Category Archives: Pre-University Summer School

The global challenge: developing sustainability skills in King’s summer programming

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Hannah Bond is Associate Director – Learning and Teaching for Summer Programmes at King’s College London. 

Education plays a key role in the fight against climate change and education institutions must prepare learners of all ages to with the ‘knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to address the interconnected global challenges we are facing’ (UNESCO, 2021). One of the ways universities and schools can equip young people with the skills and knowledge they will need, is through developing sustainability skills – the ‘knowledge, abilities, values and attitudes needed to live in, develop and support a sustainable and resource-efficient society’ (UNIDO, 2021).

Sustainability skills are relevant to all disciplines and levels, summer schools included. In July 2021, King’s Pre-University Summer School launched the inaugural Global Challenge to help prepare our students to address complex challenges and empower them to make informed decisions to positively impact society and the planet. Modelled on a hackathon – an event in which a large number of people meet to engage in a specific topic or challenge – the Global Challenge is an intensive problem-based group project that students complete alongside their subject studies.

Students are the future changer makers; they are integral to forging a more progressive world and advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Therefore, it is the role of the education sector to properly equip students with this sustainability knowledge, skills, confidence and to understand complex issues so they can play a transformational role in helping to build a sustainable and inclusive future we can be proud of – and understand the cross-collaboration which is needed to get there. 

King’s Sustainability Officer Alexandra Hepple, who contributed her expertise to the project 

We recognise that summer schools offer students a transformative, intensive learning experience where they can learn alongside other young people from a wide range of geographical, cultural and academic backgrounds, and we recognise that such diversity can drive new approaches and creative problem solving. A key requirement of the project is that students address a global problem in a collaborative, thoughtful way, working with teammates from a wide variety of disciplines and backgrounds.   

Beyond developing skills directly related to sustainability, the Global Challenge aims to develop students’ creative problem solving and academic skills as preparation for university and beyond, with an emphasis on critical thinking, communication skills and teamwork. It also builds students’ understanding of sustainability, at a global level as well as in relation to their own lives and communities, and their exposure to varying perspectives/experiences 

In its first year, the Global Challenge project was adapted for online delivery due to the pandemic. Students learned about the factors contributing to food insecurity around the world, working together to identify solutions and communicate these to different audiences. 

“We discussed source reliability when sharing our findings. We also conducted research on the topic of the UN SDGs and how certain SDGs had links to our topic and we discussed ways we could incorporate them into our final activity.

We were able to all make very well structured arguments that were backed up by evidence and research. This skill is not only crucial to our future when in university but also to our current lives in high school.”

Lucas

For King’s Summer Programmes, Hannah Bond delivered a well-received presentation on ‘Hacking’ the Sustainable Development Goals: Facilitating global problem solving in short term programming at the 2021 EAIE Conference 2021, sharing the fresh work being done at King’s with the wider international education community. As our summer schools return to on-campus teaching in 2022, the prospect of running the Global Challenge in person is an exciting one.

The way we learn on summer schools

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Thais Russomano, MD, is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre of Human & Applied Physiological Sciences, part of the Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine’s School of Basic & Medical Biosciences.
Thais teaches summer school students about body systems and how humans adapt when exposed to hostile environments.

 

If asked at the age of 16 what I wanted to be when I ‘grew up’, the answer university professor would never have crossed my mind. I knew what I wanted to be, it was simple – for as long as I could remember I dreamt of becoming an astronaut. This would be a difficult career path for anyone to follow, however, coming from a country (Brazil) that didn’t at that time even have a Space Agency made the task as difficult as climbing Mount Everest blindfolded! I wish at that stage of my life I’d had the opportunity to experience a course like the King’s Summer programme.

Exposure to material taught by an international professor in a ‘university-type’ form would certainly have given my confidence a boost and allayed many of the doubts I had about studying abroad and at a higher level. Nonetheless, I planned my journey, completing medicine in Brazil, then facing my fears and going oversees for a 2-year MSc in Aerospace Medicine in the US, and a PhD in Space Physiology at King’s College London, before working at the German Space Agency (DLR).

