Dr. Karsten Zegwaard his degrees at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, up through the PhD. He served as senior lecturer and director of cooperative education, both in engineering and in Science, he has been the director of work-integrated learning research office and the office of the vice chancellor. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Work-Integrated Learning (IJWIL), the major outlet for such publications worldwide. He also currently serves as Vice President for Work-integrated Learning in New Zealand, Vice Chair of the International Research Committee Oceana, is a board member of the World Association of Cooperative Education, and has won many awards for his research. He has a new book coming out this summer with co-authors Advances in Research Theory and Practice in Work-integrated Learning: Enhancing Employability for a Sustainable Future, as well as another works coming later.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
Resources Discussed in this Episode:
Music Credits: C’est La Vie by Derek Clegg
ExperiencED Season 4, Episode 2
Jim Stellar: [00:00:00] Welcome to the ExperiencED podcast. I am Jim Stellar.
[00:00:12] Mary Churchill: [00:00:12] I am Mary Churchill
[00:00:13] Adrienne Dooley: [00:00:13] and I am Adrienne Dooley.
[00:00:15] Jim Stellar: [00:00:15] We bring you to this podcast on experiential education
[00:00:18] Mary Churchill: [00:00:18] with educators and thought leaders
[00:00:20] Adrienne Dooley: [00:00:20] from around the country and the world.
[00:00:23] Jim Stellar: [00:00:23] Dr. Zegwaard earned all of his degrees at the University of Waikato in New Zealand, up through the PhD. He served as senior lecturer and director of cooperative education, both in engineering and in science since 2019, he has been the director of work- integrated learning research office and the office of the vice chancellor. All of these positions were also at Waikato, giving him a deep understanding of this institution.
[00:00:51] Dr. Zegwaad also has a great breadth. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Work-integrated Learning, the major outlet for such publications worldwide. He also currently serves as Vice President for Work-integrated Learning (WIL) in New Zealand, serves as Vice Chair of the International Research Committee Oceana, and is a board member of the World Association of Cooperative Education or WACE. This gives them a national and international view. He has won many awards, including the Don McLaren award for professional achievement from WACE, the Ralph Tyler for research and James Wilson awards for research and leadership, both by Cooperative Education and Internship Association, the CEIA. This last year, he won the Fellow Award for Work-integrated Learning New Zealand Inc. In addition to his own research, his editorship of the journal resulted in a doubling of its circulation requiring the hiring of two associate editors. He has a new book coming out this summer with co-authors Advances in Research Theory and Practice in Work-integrated Learning: Enhancing Employability for a Sustainable Future.
[00:02:09] Welcome Karsten. It's a pleasure to have you with us. You are our first interview outside of North America. So let me open by asking you to first, describe the Wniversity of Waikato in Hamilton on the North Island of New Zealand, just South of Auckland. If I got that right.
[00:02:25] Karsten Zegwaard: [00:02:25] Thank you, Jim. Appreciate it. And funny enough, this is the first time I've done a podcast for outside of New Zealand.
We have a few firsts here. The university of Waikato is a relatively young university. It was founded in 1972 or 73, somewhere along those lines. It is not a particular large university. We have around about ten thousand or equivalent full-time students.
[00:02:50] About two thirds are at the undergrad level and the others at graduate level. The universities is a regional university and a research university. We do a lot of focus on research, and we are particularly quite strong on educational research management. Our computer science school is a leading school in the Southern hemisphere on computer science.
[00:03:15] We recently introduced a engineering, as part of the university that's growing very rapidly, and I've been involved with that until just recently. I was quite involved in that. We have also just introduced a degree in health and degree in nursing. And this is part of Waikato’s getting into medicine. We are very intent on having a graduate college in medicine. It is our Vice Chancellor’s dream is to be in that space. He's worked very hard to do so, and we're certainly making good progress in developing in that area.
[00:03:46] Jim Stellar: [00:03:46] Well, thanks. That's really great. So could you now also describe how you came to work at the university-wide level for the vice chancellor and what kinds of programs your university is offering to all of its students outside of engineering?
[00:04:02] Karsten Zegwaard: [00:04:02] Yes. There were a lot of changes happening at university at around the same time. So it is quite a complex space that we were in. We were restructuring both our curriculum, across the whole institution. And we were doing an institutional restructure around the management structure. We had eight faculties with disproportional sizes and probably too many for a university our size.
[00:04:26] So these faculties were collapsed together into four divisions and that resulted in the middle management being restructured with those my own position. So my position was changed as part of that. Slightly earlier than that, we did our curricular restructure and one of the changes that occurred was there were going to be three compulsory papers in every single undergraduate degree.
