Campus Review Vol 30. Issue 01 | January 2020 | Page 12

FACULTY FOCUS campusreview.com.au HASS it worked? How curriculum change and a new academic structure can provide a contemporary edge. By Catharine Coleborne B ack in September 2017, Campus Review highlighted changes being made in the humanities and social science areas at the University of Newcastle, which involved the development of a new structure built around four multidisciplinary ‘clusters’. Aligning organisational changes to the School of Humanities and Social Science (HASS) with the reinvention of the Bachelor of Arts degree was always going to be complex. It has involved the challenge to reorient pedagogical practices, student learning experiences, and at the same time it engages academic staff in new ways of working. So how did we do? What were the results of this ‘revamp’, and did we achieve the ‘contemporary edge’ we set out to create? AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCES First, the question of employability for our graduates from the BA degree shaped the redesign of the curriculum. Measuring employability as a result of the BA degree is notoriously difficult – graduates travel far and wide in their job choices, which makes their career paths hard to capture over time – but our focus on new forms of ‘authentic’ 10 assessment and experiences during their degree promises to deliver. This is especially true given our aim to now bring all students into contact with work-integrated learning. In terms of degree content, along with our purposeful reflections on the nature of ‘core’ knowledge and an ‘active learning’ or inquiry-based pedagogy, we had to craft three new core courses with a modular structure. This was to break down learning tasks for student retention, but also to imagine knowledge acquisition in sequences. An example is the first-year core course which asks students to think about epistemology, representation, language and digital methods to impart the sense of future humanities learning. BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS Second, the creation of the new BA degree had unexpected, positive consequences: academic staff started to work together across traditional disciplinary boundaries, finding common ground for co-teaching. While this collegial outcome has mostly found expression in the exciting new BA Online with FutureLearn, launched in 2019, it has also filtered into collaborative research, especially in digital humanities projects between academic staff in film, media and cultural studies, French, English literature, history and applied linguistics. The contemporary edge we were seeking has also appeared throughout the three core courses for the BA, offered on different campuses and online. In delivering globally significant education about how we understand the nature of humanity in the current moment, filtered through the diverse eyes of our Indigenous, local and international teaching staff, we have received rich feedback from online learners who experience our open courses on FutureLearn, a platform that has allowed us to showcase the Newcastle environment to the world. Third, ‘new ways of working’ in many contexts tends to be read as code for ‘making staff do more with less’. In fact, the HASS disciplines, following organisational change, were renewed, with new staff appointments in digital humanities, youth sociology, urban sociology, anthropology, English and creative writing, history, social work, and applied linguistics. New staff were positioned to re-energise the school’s research, and have come from international and Australian universities including Ohio State University, the National University of Ireland (Galway), University of Canterbury (NZ), University of Sheffield (UK), UNSW, the University of Wollongong, and the University of Melbourne, to list a few. MULTIDISCIPLINARY CLUSTERS Finally, the new cluster formation to house the school of around 70 full-time effective staff and more than 100 sessional staff is now fully embedded. These clusters bring groups together to create the potential for both teaching and research collaborations. Clusters are at the heart of the school. They provide opportunities for the school to reach out and into other areas of the wider university such as the STEM disciplines. In particular, the cluster Healthy Communities and Social Futures, home to speech pathology, social work and linguistics, has a clear role to play in linking us to applied allied health research. The clusters also connect us with culture and heritage partners in our regional context, and further afield. For instance, the two clusters of Screens, Languages, English and Writing; and Historical, Cultural and Critical Inquiry, are actively forming partnerships with cultural institutions in our community. To become researchers with social impact and purpose helps to ally our school with the core values of our institution. This is enhanced by the Societies and Cultures and Human Services cluster, which includes criminology. No organisational structures within universities are perfect, and none should