Decolonising the Curriculum at IGP

"As an institute with a global outlook and student body, it is particularly important to us to build an inclusive curriculum – one that not only raises awareness of systemic injustices and historical exclusions, but that actively helps students interrogate and counter them. To do so, our staff members work with students to continually update our teaching materials and methods. We review the texts we assign, the case studies we ask students to examine, the concepts we use to jointly understand the world, as well as the pedagogies we deploy. This page introduces some of the initiatives that help us in our ongoing effort to decolonise the curriculum." – Dr Hanna Baumann, EDII Lead, Institute for Global Prosperity

Reimagining Education for Global Prosperity

The Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP) is proud to announce that, in February 2024, we received funding from UCL ChangeMakers, following a successful application from a group of our students across all three MSc programmes and Dr Mara Torres Pinedo, IGP’s Deputy Director of Education. ChangeMakers projects allow students and staff to collaborate on projects to enhance learning and student experience at UCL. The project, titled The IGP Workshop: Re-imagining education for global prosperity, aims to assess the diversity and inclusion of the syllabi of our three master’s programmes: Global Prosperity MSc, Prosperity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship MSc, and Prosperity, People and Planet MSc.

A group of people sit together at a table working on an activity and look animated like they're enjoying themselves

As part of IGP’s wider focus on decolonising our curriculum, this work will provide the department with a concrete baseline, against which we can measure our progress. The three-stage project will involve the group developing assessment tools, assessing each core module’s syllabus and, finally, leading an ideation workshop with the wider IGP community to co-create an action plan for diversifying all core modules across taught master’s degrees at the IGP. The result will be fed back to our teaching team, who have committed to implementing project recommendations for the 2024/25 academic year. Our EDI team will oversee this process.

The participating students are: Maureen Muthike, Viswanathan Veerappan, Valeria Zapata Jaramillo, Mara Stoll, Wenqi Yuan, Oluwafunke Iroko, Rex Yung, Ilona Quinodoz and Robin Heuermann. They will be remunerated for their time and contributions to the project.

Inclusive Curriculum Health Check

Since 2020, IGP teaching staff have conducted an annual Inclusive Curriculum Health Check exercise across the institute’s MSc cohorts. Modelled on the university’s curriculum health check for staff, the session takes the form of an open discussion and also solicits anonymised feedback from students. Topics covered include the diversity of readings, case studies and theoretical frameworks with regard to ethnicity, gender, nationality, class, educational background, ability, and sexual orientation among other dimensions.

The input from students is extremely valuable to assess our efforts to continually improve the diversity of our curricula. Due to the wide range of backgrounds of our diverse student body, these sessions always result in exciting new suggestions for additions to module curricula, which teaching staff take up in following years.