[00:04:48] One of these was a foundational studies, which most degrees had anyway. Then there was a cultural perspectives paper. We call them papers, offerings, or subjects - whatever the terminology might be in your own institution. And the other was a WIL paper. So every single undergraduate student will have to do a WIL paper or WIL offering for a equivalent of 15 points out of a 380 point degree.
[00:05:11] Now, when that change occurred, We had WIL across some areas in the institution already, some of it quite well established, including where I'm based. We had a very well established program. And another areas there was not, there was no practice of WIL at all in any form. So it was brand new and developmental.
[00:05:28] So centrally, there was like a working group forms for WIL. I became part of that, and I became part of the Vice Chancellor's group in order to strategize around how we roll out WIL across the whole institution, and how we can support it. As part of that, we made a recommendation that the central WIL unit will be formed.
[00:05:47] So we had local school WIL units within our faculties at the time, but we wanted a central one just to facilitate a platform from which we can manage WIL and to look at policy and to look at agreements and legal aspects and, and all the parts to support the faculties and what they're doing. When the divisional restructure occurred, it means in my own role that I had at the time was essentially split up into five. Out of those five, I got two of them, which I was apparently a full-time load. And that was to be programmed lead for the science placements. And then at the same time, I was given a 0.5 role in the vice chancellor's office as director for will research.
[00:06:26] And that allowed me to carry on doing what I did before. The other three components which included engineering. I appointed new people to lead them, then developed it further. So that's how I came from the role of being in science and engineering, into being a split role of being within science, and then also being part of the vice chancellor's office,
[00:06:45] Jim Stellar: [00:06:45] That is fascinating and I am going just give a little bit of my own experience here. What I was Dean of Arts and Sciences at Northeastern a couple of universities ago, we had committed ourselves to making co-op Northeastern (or WIL) a graduation requirement for the college of arts and sciences.
[00:07:05] So you had to do your math, you had to do your English, you had to do your distribution requirements and you had to do this. And all of the departments had a paper that was required of the students or I should say a course. There was a reflection component built in, but they didn't have any definition of what was the experience that underlay that.
[00:07:24] We chose a very broad lens, including things like, study abroad, undergraduate research, et cetera. We were pretty nervous when it kicked in and I had just become Dean a year before.
[00:07:37] I thought, this is it. I'm going to get fired because the enrollments will crash. So we appointed in each department, a forgiveness angel who by his or herself had the right to waive the requirement. If it turned out, there was something that got stuck and the kid couldn't get the experience in order to qualify for the requirement. And I have 6,000 students and there's only a quarter of them graduating or a fifth actually was a five-year program. We had six forgivenesses. I think it was unnecessary. But that was the moment that the arts and sciences college committed to the cooperative education program of the university, which had previously been an engineering business, et cetera.
[00:08:19] So I really relate to this transition. This is something I feel great sympathy for you for, and if also it was, it was very important to the future of the college, because it really produced a lot of energy and growth and helped us to rise up. So I wish you the same experience, but let me just ask you now, having gone way outside your discipline, did you find any particular challenges in talking to people, relating to people who didn't practice WIL before? Did you have to shake any heads up, did you have to make any bribes and to get them to do something?
[00:08:55] Karsten Zegwaard: [00:08:55] Your question shows you quite familiar with the process. Yeah, it has been challenging. It's been challenging in part because some areas just don't have that established practice and, and don't necessarily understand how it works or perhaps have a desire to be involved in that. And that's been one of the challenges that we've faced is that in order to have an academic involved or a faculty member involved in that space, you kind of need one of those peculiar people who finds these things interesting and wants to be a champion for work-integrated learning.
[00:09:28] And it was identifying those people that was and perhaps still is one of the challenging things that we've got. As you indicated the minute something is compulsory for work-integrated learning that does mean that every single student needs to do it. And that part did cause a lot of nervousness across the institution and including with our vice chancellor as well.
[00:09:49] We don't have forgiveness angels. We haven't quite got to that point, but we can forgive if we need to in the early stages at the moment. But likewise we've found that, that the number of what we call them waivers is extremely low, almost to the point that that probably isn't necessary.
[00:10:06] There are other creative ways of making these things work. I think one of the main challenges that we've had so far is that, that the changed to compulsory will occurred in 2018. And all students who are enrolled in 2018 had to do a WIL experience before they graduate, which means that last year, which is the likely year that do WIL was last year in 2020. So we rolled them to the year that we knew it was going to be the most challenging for WIL. And at the same time, COVID 19 came along and just bled the landscape. But we were at, and we thought we were all throwing our hands up and thinking that this couldn't be more challenging. And probably true, it couldn't be more challenging.
