The School of Social and Political Science and GENDER.ED have been awarded a Regular Grant in the University of Edinburgh’s Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme (PTAS) to research ways to refresh and ramp up staff-student co-production on our flagship course Understanding Gender in the Contemporary World (UGCW). The project entitled ‘Transforming Staff-Student Partnerships: co-creating curriculum through the course Understanding Gender in the Contemporary World.’ is led by GENDER.ED steering group member and UGCW course creator Meryl Kenny (Principal Investigator and and Course Organiser), alongside Co-Investigators Fiona Mackay (GENDER.ED Director); Radhika Govinda (GENDER.ED/RACE.ED liaison) and Sarah Liu (UGCW Course Co-Organiser). UGCW tutors Elena Pollot and Leah McCabe will also join the team as research assistants and the project will also be supported by a University-wide reference group of staff and students and the steering group of GENDER.ED.
The exciting two-year project will work with past and present UGCW students, tutors and lecturers to (re)design and pilot new co-production structures and practices; further embed intersectional and decolonial feminist approaches and pedagogy into course content and delivery; and promote student belonging and build student-student and staff-student community. The course was originally co-created with students through the award-winning SPS framework course Social and Political Science in Practice. Open to all pre-Honours students, UGCW is a popular course that provides a rigorous and accessible introduction to the study of gender from an interdisciplinary social science perspective. It attracts students from across the University each year from English Literature to Physics, and from Social Anthropologists to biologists. It was launched in 2016.
To read more about the UGCW course and how it was created, check out Meryl Kenny’s Teaching Matters blog on student-staff co-creation of a course.
Listen to this audio discussion with UGCW staff and former students by GENDER.ED 2019 Summer Intern (and UGCW alumna) Abrisham Ahmadzadeh.
And read the Yuan Changying prize winning UGCW gender observations from 2020-21 (sponsored by genderEd) here and here .
