learning communities and belonging

The Dissertation workshop: Research as a community practice

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THE TEAM

Lead: Mara Torres Pinedo

Support students: Amanda Kartikasari, Hemant Kumar, Ismat Juma, Kenneth Franco, Maria Jose Ascenzo

DEPARTMENT

Institute for Global Prosperity

WHAT HAPPENED?

The Dissertation Workshop co-developed with students a collaborative learning community to support and provide a sense of belonging for IGP MSc students during their dissertation period while reflecting on the overall learning process to improve research skills and collaborative learning for future cohorts. This project engages well with the ethos of the Institute for Global Prosperity and its commitment to transdisciplinary approaches to create more prosperous futures for all. Bringing innovation and dialogue spaces to explore models of future teaching practices that improve the belonging and wellbeing of our community can open the door to an authentic transformative education.

 
WHAT ADVICE OR ENCOURAGEMENT WOULD YOU GIVE TO SOMEONE THINKING OF DOING A CHANGEMAKERS PROJECT?
The Changemakers project is just the beginning of a further change in our teaching practice and learning experience in our community, no project idea is too small. Co-designing with students from the beginning improves your opportunities to build something more meaningful and to have more active involvement from them. It´s incredible what you can achieve, innovate and learn by opening dialogue spaces with students. A changemakers project can open the door to explore teaching practices that improve the belonging and well-being of our community and start building an authentic transformative education.

Improving Pastoral Care Provision for Chemical Engineering Students

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THE TEAM

Staff: Isobel Mackay, Beth Hills, Seema Walker (and support from Katie Bretherick our student advisor)

Lead Students: Yi Hui Loh, Adam Izham

Support Students; Lance Simanjoentak, Rebekah Goldwag

DEPARTMENT

Chemical Engineering

WHAT HAPPENED?

In recent years the Department of Chemical Engineering has received large numbers of Extenuating Circumstances claims with students referring to poor mental health and wellbeing. Issues with students’ mental health were also raised in the ASER. When discussed in the SSCC student reps mentioned that they are comfortable discussing academic matters with personal tutors, but not anything regarding mental health. In response to this the department have put in a variety of extra provisions, including training several staff members as Mental Health First Aiders and offering wellbeing drop-in sessions with these staff members as well as directly with the departmental tutors. These drop-in sessions are very rarely attended by students so it is clear that this type of provision is also not one that the students are comfortable using, and we want to use this project to determine how we can help students more effectively. In order to improve the mental health and wellbeing of students in the department of Chemical Engineering it was decided to run a Change Makers project to explore how best we can provide pastoral care to our students, in ways that the students will find the most effective and valuable. There were two key sections to this project. Firstly, for the student partners to design and run a series of focus groups to canvas the opinions of their peers on the wellbeing provision already in place in the department, and what other provisions they would benefit from. Secondly, the staff and students on the project to get together and analyse the anonymised responses of the focus groups to create a series of recommendations for the department. These recommendations will be presented to the Departmental leadership team and where appropriate acted on and implemented in future academic years, led by the departmental tutor.

 

2022_CE_Mental_Health_Change_Makers_Report_Isobel Mackay

WHAT ADVICE OR ENCOURAGEMENT WOULD YOU GIVE TO SOMEONE THINKING OF DOING A CHANGEMAKERS PROJECT?

This is a really great scheme and excellent way to get students involved with decision making at a higher level in their department. Students were really excited about being asked to be involved with this project to be able to influence their future, but also as it showed the department cares about their voice.

Terrace Club

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THE TEAM

Staff lead: Frosso Pimenides
Student leads: Sammy Doublet, Tom Henly, Clive Burgess, Lola Wilson, Thomas Butterworth
DEPARTMENT
Bartlett School of Architecture
WHAT HAPPENED?
The overall aim of the Terrace at 4pm was to challenge the conventional approach of architectural education within the Bartlett. Providing an informal space for all members of the Bartlett community, from facility staff to students to industry professionals, the conversations that took place were inspiring for all that engaged. Guest speakers involved a practicing architect, a staff member involved with book-binding, architecture, origami and other creative fields; and the Faculty Dean. All students who attended these lectures were fully engaged; learning what options were open to them; that architecture is not purely academic, and, crucially, that their futures don’t have to be linear.

