This year the University has been engaged in an HEA Strategic Enhancement Programme (SEP) project on embedding employability. The programme has allowed the University to focus on a development alongside about 30 other institutions and this has enabled us to benchmark our thinking. The project team has been made up of people in the departments of Media Arts & Computing, English, and Maths, colleagues from the Hallam Union and developers with an expertise in PPDP, lifewide learning and social media for learning from QESS and ACES. Our focus has been a critical re-imagining of Personal & Professional Development Planning (PPDP) in the context of lifewide learning and social media. The SEP project, then, has created some space for us to consider examples of good practice in the University and across the sector.

1. Student Engagement with Reflection – Re-imagining PPDP for the Social Age
1
Student Engagement with Reflection – Re-imagining PPDP for the
Social Age
Graham Holden and Andrew Middleton, June 2015
Sheffield Hallam University, Learning & Teaching Conference, 25th June 2015
Introduction
‘The best thing any education can bequeath is the habit of reflection and questioning.’ (AC
Grayling, 2000).
This year the University has been engaged in an HEA Strategic Enhancement Programme (SEP) project on
embedding employability. The programme has allowed the University to focus on a development alongside
about 30 other institutions and this has enabled us to benchmark our thinking. The project team has been made
up of people in the departments of Media Arts & Computing, English, and Maths, colleagues from the Hallam
Union and developers with an expertise in PPDP, lifewide learning and social media for learning from QESS
and ACES.
Our focus has been a critical re-imagining of Personal & Professional Development Planning (PPDP) in the
context of lifewide learning and social media. The SEP project, then, has created some space for us to consider
examples of good practice in the University and across the sector.
The need for change - an institutional context
The following extract from the University’s Learning and Teaching Strategy (2020) establishes the need for
change institutionally:
Our ambition is contextualised in terms of external developments in teaching and learning,
and the national student engagement and success agendas. This changing external higher
education landscape; the changing needs of employers and the changing demands and
expectations of our students, necessitate a step change in the way the University supports
the transition of students into and through its undergraduate and postgraduate provision
and beyond. We need to provide students with an inclusive teaching experience of the
highest quality which is inspiring, innovative, stimulating and challenging and which sets
out clear expectations of and facilitates high levels of engagement with their learning. We
need to prepare our graduates, irrespective of their geographical location or background,
to live in and contribute responsibly to a globally interconnected society.
This indicates the need for us to think differently about what it means to be a student at Sheffield Hallam; how
we foster and engender a sense of belonging; and how we support and enable our students on their journey to
becoming professionals.
Despite the significant progress that has been achieved in expanding the employability opportunities for
students, there is considerable variability in employability between subject disciplines.
Our contention is that a focus on engagement (student and staff) will directly impact on our students'
employability and their employment prospects.
Our intention was to develop an approach that will enhance student engagement across diverse learner contexts
and disciplines. In developing appreciation of learning ecologies (Barron, 2006; Jackson, 2011) we aim to
enhance our students’ skills, confidence and competence as they 'become professional', thus impacting directly
on student employability.
The habit of actively reflecting on and taking responsibility for one's engagement with learning is a further
important dimension to reassessing how we support students to engage in PPDP, whilst recognising that to
many it must seem to be a peripheral activity. Schon (1991) proposes that reflection on action is a key ingredient
of student attainment and graduate employment and while many staff are familiar with ideas such as Kolb's
cycle of experiential learning (1984), our recognition of reflection on lifewide learning established PPDP for us
as something that broached formal and informal learning. This importance is already reflected in the

