Transcript - Liberal Arts Offer Holder Open Day: Overview Recording
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
Hi everybody, welcome to the Liberal Arts at Warwick Offer Holder Open Day video, we're really pleased to have you join us even if it is virtually. We've got a really exciting range of topics and a bit of information to give you, whether or not you've attended one of our Open Days either in person or virtually. We're going to give you a lot more information about different aspects of our programme and as well as reminding you about our course structure, what it is that makes us unique, and giving you an opportunity to hear from our brilliant staff and our wonderfully exciting students as well.
So just to introduce ourselves and I'm going to ask everyone to chip in and introduce themselves in turn, my name is Gavin Schwartz-Leeper, I'm the Deputy Head of the School for Cross-faculty Studies and the Director of Student Experience for Liberal Arts. Lauren do you want to say hello?
Hi, my name is Lauren and I'm one of the teaching staff here. I primarily focus on quantitative methods and we'll talk about it later in the session but there is a place for quantitative methods in a Liberal Arts course and I hope to convince you of that.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
Thanks, Lauren, Bryan do you want to say hi?
Hi everyone I'm Bryan I'm a Senior Teaching Fellow here in Liberal Arts. I teach the first-year core module on 'Science, Society, and the Media' which I'll be talking a little bit more about later on. I'm also the Study Abroad Advisor and I teach a range of very fun optional modules that you can take.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
Thanks Bryan, Kristen?
Hi I'm also a Senior Teaching Fellow here and I specialise in the intersection of cultural, historical, and creative works and I teach the first-year module on Qualitative Research Methods and a various range of core and optional modules throughout. I'm also the lead for Equity in the department.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
Thanks, Kirsten. Bodrun, would you like to say hello?
Bodrun Nahar >>
So hi everyone I'm Bodrun Nahar and I'm the Employability and Placements Manager for the Liberal Arts degree programme, so my role is really to support you when you join us throughout your study programme in helping you to develop skills, so that it makes it a little bit more easier for you to find a job after graduation.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
Which is definitely important, thanks Bodrun. And then finally I want to introduce one of our finalists, one of our student ambassadors, Emily do you want to say hello and introduce yourself?
Emily, final-year Liberal Arts student >>
Hi everyone my name is Emily. I'm a third-year Liberal Arts student with a Specialist Interest Pathway in Culture and Identity.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
Brilliant, thanks very much. As this talk progresses you're going to hear from everybody on screen at the minute as we chip in about different bits and pieces of the programme.
I'll kick off by helping to address one of the major questions that I know you certainly have been asked. You've likely asked it to yourself but as soon as you start talking about Liberal Arts, especially in this country, people will start asking you 'what is Liberal Arts?'. This is an important question not just to help make sure you understand what the general degree is about, but especially here at Warwick for understanding why it is that our Liberal Arts course is so different from other Liberal Arts courses around the country.
The first thing to emphasise is that Liberal Arts at Warwick is about a process, not about a subject. It's a programme that's extremely interdisciplinary in a sense that you will be drawing on lots of different kinds of methodologies, of practices, of knowledge, drawn from a whole range of different disciplines. Crucially, we take a step beyond that too and you won't just be learning about academic subjects, you won't just be learning academic methodologies, we'll also be thinking about how we go beyond the walls of academia to think about the world of work and professional development so that you can be authentically integrating this kind of development into your studies as well, so you can come at information, you can come at case studies, problems, issues, whatever it is that you're interested in from a whole range of different perspectives, both academic and professional.
We take a really unique approach to Liberal Arts. Sometimes people can talk about Liberal Arts as being very broad but not very deep. That's true especially of some of the famous North American courses where you might have to do a little bit of everything. There are also other courses here in the UK where they give you tons of freedom, where you can really pick anything from right across the whole university, just because it interests you. That is a really exciting and interesting method, but it's not one that works for a lot of students, especially students that naturally see the relationship between really diverse forms of education.
In fact, the overwhelming majority of students really benefit from a much more structured approach. That's exactly why we've developed this degree in the way that we did, because learning how to relativise your knowledge, learning how quantitative methods speak to cultural elements, learning how to identify how novels can help you to develop empathy as a medic, these are not processes that happen naturally. They have to be taught, they have to be cultivated and developed. We spend a lot of time helping you to take a broad view of a range of different types of knowledge, and how you can apply them in really specific ways based on what your interests and goals are. We really help you to create a sense of strategy for your degree, so that you're picking things not just because they're interesting but because they help serve your particular interests. This really means that our programme is fundamentally based on community and team-based learning.
In a lot of liberal arts programmes, you are very individualised in the sense that you are the only one who knows what it is that you're doing, you're taking all these different modules from across a big university, and it can feel really isolating. One of the key things we've done that's been so successful in our programme is to help train students to be thinking about how they develop their own goals, but crucially how you do that as part of a team of people with diverse interests and experiences. We have structured our program around Problem-Based Learning, which I'll talk about in a little bit, but what this means is that in the classroom you won't just be isolated, that you're the only one who knows what you know, and that everybody else has such divergent experiences that it's hard to talk to them. We spend loads of time helping you to work out how it is that you can make use of the expertise of others, the interests of others and contribute your own so that you play a really leading role in the classroom, and once you graduate you're also able to work in mixed expertise environments in either academic or professional settings.
