Introduction

The Public and Community Engagement Module Development Fund supports projects which develop new opportunities for students to learn about and practise public or community engagement within taught modules. Students are employed as co-creators to design these opportunities with staff, and some projects involve partners in the design phase too.

On this page you can read about projects funded in 2022-23.

Funding 2024-2025

To find out how to apply for funding in 2024-25, please click here.

Involving patients in the teaching and learning of Clinical Skills

• Lindsay Muscroft - Warwick Medical School (WMS)
• Patients from the community
• WMS students

This project aims to increase patient involvement in the Clinical Skills theme in year 1 of the MBChB course at Warwick Medical School. In year 1, students currently have classroom-based Clinical Skills teaching for one day a week where they are taught how to take a history, examine and communicate with patients by a Clinical Skills tutor who is a fully qualified practising doctor. We would like to involve real patients in this teaching and providing feedback on student technique, as we feel they will provide a different perspective to the doctors, which would only enhance the quality of doctors we are aiming to produce by the end of the course. This in turn would benefit the local community by the production of doctors with an even more patient-centred approach to history taking and examination.

When we refer to “patients”, this doesn’t only mean those community members who identify as having a chronic condition or disability, although they can obviously bring a helpful perspective. Whether you visit the doctor once a week or once every few years, every community member is likely to have been a patient at some point, and their perspective will be valuable. Involving students in co-creating these new changes to Clinical Skills in year 1 will also be crucial to ensure that any new patient involvement would enhance student learning.

Developing a teaching tool on Transitional Justice and International Development

• Briony Jones - Politics and International Studies (PAIS)
• Lesley Stahlecker - the African Network against Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances (ANEKED)
• PAIS students

Briony has been working with the African Network against Extrajudicial Killings and Enforced Disappearances (ANEKED) on developing a teaching tool based on their pioneering work with their Digest of the proceedings of the Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) in Gambia. The TRRC Digest was a collaboration between Gambians, university students across the world, and ANEKED staff. It became not only synonymous with an example of grassroots level participation and cooperation in the transitional justice mechanism, but it also had the ability to inspire and engage a young generation of activists who gained very specific skills in transitional justice process.

The funding from WIE will be used to bring together PAIS students and ANEKED to work on how the teaching tool can best be used to enhance learning in transitional justice beyond the university classroom. It will then be launched as an open access tool for use by teachers in universities, by students independently, and by transitional justice activists. At Warwick, it will be used in the PAIS module Transitional Justice and International Development.

The tool itself will contain content from NGOs, activists, journalists, and other civil society working on justice issues particularly focused on highlighting narratives and experiences in the Global south. It will be designed in such a way that students will be able to learn about this work – i.e. how their conceptual learning interacts with justice processes – and to contact the organisations to learn more. The tool will therefore be a conduit in creating a direct pathway of engagement between those working on justice issues and students who can exchange knowledge and ideas. It will also offer concrete advice for how to join public and community engagement efforts with justice.

ANEKEDLink opens in a new window is a partner of the Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International DevelopmentLink opens in a new window, of which Briony is the Director.Awarded Summer 2023

Creating a new module on Social Design

• Adela Glyn-Davies - School for Cross-Faculty Studies
• Warwick students
• Community partners

Social Design is design with and for people. This module will foster students' development in becoming designerly change agents through engagement with their local and regional communities. Social Design understands design as an ethically driven endeavour seeking to make improvements to the lived experiences of people, communities, and the built, natural and social environment. The module will be underpinned by the principles of co-design/ co-creation, working in partnership to identify, investigate and resolve design problems.

During the module, students will have a relationship with a specific community context and over a period will develop collaborative research into factors and influences which are shaping that community and propose a co-designed solution to address the needs arising from that research. Social Design challenges common-place practices of 'doing research to people' through methods which engage people in research and ultimately creates partnerships for design and system innovation.

Creating experiments for school pupils through programming

• Jianhua Yang, Mir Seyedebrahimi and Margaret Low - WMG
• Degree apprentices - WMG and Jaguar Land Rover
• Schools in the West Midlands

This project aims to introduce more interactive elements to the module Smart Solutions Development I (Programming) to foster public engagement and enhance teaching quality.

In this module, first-year undergraduate degree apprenticeship students learn the C++ and Python programming languages. Currently, the Python assessment requires students to analyse a public dataset and present results using a graphical interface.

This project will introduce Arduino-based air quality monitoring kits which WMG students will use to design experiments for school pupils. They will take the kits to local schools and teach the pupils how to use the kits to collect data. That data will be compiled and used in the Python assessment, and after completion, students will revisit the schools to demonstrate their Python coursework.

We hope that the degree apprentices and school pupils will be inspired by their collaboration with each other.

Teaching public engagement in Global Sustainable Development

• Gioia Panzarella
• Global Sustainable Development students

In this project, students and staff will co-create new teaching and learning resources to strengthen students' understanding of public engagement, with a focus on how to disseminate their research to wider audiences.

Students will have opportunities to engage the public with their dissertation topics, including at an annual event in the summer term.

Teaching public engagement in Biomedical Sciences

• (In alphabetical order) Andrew Bowman, Claire Bastie, Craig Thompson, Leda Mirbahai, Meera Unnikrishnan, Richard Clay and Timothy Saunders - Biomedical Sciences Division, Warwick Medical School
• Eleanor Hoverd, HEE/NIHR Clinical Doctoral Fellow, Health Sciences, Warwick Medical School
• Biomedical Sciences students
• Local communities

This project will develop a series of interactive workshops on effective communication of scientific research with the public across the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes delivered within the Biomedical Sciences Division. The sessions will be embedded in core modules and the training will culminate in an annual public engagement event where students will engage with the local community about their research. Staff, students and members of the local community will be involved in the development and evaluation of this project.