Virtually There: Student experiences of remote and blended museum studies work placements

Amy Johnstone

Keywords: Work-integrated, work placement, remote learning, TEL, equity-deserving, inclusive, accessible.

Work placements in Museum Studies professional postgraduate programmes are increasingly undertaken in blended or remote ways, but are these placements as equitable as we think? This presentation presents an outline of a small-scale scholarship project designed to explore the experiences of equity-deserving students undertaking remote and blended museum studies placements at the University of Glasgow.

The University of Glasgow’s Learning and Teaching Strategy asks staff to ‘embed work-related, professionally recognised learning opportunities for students’ (University of Glasgow 2019). The MSc Museum Studies, as a professionally accredited degree, includes student work placements, or ‘Work-Integrated Learning’ (WIL) for its accreditation with CILIP. Since covid19 we have seen an increase in WIL being undertaken remotely, or in blended formats, representing a significant shift for the field away from previous in-person work in museum stores. This shift can be seen across the higher education sector more broadly. While there is evidence that in-person WIL can present barriers to participation for equity-deserving students (Jackson, Dean & Eady 2023), much of the literature around remote WIL frames this as inherently more accessible, due to removing barriers associated with ‘in-person’ WIL (Bell et al, 2024). This doesn’t consider wider contexts, existing literature in digital education barriers (Pedruth et al. 2017), or the entanglements involved in education (Fawns, 2022).

This project extends existing knowledge of remote WIL by using digital storytelling to understand remote and blended work placement experiences of equity deserving students from their own perspectives. By prioritising participatory, narrative, storytelling methods, the study seeks to centralise student experience, and to remain open to exploring aspects of remote WIL that are important to students, to avoid replicating concepts of barriers drawn from ‘in-person’ WIL. In this way the study offers a fresh perspective of WIL, and one suited to the varied WIL placements undertaken in the field of Museum Studies.

The study has recruited 10 student participants who self-identify as equity-deserving, from the 24-25 MSc Museum Studies student cohort at the University of Glasgow, and will follow the Lambert method (2018) to scaffold digital storytelling over two sessions to be held in April. The intended outputs of these sessions are individual digital stories in a range of multimodal formats, broad enough in scope to engage with entangled learning experiences. These stories will be analysed using thematic analysis in collaboration with student participants through online platform Taguette. Themes generated can then be used to build up a picture of important shared elements of remote and hybrid WIL experiences.

It is anticipated that data generated will reveal themes and shared experiences of undertaking remote and blended WIL, as well as contributing to student empowerment, and reflective practice, thus also supporting their professional development. It is anticipated that once analysed, the data gathered from these digital storytelling sessions can be used to inform practice in planning and supporting work placements both in museum studies, and in other fields by suggesting new avenues to be explored for support.

Initial data gathered during a short pilot digital storytelling session showed a focus on sensory accounts, including soundscapes of placement day, and a story of a student’s emotional journey through images sharing feelings of distance from placement colleagues. The focus on sensory experiences of WIL suggests that students experience their placement challenges in primarily embodied and emotional ways, rather than through the sets of barriers or technologies, suggesting potential areas for future student support need to be considered more broadly than technologically, and that remote WIL can’t be easily untangled from its wider contexts.