Decolonising the curriculum

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. 

Reimagining education for global prosperity

In February 2024, the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP) 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 Deputy Director of Education). ChangeMakers projects allow students and staff to collaborate on projects to enhance learning and student experience at UCL. The project, 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.

As part of IGP’s wider focus on decolonising our curriculum, this work provides the department with a concrete baseline, against which we can measure our progress. The three-stage project involved 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 results were fed back to our teaching team, who committed to implementing project recommendations. 

The participating students were: Maureen Muthike, Viswanathan Veerappan, Valeria Zapata Jaramillo, Mara Stoll, Wenqi Yuan, Oluwafunke Iroko, Rex Yung, Ilona Quinodoz and Robin Heuermann. They were 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.