WHAT ADVICE OR ENCOURAGEMENT WOULD YOU GIVE TO SOMEONE THINKING OF DOING A CHANGEMAKERS PROJECT?

Changemakers funding can provide the step your idea needs to become a reality. Having the provision of funding direct from UCL means that your ideas gain legitimacy, and you can start to make an impact on your learning community from the outset and for future learners.

Bringing Academic Work to Life

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THE TEAM

Lead students: Trista Wu, Chanju Mwanza, Michelle Kai Yee Wong, Wai Lok Ng

Support students: Kazunori Shishikura, Fu Kexin

Staff lead: Ieva Kelpsaite

 

DEPARTMENT

Student Services Team (IOE)

 

WHAT HAPPENED?

In this project lead students led three creative groups – podcast, website creation and video creation. The website and podcast groups have been incredibly successful as they have most participating students engaging with the project, following up the workshop and learning to either design their own website or create a podcast. We had participating students showcasing their work at the end of the year celebration. I found particularly inspiring that our student leaders needed very little support from the staff to lead their own groups and workshops. They were switched on and knew how to manage the groups, and how to engage. I thought that their leadership were exemplary and I hope something they will take away into the workplace as a great skill they’ve practiced.

 

WHAT ADVICE OR ENCOURAGEMENT WOULD YOU GIVE TO SOMEONE THINKING OF DOING A CHANGEMAKERS PROJECT?

Go for it, it’s currently the most successful way of engaging with the students. As it’s a long time engagement it also leaves greatest impact on the students.

Changing the story: A storytelling approach to visualising the impact of PhD research around the world

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THE TEAM

Student lead: Haoyue Guo
Support students: Cristina Garcia-Maurino Alcazar, Reshmi Mukerji, Alma Ionescu, Ana Correa Ossa (treasurer).
Staff leads: Professor Kholoud Porter, Professor Nigel Field
DEPARTMENT
Institute for Global Health
WHAT HAPPENED?
The project is about generating an interactive online platform for students to share their research and its impact using storytelling. The idea was to inspire thinking and learning around research impact through a fun way of storytelling, and to convey research impact from the perspective of the public. PhD students are able to create fictional avatars, who represent people affected by their research, on a world map and are to explain their research in terms of how it might directly impact them (e.g. my research will give a voice to women like Mrs A, who lives in India, has HIV, and has faced domestic abuse, in order to inform changes in the socio-legal framework impacting her life). They are also be able to link to other avatars to form a series of research stories that flow around the world. This will help students conceptualise their research impact, and provide an innovative mechanism to showcase the diverse research done by more than 50 doctoral students at IGH. We plan to run this department-wide first for PhD students, with the potential to expand faculty-wide and include staff research.

WHAT ADVICE OR ENCOURAGEMENT WOULD YOU GIVE TO SOMEONE THINKING OF DOING A CHANGEMAKERS PROJECT?

We would strongly encourage others to apply to a Changemakers project. The most important thing is to have a clear objective and a clear idea of the impact that your project will have on students and staff. Also, if you’re planning something technical (in our case, making a website), it is better to have someone on your team with relevant experience, which should allow you to have more control over and flexibility with the output.

Stronger Foundations / Academic Skills Assembly

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THE TEAM

Supervisor Staff – Caroline Garraway
Lead Student – Anqi Tang
Supporting Student – Lena Shaiakhemetova

DEPARTMENT

Anthropology

 

WHAT HAPPENED?

