Welcome - Advancing WIL Research
Ashley Stirling, University of Toronto

Work-integrated learning experience for public health students: A case study project in partnership with a community farm
Apira Ragunathan, University of Toronto Scarborough
Obidimma Ezezika, University of Toronto Scarborough

This chapter describes a case study on work-integrated learning (WIL) in a public health undergraduate course, where students addressed a health issue in a “real-world” context. Students collaborated with a community partner to develop case study proposals that would target food insecurity. In this chapter, we describe the design and development of the course to integrate the WIL experience. Five key lessons were drawn; aligning learning outcomes with the aspirations of the community partner requires careful dialogue, a well-designed WIL experience enhances critical thinking skills and course enjoyment, WIL must not replace other course learning opportunities and outcomes, students may not value work-integrated learning experiences unless shown how it affects course performance, and WIL can provide students opportunity to create meaningful impact. We discuss the lessons and course implementation in light of Kolb’s experiential learning theoretical framework and provide a few considerations for course designers.

Number of work experiences and student employability
David Drewery, University of Waterloo
Judene Pretti, University of Waterloo

This study addresses a fundamental question underpinning the influence of work-integrated learning (WIL) on students’ employability: will participation in multiple WIL experiences lead to greater competency development and, in turn, greater employability? To address this question, we asked co-operative education (co-op) work supervisors (n = 778) to evaluate students’ competency development in terms of a lifelong learning mindset and employability in terms of their willingness to offer a position to their student in the future. The number of students’ WIL work experiences was also collected. Linear regression and mediation analyses showed that supervisors’ evaluations of students’ lifelong learning mindsets mediated a positive indirect association between the number of WIL work experiences and employability. The results suggest that coordinating multiple WIL work experiences may promote greater employability because of greater competency development.

REGISTER HERE.