I talked a little bit about how we're a unique programme and that's certainly true. I just wanted to highlight some of the ways in which we really are quite different from other programmes that you might be looking at. First is to say that - I mean you can see all their smiling faces here - we have dedicated expert academics that are based here within Liberal Arts. They're not seconded out from other departments in the university, they are experts in liberal education, as well as their subject areas in this specific context. So in addition to knowing about public health (Lauren), about utopias (Kirsten), about Tasso (Bryan), or whatever our experiences might be, we also have expertise in liberal education, in Problem-Based Learning, so that you're getting really expert-led support.
I've talked a little bit about community and I'm going to ask Emily at various points later in the talk to chime in a little bit about this, but again just to say that we really believe that the student experience is one that is not just about what it is that you learn in the classroom, but how you learn and how you interact with staff and students. We really help our students develop close relationships not just with each other, but with us. We're a small department: we take about 30, maximum 35 students per year, and so we get to know our students and our students get to know each other in a way that means that they can really help each other achieve their respective goals, rather than just sitting in isolation next to somebody that you know you've never seen before. I help do that of course in my role as Director of Student Experience, but you'll also have an academic personal tutor (which will be Kirsten, Bryan, or Lauren) who will help support you through your time here at university.
In our department, we really believe in student support very strongly and so we've given a lot more of our staff time over to advice and feedback hours so that when you get feedback on an assessment, or maybe you're not sure how to proceed for a particular piece of work, or maybe you've got a project you're really excited on and you want to see where you can take it, our staff are available to talk to you and eager to talk to you about how to make the most of those different opportunities. We also believe in incorporating students and their views at a structural level when we talk about the running of the department. So we have a really active Student-Staff Liaison Committee that works very closely with the leadership of the department to help us to make sure that whatever it is, whatever changes we're making, whatever new modules we propose, that the students have a powerful voice and formative voice within that process. And then finally, very specially, we're very excited about Bodrun. Bodrun as she introduced herself, really works closely with our students. She can work with you one-on-one right through your degree as well as in different kinds of group settings and to help you work out what it is that you want to do after graduation and how best to get there
I'm conscious that I've talked a little bit about how amazing we are, but maybe it'd be better, Emily, if you wanted to say a few words about your experience of Liberal Arts and why it is that you came to Warwick in the first place.
Emily, final-year Liberal Arts student >>
One of the reasons that I really wanted to come to Warwick rather than other places (I applied for Liberal Arts across various different universities over the UK) was because of the way Gavin was saying about how the course is really structured and you're assisted through the actual Liberal Arts Department to make sure you're making choices that make sense together and that you're encouraged to see the links between all your classes. That was one of the things that really encouraged me to come here and I definitely agree with the whole 'community spirit' thing. I think the fact that the department is small also helps with that because we all know each other and there's no Liberal Arts academic that I don't feel comfortable talking to. It just feels really personal and we know that everyone will be there for us if we need anyone to speak to, whether it's academic or otherwise. In usual circumstances, there's also the Liberal Arts common room which is really nice because I can sit there and do my work and I can meet other people across Liberal Arts and Global Sustainable Development and we'll talk about our ideas, even though a lot of the time we're working on very different things it means that we can still communicate and discuss those ideas, rather than feeling really separated.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
Thanks Emily, that's so important that learning takes place in so many different kinds of ways, so many different kinds of environments, and so it's not just socially nice (although it is) to have this kind of interaction between staff and students. It really helps students to work out for themselves how to relate these different kinds of knowledges and gain exposure to different kinds of experiences and how they might factor that into their own journeys.
How do we talk about what the experience is actually like in the classroom? I mentioned before that we use a system called Problem-Based Learning. What this means is rather than starting from a content acquisition perspective where you might take an introduction to medieval literature and you'll spend 10 weeks hearing from a lecturer and then discussing different topics related to that overall overarching theme, instead we start with problems. Problems in particular that aren't solvable through, for example, a multiple-choice questionnaire, but instead are what we call 'wicked' problems. These are problems that resist solvability. We can think about some of the classic wicked problems as being things like climate change, food security, social justice. These are really broad complex problems that can we can only hope to create some interventions in by learning to work together across different disciplinary boundaries.
To be able to help you to do this, we not only work on how to help you identify problems and what a problem looks like and how to create research-based interventions in problems, but also how to approach a whole range of perspectives so that when you approach a problem your intervention is one that you believe will be really effective. We'll cut across the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences as well, depending on what your particular interests are. It's a very open programme in the sense that you can pursue your interests, but it provides that sense of structure so that anytime you move to a new area of knowledge, or a new problem, or a new issue, or a new job, you have this comfort factor because you're really practiced at getting started in these new areas and acquiring expertise.