The “Stronger Foundations” project was initiated to understand why some undergraduate students face significant academic skills-related struggles in their studies, and to offer practical solutions to help alleviate them. Although we had initially proposed to find workshop-based solutions, focus groups suggested that there were many intersecting social factors, some of which were exacerbated by the COVID-related remote studying format which had affected students’ sense of belonging, which in turn had affected their perceived and actual academic competency. The project came up with a series of recommendations/ project ideas to take forward for the next academic year which included activities/initiatives relating to improving study skills, increasing student’s sense of belonging and looking after students’ mental health. These recommendations were discussed in a wider staff/ student group which resulted in agreeing a significant increase in academic skills provision and support for undergraduate students 2022/2023 including: Doubling the number of academic skills tutors; working more closely with transition mentors; having timetabled academic skills sessions for all incoming first year UG & PGT students; increased academic skills tutor office hours; and supervised ‘shut up and write sessions throughout the year. The final part of the funding enabled the project to trial run an end-of-year mug painting social. It was a popular event with over thirty students, where we learned about the types of social activities that students prefer that we can do more of in the future. Overall, I found the most rewarding part of this project to be working in a relatively large group of students and staff. Just knowing that there are so many passionate people who wanted to use their experience to help others was rewarding in itself. Also, every part of our communication was a collective ideation exercise that allowed the voices of many voices in the community to be heard at once.

WHAT ADVICE OR ENCOURAGEMENT WOULD YOU GIVE TO SOMEONE THINKING OF DOING A CHANGEMAKERS PROJECT?

Make sure to communicate your ideas with others as much as possible – not just with people who are directly involved in the project, but also everyone around you. It’s rewarding to bounce ideas off others, and you learn a lot in the process. For me, the most daunting part was anticipating and trying to raise the level of student engagement. The important thing to remember is that there is no perfect solution, and just try things if you think they will work. If they don’t, at least you have tried your best. Sometimes, things turn out better than you can ever expect too!

‘I Spy’ & ‘Many Faces of UCL’

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THE TEAM

Student head: Nanaki Maitra

Staff lead: Dr Alvina Lai

 

DEPARTMENT

Institute of Health Informatics

 

WHAT HAPPENED?

At UCL IHI, the PhD students have a tradition of playing the games’ hangman’ and ‘I spy’ on the kitchen whiteboards, so we decided to continue this tradition and expand our audience by using Twitter as the game platform. We photographed areas around the UCL Campus and London to evoke a sense of community and nostalgia to increase our post-engagement. The games were a big success resulting in the UCL_IHI twitter getting an overall boost of 3711% in tweet impressions, 469% increase in profile visits, and 705% increase in mentions! We then launched the ‘Many Faces of UCL’ interview series to increase opportunities for interactions between students and staff, especially those new to the IHI. We interviewed 8 individuals from IHI, including students and staff, to share their experience working at IHI and their advice for prospective students. Over the 7 days, we received 14K impressions on the tweets, with a sharp increase in engagement rate. These interviews will soon be posted on the UCL IHI website for all to see. The UCL Changemakers funding allowed us to rebuild a sense of community at the IHI through our projects, and it has been a very fulfilling experience.
WHAT ADVICE OR ENCOURAGEMENT WOULD YOU GIVE TO SOMEONE THINKING OF DOING A CHANGEMAKERS PROJECT?
If someone has an idea that can help improve the UCL community on any front, academic or social, I believe they should pitch their project to UCL Changemakers. I would advise keeping the project as feasible as possible, as even the seemingly small projects, like my Twitter game, can have a big payoff. I received a lot of constructive feedback from the UCL Changemakers team during the development of our project, which eventually helped in the project’s execution. As a first-year PhD student, the UCL Changemakers project was a fantastic opportunity to connect with many people in my department, so I highly recommend others to go for it too!

Development of an Inclusion Student Advocate Programme in the Faculty of Medical Sciences

