On Tuesday 8 April, we co-hosted our latest Mini Conference with colleagues from Careers and Employability Services. We hosted 50 attendees from across the University and had 5 sessions.

Materials from the conference are now available on our webpages.

The conference started with a welcome from Professor Anwen Jones, Pro Vice Chancellor for Education and Student Experience. Following Anwen’s address, Dr Aranee Manhoaran from Kings College London gave a fantastic keynote. In her keynote, Aranee identified an Employability framework that can be applied to the curriculum. As well as this, strategies were given regarding how to map this framework onto the curriculum to review assessment.

Dr Saffron Passam from Psychology gave a presentation which focused on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion as an integral employability skill.

Dr Louise Ritchie from Theatre, Film and Television Studies gave an overview of how the Drama and Theatre Curriculum partnered with the Careers and Employability Service to improve visibility and graduate outcomes.

The School of Education’s Annabel Latham outlined innovative assessment design with the Careers and Employability Service. The assessment included workshops, poster creation, and a post assignment discussion.

Finally, Careers and Employability Services’ Bev Herring and Jo Hiatt recapped the morning’s event and ran an interactive presentation for colleagues to reflect on how comfortable they felt integrating employability skills into their curriculum.

A big thank you to our presenters for such engaging sessions and to those who attended.

We’re looking forward to our next Mini Conference. In the meantime, colleagues can book onto the Annual Learning and Teaching Conference which is taking place between 8 and 10 July.

Inclusive Curriculum 2.0: Bridging Inclusion and Employability Aims through the Curriculum

We are delighted to confirm our keynote for our mini conference on Tuesday 8 April.

Dr Aranee Manoharan from Kings College London will be joining us.

Please see below for an overview of Aranee’s keynote and a biography. You can book your place for the mini conference online and we will be announcing the full programme in due course.

If you have got any questions regarding this event, please contact the conference organisers on elearning@aber.ac.uk.

In this keynote, Aranee will introduce an approach to inclusive curriculum design that supports all students to develop the knowledge, skills, and experiences required to successfully navigate the rigours of a VUCA 21^st century. The presentation will explore the key principles of inclusive curriculum development that supports student and graduate outcomes, before sharing how employability can be integrated effectively through subject teaching & learning – including using a programmatic approach to curriculum design and high impact pedagogies and assessments. The session will share a range of tools that Aranee has developed through her work with academic and professional services teams in this area; all of which can also be found in the QAA-funded toolkit for Inclusive Employability Development through the Curriculum that she led with colleagues at City University and University of London.

Dr Aranee Manoharan, PhD, SFHEA, FRSA

Aranee is Senior Associate Director for Careers & Employability at King’s College London. With experience across the areas of teaching, student experience, and educational development, as well as EDI and governance, she specialises in taking a whole student lifecycle approach to improving student outcomes. An Advance HE Senior Fellow, she specialises in inclusive approaches to curriculum design to support student and graduate outcomes and has significant experience working with academic teams to facilitate real-world learning, using high-impact pedagogies and assessments, delivered in collaboration with community and industry partners.

A committed advocate for equity and inclusion, Aranee serves on a number of advisory groups, including the Institute for Student Employers (ISE) EDI Working Group; Royal Society of Biology HUBS Awarding Gap Network; Advance HE’s Race Equality Charter Governance Committee; and as a Board Director for AGCAS, where she leads the social mobility, widening participation, and regional inequality portfolio. Aranee is also the Director of AM Coaching & Consulting, a consultancy that supports organisations to establish inclusive working, learning, and research cultures.