Will May wins £4,000 module development grant

Will May (English) has been awarded £4,000 by the Centre for Career Management Skills (CCMS) based at the University of Reading to design a career-focused module entitled 'Working in Postwar Britain'. This innovative national award, supported by the Higher Education Academy, aims to develop a series of subject-specific courses which ask students to consider issues around employability and career development using critical approaches and primary texts from their own disciplines. The planned module invites students to read postwar fiction through the lens of employment practice, career stratification, and social change. The proposed module would be assessed by students giving talks on employment to local sixth-formers.

"This award, which asked applicants to draw on existing modules already running at their university, is a great endorsement of the innovative teaching already going on in English and throughout Humanities," said Will. "From the careerist clerics of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers (1857) to Tertius Lydgate in Middlemarch (1874), the British realist novel has often centred on the professional struggles of its protagonists, but the postwar period, with its expansion of secondary education, speaks with particular urgency to current trends in and attitudes to employment." The course design will be disseminated nationally in 2011.