Bringing a HASS lens to work-integrated learning: Australian contexts, challenges, opportunities

This paper examines Work-integrated Learning (WIL) as a pedagogy within Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS) learning and teaching. It examines WIL as an important strategy for ensuring that the university is contemporary, connected, and engaged with the realities of the rapidly changing nature of work. WIL has the capacity to enable greater mobility between the university and strategic partners – encompassing industry, business, community, not-for-profit, cultural and governmental bodies, and even other areas of the educational institution – and can demonstrate the value of HASS both to partners and to students themselves. This article positions HASS disciplines in relation to the contemporary Australian higher education sector’s employability agenda, argues for the value of these disciplines to employers, the workforce and to the future of work, and offers recommendations for designing contemporary curricula using the pedagogy of WIL as seen through the lens of HASS disciplinary learning. This is important in a global context in which HASS is increasingly under attack for being inward-looking, siloed, and irrelevant. The Australian context provides an apt case study, demonstrating the intersection of governmental policy settings, responses from Higher Education Providers, and the norms, values, and priorities of individual disciplines. Moreover, the challenges that face HASS disciplines in the contemporary Australian tertiary sector, where HASS learning is routinely derided, and indeed legislated, as not ‘job-ready’, are particularly acute and serve as a warning to other national contexts. It is imperative, at this inflection point in Australian higher education, when conceptions of knowledge work are being ruptured by generative AI and forces like an expanding gig economy, that HASS learning is framed as future-ready; as preparing students for a full working and civic life, not just a first (professional) job. To that end, this paper critiques mainstream employability discourse and celebrates HASS learning as authentically work-ready while also outlining recommendations for scaffolding through a future skills matrix and supporting pedagogies to foster authentic, industry-partnered WIL to enrich students’ engagement with study, each other, and their communities.