2. Student Engagement with Reflection – Re-imagining PPDP for the Social Age
2
University’s strategies and frameworks (Personal and Professional Development Planning), with PPDP being a
required feature of all validated programmes; however, PPDP is under-appreciated by students and ideas for
embedding employability in the curriculum, rather than through the student experience, dominate thinking and
suggest institutional understanding needs to be developed too.
Why is it so difficult?
So why is it so difficult to engage our students with reflection and PPDP?
The SEP project's diverse participants suggested the simple answer is that our whole community lacks a
profound understanding of PPDP, employability and learner engagement. By examining the question we find a
whole series of interconnected questions including:
• What is employability and where does it sit?
• What is PPDP and what do our students and staff understand it to mean?
• Why don't students more easily engage as reflective and autonomous learners?
• Why do many staff think of employability only in terms of developing career management skills, while
an active learner-centred curriculum affords many opportunities to develop the whole student's
capabilities?
From the outset of the project we recognised the importance of learning ecologies to the key question about
engagement with PPDP. This recognition takes two forms:
• Every learner is receptive in different ways and at different times;
• Reflective thinking about oneself is a lifewide habit and is not, should not, and cannot be neatly
bounded or defined by university structures.
Both of these points clearly indicate that PPDP and employability are first and foremost matters for the
individual. Nevertheless, they directly relate to the business and responsibility of a university: to meaningfully
engage each of our learners. Another way of putting this is that the challenge for our university as a learning-
driven organisation is to pay attention to engagement: student engagement and staff engagement.
The need for engagement has many facets, but ultimately these come down to developing understanding around
the key ideas of engagement and employability so that they are clear, meaningful, relevant and habit-forming.
Bourdieu’s theory of habitus offers a further useful concept connecting our interest in PPDP to lifewide learning
and to learning ecologies.
“Habitus is created through a social, rather than individual process leading to patterns that are enduring and
transferable from one context to another, but that also shift in relation to specific contexts and over time.
Habitus "is not fixed or permanent, and can be changed under unexpected situations or over a long historical
period.” (Powercube, n.d. citing Navarro 2006, p.16)
Habitus captures the idea of the lived experience and, for us, it challenges organisationally-centred thinking and
recognises that the learner's changing idea of self is formed as much by their world experience as it is by what
we as a university might construct for them. It moves us away, therefore, from instrumental problem-orientated
thinking as we seek to understand why students don't engage.
An integrated and lifewide view of PPDP (and employability)
At this stage of our thinking it seems clear that PPDP, and employability more generally, need to be re-imagined
and re-branded and that:
• PPDP needs to be habitual, consistently part of a student's life at university and beyond. It needs to
develop thinking approaches that are fit for life. To do this PPDP and employability, and other
metacognitive capabilities, need to be fostered alongside the curriculum, with curriculum activity
providing some of the triggers for reflection on learning.
• PPDP needs to be established during pre-enrolment so that the rich baseline data of transition into
university helps to form the reflective habit.

3. Student Engagement with Reflection – Re-imagining PPDP for the Social Age
3
• PPDP needs to be understood as relevant from Day 1, therefore attention needs to be given to
recognising new learner engagement and peer mentoring. Social media may provide answers for how
this is achieved.
• Course-long and course-wide engagement with PPDP means that PPDP becomes a key tool in
tutoring. Students should be expected to recall, reflect in and on their academic and lifewide
experiences and apply lessons from them continuously. This should include feedback on assignments,
work experiences and placements for example. It also suggests that curriculum design should seek to
be accommodate models of authentic learning more consistently.
• PPDP needs to be concretised; that is it needs to be removed from the abstract and made real. The
expectation that all professionals (including the becoming professionals) in the digital and social age
should develop a professional profile and the digital capability of students and staff should be
developed to support this. The University's LinkedIn University project has already begun to address
this, but more is needed.
References
Barron, B. (2006). Interest and self-sustained learning as catalysts of development: A learning ecology
perspective. Human Development, 49, pp. 193 - 224.
Dacre Pool, L. & Sewell, P. (2007). The key to employability: Developing a practical model of graduate
employability. University of Lancashire. Online at:
https://www.uclan.ac.uk/students/employability/futures/files/Dacre_Pool__Sewell_2007_CareerEDGE
_Article.pdf
Grayling, A.C. (2000). The Guardian: 22 July 2000. Online at:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jul/22/books.guardianreview9
Jackson, N. (2011). ‘The lifelong and lifewide dimensions of living, learning and developing.’ In: N. Jackson
(Ed.) “Learning for a complex world: Education and personal development.” Bloomington:
Authorhouse.
Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. p. 21
Navarro, Z. (2006) ‘In Search of Cultural Intepretation of Power’, IDS Bulletin 37(6): 11-22.
Powercube (nd). Bordieu and 'Habitus'. Onlinbe at: http://www.powercube.net/other-forms-of-power/bourdieu-
and-habitus/
Schön, D. (1991). The Reflective Practitioner. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.