[00:10:43] But despite that, we still got a very high success rate of placements and other work-related type projects for students. We had to be very creative. I've got to admit that. And there's a little bit of compromise here and there, but we were able to achieve it anyway.
[00:11:00] And of course we were very fortunate in New Zealand that we were in lockdown for six weeks, and a very hard lockdown. But afterwards we were actually quite free to move and business came back to normal and economically we took a hammering, but it was nowhere near as bad as what we thought it would be.
[00:11:15] So, e did transition back to normality, whatever that is, a reasonably quickly, which I think really helps the WIL component for our university.
[00:11:25] Jim Stellar: [00:11:25] So, I think there might be another story in there that we could tell about how universities maybe get a little bit nervous about something like a full on commitment and then have it work out. You have the pandemic Northeastern didn't have that at the time, but it had the same fear.
[00:11:37] So what I'd like to do is to turn our attention to this very important journal that you edit. So could you tell us the story of how you became involved in it and then how it changed its name and sort of took over the world from a more regional perspective.
[00:11:56] Karsten Zegwaard: [00:11:58) Absolutely. Absolutely. So my good colleague, Richard Cole, he was at the university of Waikato at the same time as I was. He was the founding editor of that journal, and I was involved right at the start. I was part of the founding editorialship. And the thinking at the time was there was a lot of what we call the Coop back then.
[00:12:16] Then the terminology switched to WIL partway through. And there was a lot of Coop, a lot of workplaces activities occurring in our region, but none of it was particularly informed by research. There were often practitioners and they were trying to make things work and not engage with research.
[00:12:31] But perhaps we can get them involved with it. So we, we phoned this regional developmental journal with the intent of partnering with local conferences and then encouraging people who are active in giving presentations or doing, uh, for lack of better, some sort of lighthearted research to get them active and publishing their research, and then to build up their research ability so they can do more substantive research as their career progresses.
[00:12:53] That was the intent of the journal, and it started that way and did that reasonably well. But as it grew over time, it moved from the Asia Pacific region to become much more international. We were picking up multiple publications from North America, from the UK, quite a few from Canada, and those spaces and, and have got a flavor of no longer being Asia Pacific, but, but being international. During that time, the terminology changed too.
[00:13:23] So we called it co-op at our university, at Wakito University. We were probably one of the few universities that did use the word co-op . It was a very North American term, but then again, we based our model on the Waterloo model. So we borrowed the terms at the same time. The terminology has shifted more to work-integrated learning, and it also broadened as well.
[00:13:42] So it no longer was about placements. It was also about, work-related projects where you have a client, but you might be based at the university itself. So there's not a work placement, but you still have that external partnership. You still have that authenticness that comes through, still have that meaningful task the students are doing.
[00:13:58] That was a good move for universities in general. And in a sense that gave us more flexibility. Perhaps more resilience on the different types of projects we can offer and really helped us during the COVID-19 period as well. But it means that the scope of the journal changed and it was at that point before, look, you know, we need to change the name of the journal.
[00:14:19] So we changed the name from Asia Pacific journal of Cooperative Education, to the International Journal for Work-integrated Learning, with work-integrated learning being that internet internationally recognized term. Now changing the name of a journal. It's not as easy as it sounds. And we agonized about this because when you change the name of a journal, a lot of the measuring metrics that they simply treat the new name as a new journal.
[00:14:40] So you start at point zero in many cases. And then for example, the impact factor number, which is an important number, for two years, you have no impact factor number and it has a negative impact on the journal. But we were just coming out of that period now. But it wasn't a decision that we made lightly. But we sincerely believed that that was the best name to reflect what type of audience and what type of authors we had in the journal.
[00:15:07] Jim Stellar: [00:15:07] I did not realize that your time to come back to having the metrics was so recent. I guess I just forgot that. That's a really interesting dynamic. So let's switch a little bit in topic from the editorship and managing it all to the research, including your own research.
[00:15:26] Could you just give us a few points that you have learned from your leadership of the journal and your own research that you think people should know about in the practice of WIL.
[00:15:38] Karsten Zegwaard: [00:15:38] Yeah, sure. To higher education or tertiary education, one of the defining elements is that it is informed by research.
[00:15:48] And work-integrated learning should be no exception around that. It should be research informed practice of education. So my encouragement would be that if not to do research, to be at least engaged with reading the research. And now more than ever, we have targeted areas for research and work-integrated learning.