To give you a sense of how we develop that over the course of the programme, our programme in total is roughly a 50:50 split between Liberal Arts core modules and your own pathway modules (your pathway is your own area of specific interest), but that 50:50 split comes a bit unevenly. In the first year, roughly about 75 percent of your time is spent in the core modules that help you to lay this groundwork, how to identify problems, how to conduct real authentic research that asks real original research questions. We're not just asking you to go out to the library with a reading list and rehash what other people have said for decades or centuries. Instead, we're giving you the skills so that we can ask you to come up with original research interventions. We'll talk more specifically about some of the modules in a few minutes.
In addition to the roughly 75 percent core modules, you also have optional modules within the first year and depending on whether or not you want to choose the Quantitative Methods for Undergraduate Research or if you just want to pursue a more qualitative pathway, you then have a whole range of options either from within Liberal Arts or right across the university. So, for example, if you're really interested in Spanish cinema and you want to be taking a Film module and a Language module, you're more than welcome to do that. This is a really good opportunity to try things out before you commit.
Once you hit the end of the first year I will meet with all students individually (as I will be through the whole first year) to help you choose a pathway. A pathway is a specialism, but crucially it's one that you're in charge of, that you construct yourself. As you move through the programme, you spend more and more time in your own area of interest. In the second year, it becomes a 50:50 split. You do our two core modules, 'Consumption' and 'Sustainability', that help you to be practicing how you bring in diverse kinds of knowledge from a range of different sources into these Problem-Based environments and then of course you have your subjects and or specialist expertise that you're developing in the other half of your year. Then you have opportunities for either a year-long study abroad or a year-long work placement (or a split) and we'll come and talk about that in a little bit.
In your final year, it's really about acquiring and deploying expertise. 75 percent of your time is spent in your pathway modules from right across the university built all around your interests, and then the 25 percent that remains is a year-long Dissertation module where we work really closely with you to help you to develop the interests that you've got into a significant piece of original research. Again this isn't just a deployment, a summary of all the knowledge that you've gained, it's about really contributing to a research debate in your area of interest.
To talk a little bit about the modules, you can see on the screen we've got a load of different options and that cover a huge range of different topics. What unites them is that they're all transdisciplinary like I talked about before, they're all problem-based, so whatever the overall topic is you'll have loads of opportunities to bring in whatever your specific interests are into these modules specifically.
You can see on the left-hand side the core modules (broken down by year). These are the ones that you have to take, with the potential option of Quantitative Methods for Undergraduate Research (that's only required for certain kinds of quantitative pathways, for example in Economics, Life Sciences, that kind of thing so you don't have to do that one if you don't want to although we encourage you to).
On the right-hand side, you can see a range of some of the optional modules that we've developed and that we have on offer in particular years. This is a constantly rotating cast of modules, because one of the things we really want to try to do for students is provide this real range, this real diversity of experience, and we're constantly updating all of our modules (including the core modules) in response to recent events, the latest research, and what our students want to study.
Let's drill down a little bit more into some of these modules in particular so you can get a sense of what the modules cover and what they feel like. The first one I want to visit is 'Science, Society, and the Media', and this is taught by Bryan in the first year. This is one of our core modules. Bryan do you want to say a few words about this module?
Dr Bryan Brazeau >>
Yeah sure thanks Gavin. 'Science, Society and the Media' tries to explore firstly what scientific knowledge is - how is it constructed, what is science? We have so much trust in science, but what exactly is it? How do scientists come up with this knowledge? How reliable is it? And what does the history of science look like? We then look at plugging that into the relationship between science and our society, particularly through the means of looking at the media, but the way we do this is not just simply by memorising theories or anything like that. What we do is look at real-world problems.
We start by looking at the science wars, this really contentious debate that happened in the 1990s between cultural critics and the social sciences on the one hand, and really intense sort of physicists and scientists on the other hand, and we try and understand that and unpack that. Then we look at the relationship between science and power looking at the way that science has treated women in the past, the way that science has treated all kinds of different people in the past, and trying to understand how scientific knowledge can be conditioned by our society and also by biases sometimes very negatively. We then move to talking about public understanding of science. What does it mean when we talk about the public understanding of science? Should we just teach more science in schools? Do we just need to get out there and have everybody learn more science in order to follow the science? Or do we actually need to start thinking critically about: What is the role of science in our society? Why is it that so many people reject science? Is that linked with politics? Is it not? How does this work? And you do this with really hands-on experience. One of the problems that students really love is the one where we look at representing science, so we look at science fiction in the 1950s and 1980s, we move up to the 1990s and we try and think 'what is it about these cultural representations of science that can tell us more about the way that our society perceives science, scientific knowledge, and scientists themselves?'
