A Case Study from the Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Sheffield
By Dr Gary C Wood and Dr Beverley Gibbs
Please note that this blog post was orginally written in 2019 and was published on the old Elevate blog.
The Department of Mechanical Engineering engaged students as partners in ‘curriculum design and
pedagogic consultancy’ (Healey, Flint & Harrington, 2014).
Initially, students were engaged through a focus group, in which fourth-year students articulated their
views on their experience of transitioning back into studying after being away on a year in industry.
This provided interesting insight into which aspects of the programme were working well to prepare
students for industry, and where there was scope for improvement.
Through this focus group, it was apparent that the issues were rich, and that students were sometimes
struggling to articulate their suggestions because they lacked the pedagogical language to get to the
heart of the issues.
Recognising this problem, the department invited a subset of the focus group students to develop a
learning experience from scratch, giving them a space to show us their thinking, rather than trying to
simply describe their ideas in the context of the extant curriculum. This was helpful in allowing the
students to express their thinking, whilst providing insight into the right questions for the department to
ask to probe further.
After recognising the immense value that students could add when they work as equals in the process,
the department recruited a small team of around 8 students to join its programme-level approach
(PLA) working group. Although these students don’t have teaching expertise, they bring unique expertise
in being students in current times. Their naïvety in programme design has proven valuable in
challenging staff assumptions about the design process.
The PLA students are supported and mentored outside the PLA meetings, to ensure that they have
the skills and feel comfortable contributing to meetings in a professional way, and to remove barriers to
their participation and ensure that they could operate as true equals to staff around the table. In
recognition of the crucial role they play, students are paid for their time attending the meetings.
The PLA team reports to the department’s teaching committee, and also consults the department’s
staff-student committee (SSC). Both of these relationships are part of the governance process through
which decisions made at PLA are reviewed and ratified. The department made a conscious decision
not to rely on the SSC for student engagement, but to have students sitting on the PLA committee.
This was because SSC typically involves students providing feedback with the onus for action on staff;
for the PLA work to be effective, the department needed true engagement and for actions to be a truly
collaborative endeavour.