[00:16:04] There is this high quality publications coming through. There's a growing body of literature that the practitioners can be tapping into and should be tapping into. So my encouragement would be that the for practitioners to be engaged that reading with the journal with the books that are coming out. There is a number of books coming out at the moment in that space and also related spaces as well.
[00:16:23] A lot of the research over the years has changed focus. I think for the early to mid-nineties in that space, a lot of the research was focused on pragmatics and that was the way all of this was at. It was about how can we run work placement programs better? How can we improve it? That was very pragmatic focused.
[00:16:42] But now we're seeing a lot of research taking place that as theory informed. It is around educational issues that are pertinent at the time. We're seeing some really difficult topics being addressed in research. So I was seeing a real maturing of research taking place. So it's a fascinating space to be reading it.
[00:16:59] Jim Stellar: [00:16:59] So give me an example of some of those difficult topics that you think are coming out. And what do you mean by difficult?
[00:17:06] Karsten Zegwaard: [00:17:06] Difficult. Assessment, that is a, long-standing difficult one. Assessment of work, integrated learning is challenging because work-integrated learning is so diverse across your class cohort, if you wish.
[00:17:18] So you're going to have a very robust assessment system around authentic practice, which is not, I don't want to say I won't say just carefully. It's not something that normally occurs in a university context, but because of the context of WIL, you can. And apply it that way. So there's definitely a lot of development in this space.
[00:17:34] There is research taking place around a bit of integration of WIL within the wider degree, rather than having it as a standalone offering that sits alongside that integrates better into the curriculum. We're seeing difficult subjects like accessibility for students who are struggling to having good access to the work-integrated learning for whatever reason that might be.
[00:17:56] Indigenous studies perspectives are coming through. We've got a special issue coming up on that probably near the end of the year, perhaps start of next year, around that particular space. And again, one of those really challenging spaces that we haven't engaged well in this part of our WIL research community is a big gap in the literature there.
[00:18:14] And now we have an issue that's going to come around that. And, and look at how this perspective comes through how a particular practice we had the special issue on COVID-19. That was that was a phenomenal undertaking that happened during the very early stages of the pandemic. When we looked at this and we thought, gosh, COVID-19 is not going to be a flash in the pan.
[00:18:32] It's going to be around for a while. It has. It has huge impacts on the practice of WIL. A lot of work placement programs, couldn't cope with that. What else can we do? We know there are different types of practice that we can do that suited our students, there WIL experience this, but a lot of the literature has being focused on placements, that's been the high profile focal area.
[00:18:51] And perhaps it's the history of co-op feeding into WIL that we have that presence, but there's very little research around non placement WIL. So the COVID-19 special issue was really around showcasing and practices that you can do in a COVID type environments where you can't necessarily do work placements, at least not conventional work placements.
[00:19:12] So that was a really difficult topic in a difficult context that came out as a special issue. And I want to encourage you most about that. I’m really quite proud of the COVID daunting special issue, really encouraging part of it was that when we made a call for papers, for that special issue, the timeframe was really tight.
[00:19:30] We were all in lockdowns at that stage. The workloads were all through the roof and so were our stress levels. We thought maybe we'll get a small special issue out of it. And we had so many submissions or expressions of interest that we only accepted half of them and ended up at a double special issue. Both of the double special issues were individually the largest special issues that we've ever done for the journal. It was just phenomenal how the community just came together and started sharing knowledge.
[00:19:59] Jim Stellar: [00:19:59] It is amazing. And you were the spark that started the fire if you will, with that journal and that call, which I think is absolutely right, because the COVID is changing the world. And a lot of it is not for the better, but some of it might be, as we are forced to adapt and be creative.
[00:20:19] So you're also editing an updated handbook. You are a busy guy. Could you talk a little bit about the handbook?
[00:20:28] Karsten Zegwaard: [00:20:28] Yeah, absolutely. The handbook is another one of those projects that we have been quite proud of. Richard Coil, my colleague did the first edition of this handbook, but Chris Eames back in 2004 and then Richard and I did a second edition about 11 years ago in that space. The handbook got a lot of traction in the community. It was the go-to book for established knowledge for work-integrated learning or the practice of it.
[00:20:55] So that wasn't always the, the team. It's supposed to be easy reading. It was aimed at practitioners as well as researchers. The third edition that was long coming, to be to be honest, because the literature has shifted so much over those 11 years. Our understandings have advanced so much and we also looked at work-integrated learning differently.
