As a teaching team, we needed a cohesive plan for inclusive curriculum design at the department level. While this was part of an institutional level curriculum review, it was something that we wanted to implement going forward.
We started off with a discussion with the TEA team, discussing what we do already and where there might be room for improvement. The discussion was aligned with the Inclusive Education Framework and we outlined actions to be taken at the departmental, module, and personal supervisor level.
Most important was the module level work, which needed to be included in the upcoming curriculum review paperwork. In order to facilitate this we asked module leaders to write a statement for each module, with the following request:
Staff were given a link to a collaborative document allowed module leaders to share how they were addressing key issues in their modules (e.g. a statement on inclusive fieldwork procedure). We started off the document with some examples based on our initial conversation with the inclusivity team but these were then supplemented by the module leaders themselves. This concentrated lateral sharing of ideas was highly effective with best practice spreading throughout the department rapidly.
As a result of the process every module leader has made an explicit statement in their module document about how they will improve inclusivity on their modules. Not only this we have provided consistency and parity in our approach to key inclusivity issues at a departmental level (because so many people used the approaches of others in the shared document). There has been a dramatic increase in the number of modules explicitly offering good inclusivity pedagogical practices such as:
I see this as an ongoing process that module leaders should revisit on a regular basis to amend and update their specifications (as they would do for any changes to taught content).
