Whose voices should shape global health education? Curriculum codesign and codelivery by people with direct expertise and lived experience
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Published version
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Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
There are contrasting opinions of what Global Health (GH) curricula should contain and limited discussion on whose voices should shape it. In GH education, those with first-hand expertise of living and working in the contexts discussed in GH classrooms are often absent when designing curricula. To address this, we developed a new model of curriculum co-design called Virtual Roundtable for Collaborative Education Design (ViRCoED). This paper describes the rationale and outputs of the ViRCoED approach in designing a new section of the Global Health BSc curriculum at Imperial College London, with a focus on healthcare in the Syrian conflict. The team, importantly, involved partners with lived and/or professional experience of the conflict as well as alumni of the course, and educators in all stages of design and delivery through to marking and project evaluation. The project experimented with disrupting power dynamics and extending ownership of the curriculum beyond traditional faculty by co-designing and co-delivering module contents together with colleagues with direct expertise and experience of the Syrian context. An authentic approach was applied to assessment design using real-time syndromic healthcare data from the Aleppo and Idlib Governorates. We discuss the challenges involved in our collaborative partnership and describe how it may have enhanced the validity of our curriculum with students engaging in a richer representation of key health issues in the conflict. We observed an enhanced self-reflexivity in the students’ approach to quantitative data and its complex interpretation. The dialogic nature of this collaborative design was also a formative process for partners and an opportunity for GH educators to reflect on their own positionality. The project aims to challenge current standards and structures in GH curriculum development and gesture towards a GH education sector eventually led by those with lived experience and expertise to significantly enhance the validity of GH education.
Date Issued
2021-09-02
Date Acceptance
2021-08-05
Citation
BMJ Global Health, 2021, 6 (9)
ISSN
2059-7908
Publisher
BMJ Publishing Group
Journal / Book Title
BMJ Global Health
Volume
6
Issue
9
Replaces
10044/1/90988
Copyright Statement
© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Subjects
epidemiology
health policies and all other topics
health systems
public health
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN e006262