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