institute of epidemiology and health care

To support efforts piloting the decolonising curriculum toolkit on a module in IEHC, we led a changemakers workshop to gather student perspectives on how to foster a more inclusive learning environment. This project was led by three students from the MSc Social Epidemiology programme, with an initial focus on one of our modules, Health Inequalities Over the Life course (IEHC0049). Our goal was to follow an iterative process based on student feedback and perspectives as the foundation. We started with a student workshop to brainstorm challenges and suggested solutions, then discussed the themes and topics that emerged with the academic leads for the module. Academic leads then reviewed the challenges and solutions identified by students and met to brainstorm their feedback and suggested solutions for staff to take student suggestions on board. We then reviewed all the feedback and ideas that had been brainstormed to create a guide for each pillar in the decolonising curriculum toolkit. Next we aim to share this output with the students who originally input into the process and to capture their feedback before circulating more widely to academic leads across the institute and the changemakers team. During the course of the project, we found that the results we got apply not only to one module, but can be taken on any modules to enhance curriculum decolonisation based on student perspectives. Then we build a guide that can be shared across the institute with tangible actions as the result of this changemakers project. We hope this guide will be an invaluable resource for improving efforts to decolonise the curriculum across the IEHC.

It is helpful to have a team of students who can support and who are also eager about the goal, to keep the momentum going.