Interdisciplinarity in a Postgraduate Professional Development Programme

Bio
Gill is an Associate Professor in Warwick’s Centre for Lifelong Learning. She leads on the Career Studies and Coaching programmes and was previously Head of Careers in the Centre for Student Careers and Skills at Warwick. She is also Chair of the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling.
Gill has numerous publications on career development and coaching.
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Project Summary
Gill’s Postgraduate Award in Interdisciplinary pedagogy centred on her implementation of Collective Academic Supervision for the dissertation module on the career studies and coaching masters programmes. Gill first explored how teaching in career studies can be conceptualized as interdisciplinary, merging aspects of vocational psychology, sociology and organizational studies and even literary studies. Gill also discussed in her final project portfolio how career studies pedagogy requires students to integrate theory, policy and practice through experiential and critically reflective learning activities, which is another way of framing interdisciplinarity. One such activity was Gill’s exploration of the Collective Academic Supervision (CAS) model. Through engaging aspects of a CAS, Gill aimed to address some of the difficulties in infusing dissertation supervision with effective pedagogical principles. The CAS model originated at Aarhus University in Denmark and involves students working in groups with a supervisor as opposed to one-on-one supervision. Grounded in Bakhtin’s theoretical model of dialogism, students in CAS read each other’s writing and then engage in dialogue about their work with their group members and supervisor. Gill adapted the CAS for her teaching context on the dissertation module, offering monthly peer support sessions where students could present about their projects as they progressed and receive questions and comments from fellow classmates to facilitate shared learning. While Gill noted some challenges with this new collaborative format as well as key differences in how CAS has been conceptualized elsewhere, Gill described she noticed further motivation and support amongst students, even after they had submitted their dissertations. Gill’s project foregrounds the connection between CAS and interdisciplinary pedagogy, as students sharing experiences, building confidence and trust and developing their skills as reflexive practitioners feeds into interdisciplinary approaches to complex problems they might be facing in their dissertation journeys and in their professional careers as interdisciplinary integrators.