Abstract
Being able to operationalize the concepts of inclusion and diversity is now an integral part of change integration and management in UK higher education institutes. With emphasis on the societal impact of education as well as its role in ensuring optimal employability and widening participation for first generation graduates, being able to co-construct academic curricula is now regarded as a desirable norm. Being able to also enhance the concept of student agency also moves co-constructive approaches to curriculum development beyond merely a tokenistic gesture in the uncertain contextual backdrop of politics, culture, and the dynamics of constant change. This chapter provides an insight into curriculum design as an overall holistic structure and a mechanism of extending the context of academic praxis into the social world. The chapter posits the idea that curricula can be a strategic lens through which students' active participation and co-creation can be illuminated and further extended.
TopThe Inclusion Barrier In Academic Curricula
An inclusion barrier can be defined as any characteristic that contributes a blockage to effective educational integration. Our students are all fundamentally unique, each with their own particular set of defining situational issues that ultimately frame and define how and what they have the capacity to learn.
In common with the rest of this book, as educationalists it is possible to define the most obvious as being age, gender, nationality, learning capability, physical disability, mental health, non-traditional learning origins or academic pathway to university. Regardless of all this, students’ realities are constructed of so many variables that this may give them connection to others or purely highlight how uniquely individual all of us are. This remains the fundamental beauty of education as a social science – we are all social creatures each with our own particularity. A one-size fits all curriculum might not exist but where unique individuals can contribute it is in the establishment of an ethos that is truly authentic, collaborative and inclusive – where value for difference is more valuable than the homogenisation of human experience into faceless metrics and correlations.
The nature of all academic curricula is shaped by formality and informality – what is bracketed under each can be startlingly different and can be engaged with by students as part of formal or informal learning that ultimately contributes to an holistic and societally driven education system.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Signature Pedagogy: Refers to the characteristic way different pedagogical processes frame and define specific academic disciplines, areas of study or professional identities.
Co-Creation: In the context of curriculum development can be defined as the process by which input from students and/or key stakeholders plays an integral role of justification, design, and eventual implementation.
Epistemic Cognition: Is defined as the study of thinking about processes of knowledge and knowing.
Social Integration: Refers to the mechanisms and processes by which people can positively interact and connect with others from different sociocultural, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds
Curriculum Development: The process of planned, purposeful, progressive and systematic processes in order to create a demonstrable improvement in the delivery of academic programme content.
Transformative Learning: Is the process of constructive and deep learning which moves beyond straightforward knowledge acquisition to critically impact on how learners make conscious meaning of their lives and decision-making processes.
Experiential Learning: Is the process of learning via experience, which can also incorporate processes of critical reflection and reflexivity.
Inclusion: Is the practice or policy of providing equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalised.
Agency: Is the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power from within an educational institution.
Diversity: Is the practice of including and involving people from a range of sociocultural, ethnic, and geographical backgrounds and different sexual orientations and genders.