Perspectives on motivation and engagement in an extracurricular project

To enhance employability opportunities, a range of co-curricular opportunities are offered to Nutrition students at Kingston University. Student uptake of these opportunities tends to be limited to a small group of highly motivated students. Using an unpaid public health project undertaken as a staff-student partnership as a case study, both the processes involved in the project and the motivation of staff and student partners are explored. Understanding what elements of motivation were involved may help to pinpoint aspects of co-curricular work to focus upon in order to increase student uptake, thus potentially enhancing graduate employability. Keywords: Intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, partnership, autonomy, engagement