[00:21:17] So the examples of good practice in the second edition was based around the practice of will within a context within a discipline. We now kind of look at it, think about actually discipline is important, but what's more important is what type of work-integrated learning is being practiced. And quite likely to different types of work-integrated learning
[00:21:33] looks similar in the different contexts of different disciplines. So we kind of turned that around and now we're focused on the type of work-integrated learning. As both Judene Pretti and I, Judene from the University of Waterloo , are co-editors of this one. It's going to be something that's going to absorb a lot of our time, particularly the second half of the year,
[00:21:52] but as a project that both of us are very excited about. It is going to be a good handbook, a good publication. Well, and of course, yourself or an author in one of the chapters as well.
[00:22:04] Jim Stellar: [00:22:04] True. I am. And it's been enormously fun to work on that chapter with the colleagues that you helped us put together. So I must say thank you for that.
[00:22:13] I'm just, I'm really grateful for the way that. Co-op or WIL is sort of making its mark in the world and in the higher education, if there isn't research behind it, it is not only bad practice, but it doesn't have the prestige. So you are, I think, right now single-handedly helping us to be everything we can be.
[00:22:41] Karsten Zegwaard: [00:22:41] Oh, I have to acknowledge my colleagues though, cause it's not quite the single handed. So for the journal we recently, or a couple of years ago appointed to associate editors to help with the workload. And, one of those is Judy Pretti from University of Waterloo and the other one is Anna Rowe from, from Australia.
[00:22:57] The two of them being really instrumental in helping the success of the journal. It's growing well beyond what one person can cope with, which is great, which is encouraging.
[00:23:13] Jim Stellar: [00:23:13] Yeah, I guess I meant single-handedly as a team, but it's good that you've got their names out there. So we're about at the point where we should stop. SoI want to just give you the last word, if there's something that you want to say to the audience that puts a period at the end of the sentence about research and Co-op/WIL.
[00:23:33] Karsten Zegwaard: [00:23:33] Yeah. Certainly. I actually think that that work-integrated learning is in a really exciting time. Both in the sense that there is a greater spotlight on work-integrated learning in general. Governments are very focused on employment, employability, and employment outcomes from engaging with higher education.
[00:23:56] A lot of universities are appreciate to have direct links to employability outcomes and engagement in higher education, and work-integrated learning is the practice that perhaps most prominently makes those particular links. So we're seeing a real growth of WIL and co-op internationally, which is really encouraging. At the same time
[00:24:17] even though COVID 19 gave us a really challenging time, it gave as opportunity as well. It gave us an opportunity to showcase work-integrated learning that wasn't necessarily placement focused. And I think we're going to see a change in focus of research and practice into those particular spaces.
[00:24:36] So not only are we in a growth phase and at an exciting phase, we're also entering a phase of different types of practice. Diversity or practice is coming through much more now than it was before. And for institutions who have compulsory work-integrated learning, having diversity of practice is going to be really important for having resilience in their practice of work-integrated learning.
[00:24:57] So if we have a global economic downturn, or if we have a pandemic or something like that we can easily pivot from one type of practice to another type of practice. So yeah, definitely exciting times. I mean, the literature is telling us that the impact of work-integrated learning on students outcomes and the learning outcomes are phenomenal that they are transformational.
[00:25:19] And as a practice that clearly works, and we know that and we can evidence that. Students themselves highly valued work-integrated learning experiences, and many who finished their degree will look back on their learning experience and will see work-integrated learning as being one of the highlights of this study.
[00:25:36] Jim Stellar: Right.
[00:25:38] Karsten Zegwaard: It's really, really encouraging. And of course it's as always, really important that universities engage with our community and our employers, external stakeholders. That they are not these silos that sit in the community, but they are actively engaging the community in a wider sense.
[00:25:55] And having all of our students go out into the community and doing a community project or a work placement or working with a client, that's one of the best ways of crossing those boundaries between university and wider community. That's so, yeah. Is this a fascinating space? And then that seems to be quite revolutional for universities to be in that space, but, but we're, we're doing it. We're, we're, we're changing. We were engaging with their community.
[00:26:17] Jim Stellar: [00:26:17] Well, I can feel the optimism from you and I think this is spot on. So I'd just like to thank you for participating in this fascinating podcast. And take your vitamins, all of you on the team. Keep going. We need you.
[00:26:34] Karsten Zegwaard: [00:26:34] Thank you, Jim. Appreciate it.
[00:26:35] Mary Churchill: [00:25:08] Thank you for listening. We hope you will come back soon for the next installation of ExperiencED.
[00:26:37] Adrienne Dooley: As we continue to talk about the neuroscience and sociology of enhancing higher education
[00:26:39] Jim Stellar: by combining direct experience with classical academic learning