George Koutsouris and Anna Mountford-Zimdars, based at our St Luke’s campus, are interested in the Hidden Curriculum. Their project ‘Understanding the barriers posed by the hidden curriculum that HE students from diverse cultural and social backgrounds experience in their studies‘ will attempt to better understand the barriers that students from diverse cultural/social backgrounds experience in their studies and will use the theoretical lens of the ‘Hidden Curriculum’ (HC). The HC includes norms, behaviours, perspectives and attitudes that reflect the current but also previous educational and cultural experiences of students and, therefore, can vary significantly between students from diverse backgrounds. The study will focus particularly on students’ perceptions of and attitudes towards the HC and will involve a number of UG/PGT students as co-researchers. The aim is to develop material and resources for personal academic tutors to enable them to make the HC explicit to students.
Claire Lavers and Piklu Gupta intend to explore ways in which the University can make learning more accessible for disabled students in their project ‘Accessible In-Class Teaching: A Training Resource for Academic Staff‘. They aim to create an on-line training resource to inform teaching staff how to make their in-class teaching accessible for a variety of the most commonly presented disabilities in the student body. As well as acting as a good practice guide to accessible in-class teaching, highlighting the simple changes staff can make – as a matter of course – to their teaching, it will also contain animation, videos and student testimony, illustrating the barriers to leaning students with disabilities face, by demonstrating how disabled students’ experience a range of learning environments.
In their project ‘Evaluating the impact of peer programmes on students’ learning gain and academic attainment – a cross-discipline approach‘ David MacDonald and his team will aim to provide quantitative data to support the qualitative evidence supporting peer programmes.