In terms of assessments, you'll be doing all kinds of really interesting assessments in this module. One of the fun ones is a paradigm shift science fair where you look at how a paradigm shifted in the history of science, a key idea that forms a foundation of a field, what led to that happening, but you don't just look at it in terms of acquiring content, you look at it in terms of understanding the process through which that happened and then use that to look at a current scientific idea and ask when that paradigm will shift. One of the assessments that students really love as well is the 'Science and the Media Project' where you produce a video, you produce a film, and this film can be anything involving science, society and the media. Oftentimes students will do infomercials for pseudo-scientific pills or something like that. We get students who will do documentaries, mockumentaries, they're really fascinating they're a lot of fun and we screen them in class at the end of term. In class we do all sorts of things, it's definitely not lectures. Just this term in class, students have created a set of reporting guidelines for the BBC on COVID-19. Students write movie reviews. Students produce memes and fake news to understand the way that science spreads through fake news and we even create social media maps to understand what our public sphere looks like from our own perspective.
It's a really complex module but it's a lot of fun, it's really interesting, and a lot of students say it completely changes their view of what science is.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
Thanks very much, Emily did you want to maybe say - I know it's been a few years for you, you're a finalist and this is a first-year module - but do you want to say a few words about your experience of 'Science, Society and the Media'?
Emily, final-year Liberal Arts student >>
I was definitely one of the students whose view on science was completely transformed by this module. I kind of went into it as one of the people not having a lot of faith in science. I'd studied it a lot at school but it was all very factual and we weren't really taught why it mattered. I feel like especially the aspects of ignorance and misinformation were really eye-opening for me. I think just looking more critically about how information is presented in order to kind of show balance in journalism, for example, even if the actual sides scientifically aren't balanced and for good reason, like it's there's a scientific consensus but then it's presented more as an argument, we talked about some things like that when I was studying it and it just made me realise how differently things were being presented compared to what the actual evidence was suggesting. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
Thanks very much. So you can see again, 'Art and Revolution', 'Science, Society, and the Media', these core modules are designed around particular problems and themes but they're not designed to be drawn into these silos wherein 'Science, Society, and the Media' you only do hard science and in 'Art and Revolution' you're only talking about paintings. These are not History of Art modules, these are not Science modules in that traditional sort of sense, they cut across disciplinary boundaries to help students from all backgrounds and with all interests understand why these problems are important, to model those sorts of structures so they can carry that on into their future studies.
One of the things that we really emphasise is research. A lot of times, students when we say 'oh you're going to be doing research', when they hear that they understand that as meaning sitting in the library, reading books that other people have written. You will definitely do an awful lot of that, that's definitely true, but we also want to make sure that you have the fundamental skills to generate your own knowledge, your own original research. And so we do that of course through the provision - you practice them quite a lot in the core modules like 'Art and Revolution' and 'Science, Society and the Media', but we give you those fundamental skills through core modules like 'Qualitative Methods for Undergraduate Research' with Kirsten that everybody takes, but then there's the option to take 'Quantitative Methods for Undergraduate Research' that Lauren teaches. And maybe I'll ask Lauren, do you want to say a few words about 'Quantitative Methods for Undergraduate Research'?
Dr Lauren Bird >>
Yes so you will have been taking 'Science, Society and the Media' with Bryan and you'll start to realise that maybe your perspective on science is starting to shift, maybe you underestimated some aspects of science, maybe you don't trust numbers as much. I mean you've started to change your opinion, Bryan's done an excellent job, you think you know what, actually I want to know more because the media does present science, it does present stats, it does present numbers to you in a particular way. If you're more interested in that, you can take 'Quantitative Methods for Undergraduate Research' and what we really focus on is the fact that whether you like it or not, quantitative data is all around us, data science is all around us and it's not really going anywhere.
Quantitative methods in this class, in particular, are for everyone, the class is accessible for all. You don't need to have amazing A level Maths or anything to take it, so we really want to encourage everyone to consider it. What it's really about is - as Gavin was sort of introducing - we've got these big problems, we've got these big ideas, and we want to give you some of the methods to help you interrogate them. You'll do that in 'Qualitative Methods' with Kirsten and then you can take the 'Quantitative Methods' with me.
We look at example problems from a wide variety of disciplines and what you will learn to see in the course is that a lot of the basic sort of stats underlying, or the statistics underlying a lot of disciplines, are very similar, they're sort of a key foundation and so we can look at key problems from social science, from economics, we look at climate science, we can look at health science. All these different disciplines use the same foundational statistical knowledge and so this course is about giving you that knowledge so that you can interrogate the numbers when you see them in the news, if you want to do your own research you can see how to do your own research. It's a very practical based course, contact hours are split across the week so you actually get a whole class that's a bit more lecture-based because we do have to teach some methods, but it's still very team-based, very group work-based and that teaches you about these underlying statistics, we do go through some of the quantitative methods in detail. Then you have also practical-based sessions where you get given problems, you get given data, and you just have to work through that data yourself.
The assessments are very practical as well. There's an independent assessment where you are given data and you've got to sort of perform certain stats on the data and you also make a lot of visualisations and then there's a group project as well. The group project is very exciting because you get to find your own data as a group so you really can pick whatever you want and again from a huge range of disciplines if you want to do something economic or if you want to do something about social statistics or sociology, you've really got a huge range of areas to look at that you're interested in. This will give you that sort of foundation that really blends very well with qualitative methods.
