School of Humanities Spotlight

We've reached the end of our School Spotlight series as we discuss all things Humanities with School Rep, Izzy!

Careers and Employability

In Humanities, we don’t have clear pipelines from degree to career, so the School has been doing great work integrating careers into the degree process. For example, the Year One Employee Taster project will see students supported by their first-year personal tutor meetings. These sessions have been brilliantly designed and will be a really good way to show students how their specific humanities skills can be applied to the world of work. Louise Ogle (our wonderful Careers Liaison) has also been working with the School on running integrated careers sessions within some modules, which gives an even more direct way for students to get thinking about their employability.

Joint Honours Working Group

We are also a School filled with interdisciplinarity (I’m actually a literature and philosophy student!), which makes our classrooms incredible places for discussion. However, this can be a challenge when it comes to cohesion in a degree programme. To help reduce these issues, Vicky Greenway (Vice Dean Education and Student Experience) and the School created the Cross-School Joint Honours working group. This working group focused on reducing timetable clashes, and creating better cohesion when it comes to option selection.

Crafternoons

One of my favourite projects the School has been working on is our ‘Crafternoon’ sessions, spearheaded by Richard Hawley (our Vice Dean Equality Diversity and Inclusion). The first one of these sessions focused on making Christmas crafts to decorate the International Building (you may have seen the large hovering Christmas tree in the last week of term!). It was so wonderful to see students from across Humanities all coming together, which is what our School is all about. I am really excited to work with Richard on running the next session which will be at some point this term.

Faster Assessment Feedback

A real strength of the School is listening to feedback. For example, History students wanted faster feedback for assessments, and the department worked on finding assessment types that would have quicker turnaround. English students wanted academic skills sessions to support them with writing, which have now been integrated into modules. LLC students wanted in-person grammar lectures, and the department has worked to find rooms that can accommodate this. Classics students asked for more support for neurodivergent students, and the Classics Department organised weekly drop-in sessions so students could spend an hour working collectively. All of this feedback is facilitated by the incredibly hard-working Humanities reps (which you might want to consider signing up for yourself!).

Humanities Assessment Toolkit

Finally, I have been working on assessment deadlines and stress (which I am sure we can all relate to!). At the end of last academic year, I put together an assessment poll to identify the key areas of difficulty in the assessment period, which seemed to be assessment pile-up. To try and combat this I’ve been speaking with staff, am planning to put together a small working group, and created the Humanities Assessment Toolkit. This was a short booklet that aimed to help students navigate the complications of the assessment period.

There is so much more that I, and the School, have been working on, but this is a good showcase (or perhaps even spotlight), of the School of Humanities.