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The team
Lead: Dr Nephtali Marina-Gonzalez
Support Students: Moon Cheng, Tala Al Ajmi, Emma Last.
Department
Division of Medicine
What happened?
At the beginning of the year, we gathered together to develop a program that promotes equality, diversity and inclusion within the Faculty of Medical Sciences. In hopes that by collecting the opinions of the cohort, we can identify the areas of improvement and come up with solutions that could allow a better sense of belonging in the faculty. As a faculty with many students from different backgrounds, race and gender, we believe that it is essential for us to keep EDI awareness high in order to help everyone reach their greatest potential in their academics whilst feeling supported as a unique individual. We planned 3 sections to the project, the survey, Interviews and Alumni Talks. In which the survey and interviews were constructed to collect data from the student body and the Alumni Talks are planned to invite previous students from different career fields to share their experiences with current experiences. We have finished collecting responses form the survey and are currently in the middle of organising interviews with students who self identify as having disabilities and understanding what we could do in order to help them have a more smooth learning journey. The alumni talks will be held next academic year. Since the student advocates are also student representatives from different courses in IMS, we are able to attend SSCC meetings and report to leads and other student representatives about our project. This is for the purpose of letting staff in the faculty of medical sciences to be aware of students opinions and concerns. This project is still ongoing and we hope our efforts put in this project will be able to benefit current students and most importantly prospective students as well.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
Make sure you could keep a good balance between your degree coursework and the Changemakers project at the same time. It would need good time management and also be self-motivated to progress the project throughout the year because you would have to set deadlines yourself and try to achieve them. Always communicate with your lead and other team members when you are confused with parts of the project since more ideas and opinions come up in discussions.

Improving the wellbeing of students at UCL who identify as male through physical activity

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The team
Lead students: Anne Cole and Nadia Yeo
Support students: Millie Morgan, Letitia Leong, Marta Radosevic
Project Active Lead: Lilley Kennedy
Department

Psychology and Language Sciences

What happened?
Our project has continued the work of a project completed last year. Our aim has been to increase the participation in Project Active classes of students who identify as male. Project Active runs engaging, non-competitive physical activity classes and the aim is to improve student wellbeing across the UCL community. We used behavioural science theories to gather data through surveys and focus groups to understand what could facilitate increased uptake of classes amongst male students. Results included increasing awareness, focusing on the social element of classes and providing incentives and loyalty schemes. The team and Project Active are now devising an initiative that can be rolled out in Term 1 2023 drawing on this data.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
Ensure you have clear, achievable goals and have a clear timeline with other teams.

Breaking down cultural barriers to improve student wellbeing and learning experience

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The team
Lead: Thao Anh (Tonja) Nguyen, Niloufar Abourashchi.
Support: Eleanor Chen, Tianshu Liu, Brilliant Dennise Wijaya
Department

Statistical Science

What happened?
As students of the Statistical Science department, we discovered strong cultural barriers between students from different countries, which resulted in a disconnect between students. The faculty has also noticed this and created the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) team that focuses to create initiatives to tackle this challenge. This project was created as a continuation of a survey from last year which shows that approximately 50% of the students agreed that their main goal at UCL is to make friends with peers from a different cultural background. However, the majority of the respondents agreed that they could sense a lack of intercultural interaction between students in the statistical department. This project has successfully gathered data on students’ wellbeing and learning experience through surveys and workshops. We are primarily interested in understanding on how we can provide a sense of “belonging” among students especially for international students that comes from various backgrounds. We gained students’ view of the community in the department, how this cultural barrier affects their educational experience and personal relationships, and what changes they want to see, either in the teaching delivery, style of assessments, or just in general. The feedback has been analysed and reported to relevant staff members, which will take this forward and improve the situation in our department. Similarly with last year, majority of the respondents feel that there was a lack of cultural interaction between students. This ChangeMakers project will act as ‘phase one’ of a two-phase bigger project where we will run social events to promote interculturality, and create a student-alumni network, where people can share their thoughts on inclusive community. This aligns with our survey result where it shows that nearly all survey respondents agree that running more social events could help breaking down the cultural barriers.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
We believe that it is crucial to have a clear objectives and goals and determining who are the key stakeholders of your project. You should ensure that the goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. Having clear and measurable goal will help you in quantifying your impact. It will help if you could engage with the key stakeholders and gained opinion from them to help improving your project. We also find it helpful to have a project timeline and tracker, it will give clear deadline and ownership to each team member, and it will also making sure them to be reliable to the task that they are assigned to. Lastly, it is helpful to have a prioritisation matrix, to understand what a quick win can be and what will be the long-term effect or strategy from this project.