One of the things that I hope you get from both these courses is an understanding that actually a lot of the big problems that we have today can be solved best with a blend of qualitative and quantitative methods.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
One of the things I really want to encourage folks watching this to think about is whether or not you were told that you were a math person or a science person or that you're a humanities person, people are very quick to lump you into those kinds of silos depending on what you're good at or what you were good at, at a certain point in your life. We really want to give you the opportunity to think expansively and in a challenging sort of way not just about what you know whether you're a science person or anything like that, but is thinking about how you can acquire different kinds of tools to approach the problems that are of most interest to you, whatever that might be. So we take this really broad, expansive view of how to equip you with those different diverse kinds of skills for whatever it is that you're interested in.
Dr Lauren Bird >>
Can I just add I started out very much in a Liberal Arts degree. I did all history and languages and very much cultural studies in my undergraduate degree and I only went back later and started doing quantitative methods, so it's something that you can pick up at any time and you can blend with your knowledge. It blends excellently with disciplines you wouldn't normally think it would like history and just everything, it really comes together. I'm definitely not someone who was a math person my whole life and part of what I've sort of learned over time is that that in itself is a stereotype we need to break down.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
To see maybe how we can draw some of these down into some of our more specific optional modules that you can take throughout your programme, Kirsten would you maybe mind talking a little bit about one of your modules, 'Utopia' that's really popular?
Dr Kirsten Harris >>
This is the second and third-year optional module that runs in the second part of the academic year and it's a module that I really developed out of my own research interests in utopianism and utopias and it's one that I really enjoy exploring with students in different ways every year. I thought it would help to break things down if I showed you this diagram on the left-hand side so this is the way that I conceptualise our modules.
We have one overarching issue and this is utopian thought and action. Now if you're familiar with utopias you know that maybe they are a fictionalised island perhaps, or future society, that is supposed to somehow represent a better or ideal or perfect kind of society. Well, we go beyond that public perception of utopias and we start to really think about how utopias and utopianism can be an activist philosophy that might change things and what we do is we look at how utopias themselves can be thought of as creative problem-solving exercises. It's a way of imagining, reimagining different kinds of futures which then might set the trajectory for people to begin to work towards them. It really does fit in with this whole Liberal Arts philosophy we've got at Warwick of creative problem solving, thinking imaginatively about particular problems. The way it works with any kind of utopias - I don't know if any of you've seen Black Panther that came out a couple of years ago (that's an example of one utopia there's plenty of others) - but they tend to take one overarching problem, something that's the major problem that they're addressing, imagine a solution to that, and then imagine solutions to all other kinds of link problems through that lens. So the kind of problems that we might look at are things say to do with education, with labor, with gender, with 'race' and ethnicity, with sexuality, with spirituality, we might look at transhumanism for example. What we're doing the whole way through is we're thinking about different kinds of problems and creative imaginative solutions to them.
If our overarching issue in the module is utopian thought in action which is how can we imagine a better society? What does better even mean? How can we bring about and keep and maintain such a society? Then each week we take a particular problem. So the example I've given you there Week 7 this term we're having a week on education and the problem that I set for this week is 'can education ever be the practice of freedom?' To prepare for class students go away, I set them some set reading or listening or viewing and they do that but also some of their preparation time every single week is set aside for independent research on the problem. Students can really focus on the aspects of the problem that interests them and then they can then go, dedicate their research time to it, they come back to class and they teach each other. For example for this week on education, 'can education ever be the practice of freedom?' some students went away and researched cooperative higher education ventures. Other students went away and did research on the Black Panthers education programme. Other students went away and looked at Steiner schools or Montessori schools or forest schools. Whatever your particular interest is, you can go away and have a look at that. Other students looked up radical pedagogy (pedagogy just means theories of how we teach), other students went away to look that up. They come back to class, they get into groups, and then they set about forming a response to the problem.
I set students questions every week to help them with their research, to help guide them and scaffold them through big topics, and we consider some of those questions in class as well. For this week on education, I got students to think about: who's teaching? Who sets rules if there are rules? Who sets assessments? Do we even need assessments? What's the difference between relationships between different students? Between teachers? Between our everyday life? Between education? Do they need to be as separate as they are now? Could we blend work life and education kind of more comprehensively? We go and we look about what people have said about these in literature, we go back to novels, we go back to films, we also look at real-life practices, what people have done in the real world and we blend all of these things, how different people have tried and imagined to do something better. This class really does work on the principle of when you put together all of us we can learn more than we can individually, so students teach each other in this class, they bring their own independent research specialisms that they've been gathering in their other outside modules, and they come back together and teach each other in class.
