Abstract:

First-year students may have difficulties in drawing a clear connection between their degree choice, the professional world and their consequent employability. This is mainly due to the complexity of the current socio-cultural and economic landscape (Bauman 2004), where an academic offer is also for this reason, less directly associated with a specific professional profile than in the past. This is evident mostly in the case of degrees with training components, for example degree programmes for educators.

First-year seminar courses have been identified in international literature as a high impact practice supporting students’ integration at university. The case-study discussed here is based on a degree course in Education Science aimed at training future early childhood educators and social educators at the University of Macerata (Italy) within the innovation program PRO3. In the academic year 2018-2019 an experimental seminar course was activated for first-year students of the Education Science degree course which adopted an interdisciplinary approach and a sample of 40 students.

The seminar was structured with an introductory step with a brief description of the rationale of the seminar and of core concepts discussed (e.g. what does it mean for an educator to take care; observe, design, collaborate, be resilient?) and a presentation by a group of expert external educators (working in the fields of early childhood contexts and social care); a problem-posing phase in which the expert educators described a set of cases taken from their real-life contexts and asked students (in small groups) to design strategies to face the problems described, by using the core concepts addressed in the previous meeting and a final step for conceptualisation and reflection.

The research utilised qualitative data and was framed within a descriptive case-study design (Yin 1993); the hypotheses connected to the seminar were the following:
(1) First-year students may initially struggle to frame the core contents/concepts of the degree course in terms of professional applicability;
(2) A first-year seminar can help build the connection between theory and practice with the participation of external instructional profiles such as the experts educators working in target contexts;
(3) A first-year seminar can introduce aspects of the lived experience of educators through a hands-on approach to case-studies and guided analysis.

Data were collected using three different tools: an entry questionnaire; a final written report, and semi-structured interviews.
A qualitative content analysis approach was applied to the research (Bardin 1977). All collected data were uploaded, organized and categorized within the qualitative data analysis software NVIVO.

The case study, aiming at identifying students’ motivations and expectations and the impact that a short first-year orientating seminar could play in integrating curricular learning with a hands-on initiative resulted in a twofold success. The initiative revealed a valuable opportunity for students to investigate their expectations through direct contact with experts in the field where they could approach key disciplinary concepts following reflection through a guided immersive learning path. Moreover the hands-on approach and group-work, chosen as didactical modalities applied to the seminar, were revealed as productive strategies to get students fully involved in the training experience.

Keywords:

First-year seminar, education science degree, high impact practices, student orientation, professional awareness.