Internship Scheme 2024

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Each summer, the Centre for Teaching and Learning's Student Experience Internship Scheme enables Oxford students to work in partnership with University staff to co-design and carry out defined projects that provide demonstrable benefits to students' learning experiences at Oxford.

The scheme is run as part of the University’s Summer Internship Programme, which offers students hundreds of funded internship opportunities during the long (summer) vacation. The programme is administered by the Careers Service's Internship Office, whose invaluable support includes promoting our scheme to students, managing applications, and overseeing the placement process.

In 2024, we are working with six student partners on a 10-week internship project focused on understanding disabled students' learning experiences at Oxford. The scheme is generously supported by the University's Van Houten fund.

Project background

The Disability Advisory Service has recently developed a structured approach to making reasonable adjustment recommendations for disabled students. The Service is also making changes to the way support needs are communicated to students and to those providing disability support by clearly distinguishing between individual adjustments and inclusive practice. These changes aim to improve students’ learning experiences by communicating student needs much more quickly and in a way that promotes the adoption of an anticipatory approach to the University’s Equality Act duties.

In order to understand if this new approach is meeting our hopes and expectations for supporting disabled students, the Centre for Teaching and Learning and the Disability Advisory Service want to work with students to evaluate how disabled students are experiencing these changes and propose potential further improvements. This evaluation approach aligns with the Disability Inclusion Institutional Framework (DIIF), which posits that we must empower and enable disabled students to contribute to changes affecting them through the creation of meaningful partnership opportunities that centre disabled students.

Project aims

Our team of student and staff partners from the Centre for Teaching and Learning and the Disability Advisory Service are working in partnership to propose and carry out a qualitative research project that aims to answer the following questions:

How do disabled students envisage and experience inclusive teaching practices, particularly in relation to assessment and use of teaching spaces?
To what extent can disabled students easily access the inclusive practices and reasonable adjustments they need?
What further barriers do disabled students face to feeling they matter and belong at Oxford?

Student and staff partners are working together to co-design the research questions, data collection methods, data analysis process. We will also liaise with senior staff from across the University throughout this process to ensure our research meets institutional aims, aligns with ongoing work, and recognises project constraints.

At the end of the internship, our student team will produce a record of our research approach and findings, targeted summaries of our findings, and our recommendations for action that the University should take to improve disabled students’ learning experiences. These outputs will guide and contribute to the ongoing work of the Centre for Teaching and Learning and the Disability Advisory Service. Our students will present these outputs to stakeholders in the last week of the internship.

Internship structure

The internship is running from Monday 8 July until Friday 13 September 2024 and is based in Oxford at the Centre for Teaching and Learning.

Throughout the internship, students will be supported by staff in the Centre for Teaching and Learning to develop their research and professional skills in line with their own professional development aims. This may mean taking part in workshops on qualitative research methods, being supported to take on tasks that you would like to gain experience in, and/or attending external learning events, among other possibilities.