Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
My name is Helen Higson and I'm a Professor at Aston Business School,
Professor of Higher Education, Learning & Management.
So my interest is in producing the most employable global citizens,
the sort of graduates who can
operate across countries, across cultures,
and can operate in groups - multicultural groups -
to the effectiveness of themselves and the organization.
The way that I'm working to do this
is to think about what companies need,
what companies are looking for. They're looking for students who can think and speak and
communicate well, who will think outside the box,
who will be creative, who will add value. And they're also - increasingly -
operating across global boundaries, different countries, and we all
tend to think in a certain way and if we can encourage our students
to think as if they're themselves but also others,
they will have an advantage in that market.
The work that I do, the research and the
way that we can bring interventions, based on the research,
can be with companies... I've worked with
groups of City Chief Executives across Europe,
I've worked with students not just in the business context where I started,
but also with scientists and engineers,
and more recently, I've started thinking that it's best to work with our own
academics, and on our Postgraduate Certificate they all have some experience in
the methodologies I use that they can take out into their own classrooms.
My interest is in the way that different cultures learn,
students from different backgrounds come along,
and so I decided that traditional ways of
teaching weren't enough and I started thinking that
my own background in the arts might be the way to it, and so I brought
actors, painters, writers in to work with the students,
to get them thinking and feeling and learning in a very deep way.
There's a lot of work now happening based on arts-based practice. Companies are beginning to say
"oh right, you're using acting and painting and writing in universities - why
can't we use them in companies?
"Why can't we get chief executives doing exciting acting, painting and writing?"
There's a project that I'm involved in at the moment
called CITISPYCE which is looking at youth inequality
across Europe - 10 different countries,
ten different cities and we're looking at projects...
innovative projects that are helping the cities and the youth improve their effectiveness,
improve their communication. I think there's going to be more of this
in rather more traditional contexts. Oh, there are big rewards to be got from what we're doing.
This is about changing people's lives.
It's about making them more employable,
making them more able to deal with different situations,
to be able to go to the other side of the world or communicate
in a global company, in a different way,
to maximize their employment,
to maximize their enjoyment - actually, probably to maximize their income.
This has wide implications.