My academic career began at a university in Brazil, where I established the Microgravity Centre, a pioneering Space Life Sciences Research Centre, but my links with King’s always remained strong, and I eventually became the Deputy Course Director/Senior Lecturer of the Space Physiology & Health MSc course. Another constant in my life was dedicating spare time to teaching school-aged students about the life and works of astronauts during space missions.

Therefore, when asked to participate in teaching for the King’s College Summer Programmes, I was delighted to accept, as, from my own student experience, I knew the benefit this kind of interaction brings – I see it as a two-way win-win situation for both students and professors, both of whom encounter different learning styles and gain from an exchange of cultural values, which broadens perspectives and adds to personal and professional growth.

The design of the Summer Courses fosters this interaction of tutors/students and provides an enriching learning environment. Students gain a great insight into what life would be like studying at university level, and possibly experiencing for the first time a British way of delivering knowledge. This opportunity also gives a special experience to us as professors, entering a highly multicultural environment, bringing with it challenges as to how best to engage these young minds, but at the same time making the teaching-learning process more stimulating and special.

Given the short length of the courses, they can be no more than simply ‘taster’ experiences for both sides, however, the enthusiasm and curiosity of the students is evident from their willingness to participate in activities, and from their questions, which become more probing and frequent as the week progresses and confidence grows. And it is exactly this growth in confidence, this exposure to professors of a different culture, and this opportunity to mix with a different way of doings things that is the most invaluable lesson of the week for students, opening their eyes to potential new horizons.

Likewise, teaching pre-university students, and especially those from a culture for whom English is not their native-tongue, provides lecturers with a reminder that sometimes we must adapt our skills to better communicate the content of our classes, making the language we use more accessible, building on logical reasoning and employing good analogies that help in the understanding of more complex ideas. I am reminded that these skills are important within our practice at King’s, which is by its very nature, a very international university, with more than 40% of its student population drawn from 160 countries.

For me, the experience of teaching young students on King’s Summer Programmes is gratifying and enriching; something new to add to my lifelong learning portfolio. For the students, I hope they find their pre-university programmes inspiring and motivational experiences, bolstering their self-belief and turning the first page of their academic journey.

We are the city: King’s Summer Programmes in London

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Dr Sarah Williamson, Director of Summer Programmes

Cities, like universities, are the sum of their parts and London, like King’s, is very much a product of its people. London’s citizens have long built bits on, growing the city outwards and upwards not on any grid system, but expanding it organically from its medieval footprint. London is not a city that was built then the people moved in; they built it from the inside out.

That’s the kind of city London is. It has a mindset that resists definition and a momentum that evolves in ways that are too exciting to be corralled. Just how London has been shaped and honed has become even more apparent in the last 20 years. Glorious, majestic spaces, like Somerset House, have been reclaimed as public spaces, becoming areas for public thinking and doing. Those reclaimed public spaces now influence public discourse and from there the city self-defines its future development. A city is a thinking space and the university within the city is an ideas lab, where those thoughts are grouped together to become ideas and shaped into actions.

Everyone who comes to London comes knowing it has a life blood that its citizens both create and draw from. This is what makes it such a strong magnet for creative thinkers and therefore creative learners. To be connected with and submerged into the flow of the city was always an elemental component in the makeup of our academic summer programmes at King’s. London is our classroom not just because it is our location; it’s because it is our inspiration and definition. It’s an ever-greater co-contributor to the summer classes in our sector-leading programmes.

For those seeking a starting point more profound than a traditional tourist route, having a chance to explore the city through applied study is strongly attractive. No student focused seriously on their academic career doesn’t think very carefully about how they, as global citizens, as global thinkers, will need to understand and use the city in their future as they become workers in their fields. But how to do this if you live elsewhere? What can you do to count yourself amongst the number of Londoners making waves in the world if your postcode is usually well beyond the M25? One neat answer is to join a summer programme at King’s. Short courses, run on King’s campuses over the summer season give a compact but powerful injection of intellectual rigour and dynamic personal development embedded so firmly in London’s ecosystems that your credentials as a Londoner become as established as they do as a King’s alum.

