population health sciences

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.

IEHC inclusive curriculum student engagement project

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THE TEAM

Staff: Dr Anne Peasey & Dr Rebecca Lacey

Students: Whitney Wells (lead), Wen Wang (support), Sicheng Hu (support)

DEPARTMENT

Institute of Epidemiology and Health Care

WHAT HAPPENED?

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.

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

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.

‘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!

Masterclass series

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The team
Konstantina Tetorou, Nandaki Keshavan, Ellie Chilcott, Ashley Boyle, Juan Antinao, Riccardo Privolizzi, Tania Castillo.
Department
Institute for Women’s Health
What happened?
Our project aims to create a forum through which early career researchers of the Institute for Women’s Health (Masters, PhDs, PostDocs) could be trained in different lab techniques and provide structured, targeted feedback on ongoing research projects. We will organise two technical masterclasses, one poster session, one writing retreat session and one wellbeing session to take place in a 3-month period (April-June 2022). The technical masterclasses will include training in lab techniques that are commonly used across the Institute, such as ELISA and western blot. Also, peer to peer feedback will be given on general presentation skills.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
This is a great opportunity for engaging with the community and sharing the skillset within our institute. We advise seeking the opinion of the target attendees to determine what they think would be most useful to cover in events before applying. No idea is too small for this application as long as it is well planned and justified.

Decolonising a Sexual Health Curriculum

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The team
Julia Bailey (lead)
Mayra Salazar Volkmann, Haoyue Guo, Kara Smythe (support).
Department
Research Department of Primary Care and Population Health
What happened?
This project is a module review for the iBSc Sexual Health module, which took a decolonising lens to look at sexual health in social contexts, meaning to acknowledge and remove the influences of colonialism in knowledge construction. To review our approach to decolonising medical education, we started this project in 2021 and received support from the Changemakers grant to disseminate our results. To gather data, we reviewed literature in the field and interviewed the session facilitators of the module, students, and the module lead. With their views and opinions, we were able to reflect on how decolonisation was perceived in sexual health education, what went well with our attempt to bring the element of decolonisation to the class, and what can be improved. We have shared our findings with departmental staff and PhD students through a workshop, and we have plans to further the impact of this piece of work through blogs, journal articles, and seminars.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
Time management and distribution of workload is absolutely key for teamwork. Since we already collected data before getting changemakers funding, we initially thought time wouldn’t be a problem. However, we finished analysis and preparation for dissemination just in time and it was only achieved because we set clear deadlines and divided up work clearly.