Often the experience can be unstructured, things can go wrong, volunteers don’t turn up,
project doesn’t work out and for many students this can be a frustrating experience. The
reality is that this is the real experience of many small voluntary and community groups.
They struggle to obtain resources. They struggle to obtain volunteers and they often have
real difficulties in sustaining their work within a community. And I think that what these
modules offer is their realisation of this tension and what we attempt to do in the
assessments is get those students to reflect upon those experiences and then to make those
experiences, position those experiences in some theoretical or policy context.
What we’ve found in the projects that we’ve been running for the last four or five years is
that working with the Students’ Union through the Hallam volunteering scheme – that
provides a structure, it provides formal opportunities for students to engage in some
organised voluntary or community work and many of our students choose that option, but
a number of the students actually find their own experience in the voluntary or
community sector and they want to pursue a particular interest they may have and that’s
totally legitimate, totally appropriate for this module. But what we don’t do here is direct
students to particular projects. They’ve got to want to engage with it. They’ve got to see
the value of the volunteering project. They have got to invest actually a substantial
amount of their time and in most cases well beyond the formal requirements of the
module in which they can gain some formal credit for. But I think it’s interesting to note
that we’ve been running these modules for several years now and our analysis of
students’ engagement with voluntary work after the formal module has been that students
have carried on doing the volunteering which I think is a very interesting fact in itself and
it’s something I’d like to explore more – why these students carry on volunteering after
the formal taught credit.
I think what we’ve found with the students who engage with volunteering and
community work is that they invest a considerable amount of time and effort into the
projects they’re engaged with. They have formal requirements in terms of the module
but they go well beyond that. And I think what that says is something about their
engagement with the module. It’s not just another formal 20-credit module as part of
their curriculum. It’s something they want to engage with – perhaps for a whole range of
other reasons apart from the academic rationale. It’s possibly about meeting people,
about engaging with their local community, beginning to see potential career paths
beyond their university study and these are all quite legitimate reasons. But what we do
see is that our students continually express their appreciation for the opportunity to work
outside of the university and what I think we have to do with these modules is explore
how we can extend and enhance that and make further linkages with other parts of the
curriculum, other modules that they are learning, they are being taught on their degree
route.
I think what’s been interesting with these modules and working with the students’ union
volunteering unit is that it brings together students from across the university. Students
could come from business and finance, from economics, from sport and leisure and in our
case from the social sciences. What seems interesting to me is that these students bring
with them, quite understandably, different perspectives, different, if you like, ontological
understandings of what social life is about – what are the causes of poverty, what are the
reasons for racism within our community? Why do certain community groups have poor
housing, for example, than other community groups? Why are the facilities that are
available within that community less substantial and less progressive than other parts of
Sheffield for example. What I hope our social scientists bring to the projects is a
sociological policy, a political perspective. Now, students from elsewhere within the
university may bring different perspectives and I think that coming together offers a real
exciting opportunity to bring in a whole range of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary
perspectives upon social problems. And perhaps what I’d like to see progress in the
future is students working together from different disciplines and analysing the particular
social issue and that’s something we may want to take forward in the future.
The students we have on our programmes are from a range of undergraduate, social
science degree areas, including sociology, social policy, psychology and a number of
inter-discplinary awards. The focus of our division, the applied social studies division, is
that, it’s applied. And where we can, as a group of academic staff, we engage with our
local community, be that through research, or continuing professional development work,
consultancy work and so on. We’ve extended that relationship increasingly over the
years in terms of our students’ engagement with the local community and that’s
culminated over the past four or five years with the development of a number of modules
that allow students, give students on the social science routes an opportunity to go and
work in the local voluntary and community sector and to gain academic credit for that
work. This I think underpins the philosophy that exists within, shared philosophy to
some degree, the social science routes that our students need to engage with social reality,
to put into context the theoretical dimensions and the policy dimensions, and the research
dimensions which they study at university. So, in many ways, like the final year
undergraduate dissertation, we see the work experience volunteering modules as a
culmination of that student’s experience within higher education. And when that works
well, it brings together, it synthesises their teaching, learning, real world experience and
from a lecturer’s perspective that’s an extremely rewarding experience to be involved
with. At the same time there are a number of challenges and what we’ve discovered with
these modules is that you don’t just let students go out there, work in the community and
submit an essay at the end of the period. They need ongoing support. They need
mentoring. They need guidance in terms of when they experience difficult situations in
the workplace and the reality is that working in the voluntary and community sector is
not easy. There are challenges in terms of getting income in, getting volunteers involved,
sustaining the project over a period of time.
What is the real value of offering these work experiences? First of all, what do your
students do outside of university? Often they’ll be engaged in some kind of work
experience. They may be caring for an elderly relative. They may be volunteering at a
local school on a mentoring project. Clearly students increasingly have part-time paid
work experience and so students engage with a whole set of activities outside of the
curriculum. They manage their finances. They manage their time resources. Often
they’ll be involved in creative projects so what can we do as academics to harness that set
of existing skills that our students have?
So what I’d like to do is to get you the academic to think about what’s taking place in
your own curriculum. What opportunities do you provide for students to engage with
voluntary community sector work. I suspect some of the students are already engaged
with this type of work anyway but you need to think about how you can make
connections between your taught curriculum and offering students the option, the
potential to engage in some applied voluntary and community sector work. And perhaps
there’s a check list that you might want to think about. That includes what skills do our
students develop outside of the classroom and how can we recognise and value that
within our taught curriculum? What opportunities are you providing there? Think also
about the potential benefits that wider engagement with voluntary and community groups
could offer you as a group of academic staff. In many ways our students become
ambassadors, they become linkage points, potentially, between the community and the
university and I don’t think we should underestimatge that.
I think finally the thing to think about here importantly from the student perspective is
not just the hard set of skills that they will acquire, in terms of time management,
organisation, and so on, but also the real sense that students can offer something to their
local community.
What you are about to see is a short promotional video for Sheffield Hallam University
Students’ Union volunteering scheme. What I’d like you to look at in this video are a
number of points that I think we could explore in more detail later on. First thing is look
at what the students are doing, what activities are they engaged with? Secondly, think
about the benefits that these students are gaining from this experience. And thirdly have
a look at how the volunteers themselves are managing the process. They have
responsibility and they have to manage this volunteering process themselves. Look at
how they engage with that requirement.