Interventions for Change

What is the issue we are addressing? 

Foundation courses undertake to support students via induction into the established practices and ‘norms’ of the academy and its disciplines. Yet this need not take a deficit approach. Foundation year courses and their cohorts, in all their rich diversity, arguably offer potential for practice which moves beyond the normative to the transformative, with students’ diverse strengths, lived experience and prior achievements contributing to the evolution of a socially just and inclusive academy.

Our foundation year has historically sought to build on students’ strengths and offer opportunities to engage with issues which are personally meaningful for them. We wanted to harness the students’ ‘community cultural capital’ and build on their aspirations and ambition for social change, often expressed in relation to their degree pathways. An inherent challenge was to achieve this in a multidisciplinary context at a time of expansion into a wider range of degree pathways.

What did we do? 

The key action was to design a new multidisciplinary module which sought, from the outset, to create space for student-directed group work, namely participation in a collaborative change-making project, inspired by an institution-wide change-making competition. Self-selecting groups research a global or community-based intervention in response to their own choice of real-world social (or local) issue in which they share a common interest. 

Groups create a poster to communicate analysis of the issue and exploration and evaluation of the intervention, with the option to start developing their own ‘big idea' inspired by their findings, or their own projects which are already underway. Group posters are celebrated in an interactive Change Making Poster Exhibition where students and staff are encouraged to engage in critical dialogue, and summative assessment is an individual portfolio requiring students to evidence their participation in the project and exhibition and critically reflect on the process and their personal learning outcomes.

Key to the module was the flexibility for students’ own choice of real-world issues and intervention as their project focus. Students’ choices and disciplines shaped the content of the learning sessions, particularly in the project-focused second half of the module, enabling the student voice and interests to feed powerfully into co-constructing the module. An aim was to engage students as partners enabling them to determine what could count as ‘valid’ or meaningful subject matter, without presupposition of what this might be.

What has been the impact? 

The sheer range of chosen issues/interventions testified to the wealth of ‘community cultural capital’ among the cohort. This fed strongly into projects, for example, through adapting an existing intervention to a personally meaningful context such as a local borough, region or country of interest or a particular population. Students’ diverse experience and skills, such as those gained through prior employment, community engagement or parenting/caring, were valuable assets they tapped into to inform their projects and rich reservoirs of ideas for interventions which in turn sought to empower others, often those at risk of marginalisation.

Tangible outcomes include online exhibitions showcasing students’ diverse change making research posters, which have been asynchronously viewed, interacted with, commented and reflected on by peers and tutors across the multidisciplinary cohort.

Both colleagues are exploring opportunities to elicit further feedback to enable a fuller evaluation of the approach. This could include follow-up with students to gauge perceived impact on their learning and confidence. There are opportunities to learn from and collaborate with those who have expressed interest in meaningfully taking forward their ideas, including by potentially bidding for university funding and support via entry to a future change making competition. Evidence generated from exploring the potential of change making ideas to live and grow beyond the module can feed into design/delivery in future.

Could the practice change be rolled out more widely?

Although the module was developed for a large Foundation year intake spanning several disciplines, the principle of drawing on students’ cultural capital and interests to develop social interventions could, with modifications, be adopted at other levels right up to post graduation.