Some other examples of some problems that we've looked at: we have a week on Afrofuturism which again connects like Black Panther and that kind of aesthetic that deals with problems such as 'how do you reimagine societies that haven't had the trauma of white supremacy or colonialism inflicted on them?' 'What might black excellence look like in these in these new kinds of imagined societies?' We have a week on ecological utopias so students go and they research what people have tried on a small microcosmic basis, as well as we look at other kinds of utopian fiction and films that imagine solutions to the climate breakdown and things like that. It's a very flexible module, students are given the choice at the beginning of the module as to what we choose to do in the weekly classes, we don't do the same topics every year - it depends on what each particular cohort are interested in.
Then for assessments, they do a range of things. One assessment they do a series of blog posts where they respond to the week's reading and the week's learning. Another assessment is they do a group presentation where they focus on a particular element of utopianism and explore that. Then finally they have a research project where there's just a lot of freedom for them to explore the aspect of utopia that most interests them. Some students like doing a traditional research essay, other students do podcasts, other students do one student's done an illustrated online kind of public-facing essay about ecotourism in Cuba, another's written chapters from a utopian novel. Really the most important thing is we help you to think critically about the research process, to do the kind of research that you're interested in and then to present it in a way that excites you and motivates you and we get some really fantastic results coming out of that.
Emily did the module one year, do you want to speak to either one of the weeks in class or to one of the assessments that you did?
Emily, final-year Liberal Arts student >>
I took 'Utopia' last year and one thing I found really interesting about it was when we were looking at utopian works and the problems they were responding to, as well as kind of looking at what they were originally trying to fix, we looked at the problems in what they were causing with their own constructions of utopia. So for our group presentation in my group we looked at ecological utopias and we called it 'ecotopias but for who?' That was kind of looking at the history of ecotopian works and how actually there was a lot of crossover with eugenics and things about trying to form the ideal human race and obviously that's really problematic and we were then looking at the impacts of fascism and racism in the history of utopias. There's really the room to kind of bring in the areas that you're interested in, make connections between the different weeks as well. I found it really, really interesting to talk about all these things and I also (this isn't specific to 'Utopia') but I really enjoyed that the module was for both second and third years because I was in my second year and I found that I learned a lot from working continuously with people who'd been at university longer than I had.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
There's a couple of themes that Kirsten mentioned, that all of our tutors have mentioned, that I just want to touch on before we think about some of the more structural stuff about pathway choices, which is that all of our modules are designed to give you this breadth of experience but through learning by doing (and that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to be building engines or bridges or something like that in every single context) but you're always going to be thinking about ongoing debates in either academic or professional contexts and how to make interventions in them, how to participate in those as an equal, rather than simply feeling like you need to spend your undergraduate degree acquiring more and more knowledge until you have something to say. We teach you to be a participant in those debates right from the beginning.
One of the ways that we help you to build sufficient expertise to do that is by assembling all these modules, whether they're from our department, whether they're our core modules or our options, or their options taken from right across the university. We help you build those into a pathway. Pathways are meant to help you have a kind of strategic focus for your degree. I was like Lauren, I was also a Liberal Arts graduate myself and when I was an undergraduate I did all kinds of things. I've probably even told some of you at Open Days about this before, but I did photography and I did Tai Chi and I did forestry and I did literature. I did all kinds of things, but I was never really given any support to see how these things fed together. When I graduated, I really struggled. I felt like I had learned a lot of wonderful stuff, but so what? What was the point of that? I struggled to understand how to take what I had learned and try to apply it in any direction that I was interested in, professional or academic. This is one of the reasons why we've really strengthened this idea of the pathway, meaning that this is a structure that you can use that's built by you, is adapted by you, you can adjust it lots throughout your degree, but it really helps give you the central strategy for identifying what it is that you can do, what you want to do, and how your different skills and experiences can take you there.
There are two different kinds of pathways. The first and most popular is (and this is what Emily has done so I'll let you talk about that in a second) is you can design your own pathway completely from scratch (a Specialist Interest pathway). This means you design the title of your pathway that appears on your transcript and you can pick modules from right across the university that reflect these interests. You might take a label like social justice and then apply it in a very specific context of say french-speaking Africa and colonialism, you might choose to go in that direction, you also could choose to take it in a completely different direction. It's entirely designed uh to be built by you. We have had students do all kinds of things from as we see here Apocalyptic Studies, to Imagination in Childhood Development, we have a lot of students working closely with our partner department doing sustainability pathways where they take modules from the Global Sustainable Development Department and across the university in this really important and diverse area.
Emily do you want to say a few words about your pathway?
