Preparing students for professional practice: strategies for evaluating work integrated learning within an industry-professional context.

In line with the evolving profile of the university graduate, learning strategies are changing as one contemporary view of education is to prepare students for effective participation in professional practice. Within the School of Communication at Charles Sturt University (CSU), the distance between the classroom and the professional community is closing. At Kajulu Communications, the on-campus student advertising agency, students learn to apply best industry practice to a range of real-world problems within an authentic working environment. Curriculum development and pedagogy has been informed by applied research as well as continuous industry dialogue, and is based on a belief that university courses should not only serve industry, they should contribute on a higher level, new knowledge that informs and even guides evolving professional practice.This paper reports on action research which examines strategies employed within the environment of Kajulu Communications, and specifically professional teaching models that embrace the concept of work integrated learning via constructs such as communities of practice and authentic problem-based learning (APBL). In the process, the paper seeks to identify the pedagogical practices that naturally connect learning to authentic activity, context and culture (Brown et al, 1989; Lave and Wenger, 1991) as employed in curriculum delivery and specifically, the evaluation of student learning.