Emily, final-year Liberal Arts student >>
As I mentioned at the beginning I'm doing 'Culture and Identity' and more specifically I'm really interested in the music industry and how popular culture has very real, lived impacts on broader culture on like the people who are consuming it. So that idea links in very clearly with the second year 'Consumption' module, for example. To structure my degree course around this idea, for example, I took 'The Science of Music' which was a module in the Institute of Advanced Teaching and Learning. I took that last year to get more information on like music more specifically, and I'm doing a linguistics module this year on 'Culture and Interpersonal Relations'. So as you can see I've been trying to not just pick things I'm interested in, though I'm obviously interested in all these things, but pick things that make sense together and they're also helping inform my dissertation which is to do with some of the similar ideas.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
Even if you're looking at some of these titles, these are just examples of some of the themes that our students have built their degrees around but by no means is this exclusive. You can make up whatever title you want, I mean obviously with very close support from us from the department to make sure that it's feasible, that it fits your interests, that you can benefit from our advice and that it's achievable, then we help you to do that
The other strand to our pathway development is through more specific discipline-based pathways (a Disciplinary Interest pathway). Some of our students come to us and they are really passionate about some of the traditional disciplines but they really want to approach it from a different kind of direction, from a more problem-based and research-based perspective. This is really common for example with students who come to us who are really attracted, for example, by Warwick's world-class departments and English and Economics and Life Sciences, all of them, but they really feel like they don't want to be doing the same thing that all of the other traditional students are doing in that particular area. They want to take that more hands-on research-based approach.
In this case, if you decided to do one of these discipline-based pathways, half of your degree would be spent in taking modules from that department, but you're still very much a Liberal Arts student. You're not split between the two departments, you don't fall into the gap between them, we look after you really carefully to make sure that not only are you getting all of the support that you need from our side but that you're able to gain the support and the resources that you need to make sure that you're excelling in your discipline-based pathway as well. These are quite popular with our students.
To give you a little bit more of a sense of how this might work in a more diverse sense, I mean of course you've heard from Emily and the choices that she particularly made, this is just an example of a Social Justice Pathway (Specialist Interest) from a student who graduated recently. You can see in the first year they're taking primarily our Liberal Arts core modules because most of the year is made up of that. But then they've taken a couple of optional modules from the Politics Department, the Politics and International Studies Department, here at Warwick, on 'Ideas of Freedom' and 'Justice, Democracy and Citizenship'. In the second year, that's when they declare their Social Justice Pathway and then they decided to take a range of modules from of course from Liberal Arts (from our department) as well as from the Sociology Department, trying to weave together this narrative, seeing how to unite different kinds of knowledges from disciplines like politics from sociology, and through transdisciplinary approaches as well. In their final year, now they're starting to take a bit more of a global perspective and thinking about postcolonialism in particular and this is something they applied in their dissertation that they were doing throughout that year. So you can see this year they're taking modules from Global Sustainable Development, from History, from Sociology, from English. At this point they've moved between what two different faculties at least, the majority of the university, but they're not just one random student taking a random history module and not knowing as much as the other history students. Instead they've got this really strong central core identity of Social Justice as well as the diverse kinds of experiences from different disciplines, so they just play a fundamentally different kind of role in the classroom. They're able to bring together the experience and expertise of say the history students in that module, but they're able to bring a different kind of perspective as well. You're not just abandoned to try to catch up and pretend that you have the same experience as the other history students, for example.
These are just some examples there are loads of different ways in which you can take all different kinds of modules from right across the university in all three faculties: Arts, Social Sciences and Science, Engineering and Math, so that you can have a really diverse experience but crucially it's one that makes sense, it's built around a centralised identity. When you come to go to graduate school, when you're applying for those, when you're applying for jobs, you have this really clear identity that you're able to say 'here's how what I did relates to your programme, to your industry, to your business'.
We talked a little bit about assessments and we talked a little bit about the diverse forms of assessment, so maybe we won't do all too much on this, but one thing I just want to try to highlight is that we really try to learn by doing. We really try to make sure that assessments are equitable, that they help students from a range of different backgrounds, experiences, and interests, demonstrate their knowledge in different kinds of ways. This doesn't mean that you're only going to do what you're good at and you're just going to stick with that. We're going to test you in lots of different kinds of ways so that you have the opportunity to demonstrate how you learn best, how you can demonstrate your knowledge, best but even more crucially how you can make solid and practical interventions in diverse problems using a whole range of different sources. So again, it's not that we're only giving you one tool and that's the only one that you can use, we will help you develop lots of tools so that you can really make a conscious selection about what mechanism is best for approaching the problems you're interested in.
As part of that, I want to talk a little bit about another element that makes our programme really special which again is this really rich sense of personal and professional development, this really rich approach that we take throughout the whole degree programme. I'm going to ask some of my colleagues to jump in. Bodrun, so since you primarily work on supporting our students in this particular area, do you want to say a few words about some of the professional development opportunities that we have?
Bodrun Nahar >>
For the Liberal Arts degree programme, one of the things I would like to say to you is that with the whole degree programme, all your academics will all very much encourage you to develop your employability skills and the Liberal Arts degree programme is designed in a way, whether it's how we teach you, to the assessments, to really develop the skills that are sought by employers. We really encourage you to develop your professional skills throughout your degree programme.
One of the key ways that we encourage you to do that is by engaging in a work placement and this is something that I'll just talk about very briefly. The Liberal Arts degree programme offers you two options to undertake a work placement which will be recognised on your transcript after you graduate. One of them is through a certificate, that's a professional development certificate which is the certificate in professional communication amongst others, but this one in particular very much involves you really getting a better understanding of the world of work, what's required what it involves. Then that's that then moves on to you actually doing a work placement with an organ organisation. The other is the year-long placement that is commonly referred to as a sandwich placement or industrial placement but here at Warwick it is the 'intercalated' year-long placement where you can go out and work for an employer for a minimum of seven months up to 12 months. So essentially you do a four-year degree. This is a really great way for you to actually get out there and try and understand what careers are out there, learn about yourself, about your strengths your limitations.
We appreciate, we understand, we've all been there, that you probably don't know what you want to do after you graduate you're probably not sure and that's absolutely fine it's a fine position to be in at year one, year two, even in year three. But you want to sort of make it a little bit more easier for yourself by going out there and testing the field, testing different careers, because there are lots of different options available to you, especially studying Liberal Arts. We've had students that have gone out and done work placements across a number of different sectors in very different roles. So whether that's in Marketing, whether it's in Corporate Social Responsibility, whether that's in as an editor in the media industry. It's really broad and because of that they develop so many skills and have a better idea of perhaps what they want to do after they graduate.
I'll just go through very quickly, you'll see Gavin's put up the slide, what our students do after they graduate. Obviously you have the option to go into further study, and if that's something that you're not interested in if you want to go into employment, you've got both of these options and you can see how varied it is in terms of the roles that Liberal Arts students have gone on to do. Whether it's a junior strategist in marketing and advertising, to data management, so it is really broad. When we say that the Liberal Arts degree programme actually maximises your chances or options in terms of careers, we really do mean it and I think that's reflected not only in the placements that our students have gone to but actually the careers that they have gone on to pursue. So I think the key message is here: when you do join us, do you focus on developing your professional skills, engage in work placements as much as possible, but also to remember that you're not on your own, we are all here to support you through this process, through this journey.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
Absolutely, our students often ask us 'what can you do with a Liberal Arts degree?' and the question is more 'what do you want to do with the Liberal Arts degree?' Liberal Arts here at Warwick is a really good opportunity to stand out in a way that other students just simply aren't able to do because of the structures of their programmes. It's a real opportunity for you, it definitely requires, work it requires effort, it requires thinking and preparation, but we work really closely with you to give you so many rich options to develop your own interests and to stand out. Like Bodrun mentioned, we have this range of professional development certificates, you have all these opportunities for work placements throughout your degree at different parts of your degree programme, but in addition, we also have a lot of other co-curricular and extra-curricular activities that help you develop in social ways and academic ways, all sorts of ways.
Bryan do you want to say a few words about some of the support we offer?
Dr Bryan Brazeau >>
You can do all kinds of things with your Liberal Arts degree. I'm also a Liberal Arts graduate myself and the way I always think of it is Liberal Arts is sort of like the swiss army knife of degrees, it gives you every possible tool you could ever need and even tools you didn't know you needed. Other things that we can do that we can support you in...
We often support students in independent research activities. So these are research activities you do that aren't necessarily linked to a module, such as the Undergraduate Research Support Scheme which is where you can get funding to do a research project on your own over the summer. We've had students present at BCUR and ICUR which are the British Conference of Undergraduate Research and the International Conference of Undergraduate Research and these are international conferences or national conferences where students will present their own research and we'll help coach you, we'll help you work on your paper, get it together, we'll usually show up and ask a nice question. We've also had students publish in undergraduate journals such as Reinvention which is a peer-reviewed undergraduate journal for undergraduate research.
In addition, we also offer a number of study abroad opportunities. One of the things you can do in Liberal Arts is you can say 'I would like my degree to be four years instead of three' and you take a study abroad year between your second and your fourth year (so you add a year to your degree) and we have a number of very special partnerships with other excellent Liberal Arts programmes in Canada, in the Netherlands, in Germany. We also have partnerships with Australia, we have partnerships with universities around the world and you can really choose where you want to go and what you want to do. Students who tend to do this, these study abroad programmes, they go out they study all kinds of things that further help them enhance their understanding of what they want to do later on, further help them enhance their understanding of their own chosen pathway, and also help them contextualise their own experience of Liberal Arts within a global environment, within a global marketplace. One of the great things about the study abroad opportunities is that it really allows you to develop not just as somebody who's a thinking, active, critical member of society that makes a difference, but also as a really important global citizen which is becoming increasingly important in the world we live in today.
Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper >>
I hope you can see that what we've tried to present to you, this is a complicated course right, it's not like any other course and so we're conscious that we try to present a whole range of different options, different examples of how you can customise this course to meet your particular interests, but your interests are your own. What we really encourage you to do is to reach out, to say hello to us, to get in touch. You can see we're an informal group of people, we're very friendly and we absolutely believe fundamentally in the power of this program to transform lives and to help you achieve what it is that you're interested in. So if you have any questions, if you think you know I'm really interested in macroeconomics and social policy, maybe this is something I can ask you about, 100 percent please just get in touch with us. We'd be so happy to have a chat with you and see how it is that we can support whatever it is that you want to accomplish with us.
Thanks very much and we hope to see you on campus soon.