All of our 1,800 summer alumni this year will have explored their subjects with the help of London. Academic excursions, guest speakers from across London’s industries enrich the London campus-delivered academic content of courses. From the Victoria & Albert Museum, historic Fleet Street or crowded Brixton. A diverse range of places and encounters await the summer student and life-long Londoner alike. London can be a gateway to the wider world through its London headquarters of global powerhouses like the UN Refugee Agency, teachers on our Human Rights undergraduate summer school. Our popular and long-standing summer module “Museum of London: Curating the City” with daily sessions at the museum led by its curators, is a passport behind the scenes of one of the capital’s most innovative museums. What do the collections—ranging from art to architecture, fashion to film, music to media, giant fatberg!—tell us about London over the last century? What sorts of histories do these collections tell? What stories do they leave untold? Who are the people choosing these collections and making particular stories public? What is the impact of their decisions on London’s present-day reputation as a centre of creativity and cultural exchange?

For an intellectually challenging, often assessed summer school, this is never about glorified tourism. With its highly international King’s summer student population from more than 50 countries, London connections need to be academically meaningful and relevant. Rather, it is the case that lecturers explore their subject through the prism of London in undergraduate-level courses such as London & Film, where London as a cinematic city, the divergent spaces of London, and the capital’s relationship to film genres are explored in turn. Students reflect on the relationship between London, the advent of moving images and the birth of the cinema industry; the cultural role of cinema within the capital through the strength of its institutions, among them Film London, the National Film Theatre and the British Film Institute. London is both, a ‘realist’ and ‘fantasy’ wonderland. The evolution of London (as relayed on film) as a thriving urban space marked by increased gentrification, cosmopolitanism and architectural redevelopment is considered as well as the restaging of London’s cityscape as the set for blockbuster cinema.

Inviting new audiences to King’s, Dr Alana Harris, Lecturer in Modern British History and convenor of a group looking specifically at the integration of London in the learning experience, is this year for the second time leading a King’s Summer Weekend course with The National Archives. This weekend course is for everyone who wants to expand their research into their family tree. It combines instruction on practical researching techniques with academic insight into how key historic events shape stories across generations. Those that are interested can read more about this in a recent King’s SummerTimes blog post written by Mark Pearsall, one of the course contributors from among The National Archives staff. He describes how this summer collaboration led to a podcast on the Public Record’s Office history in what is now King’s splendid Maughan Library. The city defines its history through its people’s stories. The university defines the city through its understanding of those stories and equips its citizens to continue to draw out their ideas of how the city will evolve in the future.

Alongside the large King’s summer programmes, some of the biggest in Europe, a group of cultural intelligence courses offer invite student groups from King’s university partners to explore London’s people, institution and power in innovative ways. The rationale behind these courses is powerfully simple: they use the unique dynamism of the metropolis to empower students to reflect on their own agency and take steps to be empowered in their own lives back home. Long term Londoners come into the classroom and change perceptions. New Londoners soak up inspiration and ideas and carry a bit of London’s esprit de corps with them wherever they go next. We are the city and the city is us. #everybodywelcome #summeratkings

The start of a new term

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Dr Sarah Williamson, Director of Summer Programmes

Late June. Birdsong early in the morning. Sunrise by 5 am. Lazy evenings that go on and on to the point where you realise you should have gone to bed an hour before. (But it’s light till so late!) People start dropping into conversation that they are heading off on their holidays soon. The tabloid press is obsessed with swimwear. And universities across the world are readying their halls to welcome their summer students.

Undergraduate Summer School students exploring London with their tutor

At King’s, now in its 9th year, the summer school has grown into a full portfolio of programmes. More than 1,800 people are poised to enrol and embark on what at any other time of the year would be described the start of term. They are coming from all over. The summer has always been a moment in the year for new experiences and adventures. And for cerebral beings, that can mean relocating for a few days to several weeks and flexing their intellectual muscles in the community of learning that is King’s College London.

I’d like to say that there is something for everyone, but if the Internet has taught us anything it’s that there’s some pretty select areas of interest in human society! So, I’ll simply say that there’s an impressive range of classes on offer; a range that works hard to give the world a taste of the research and learning that is the fabric of King’s everyday. A range designed to peak the interest of you out there in the ether and beckon you in to join in the discussion.

“Lifelong friendships with people from across the globe” – Louise

From Healthcare and Technology to Ancient Greek, Psychology to Politics, King’s College London is in the happy position of being a specialist-generalist research institution, so we are luckier than most when it comes to putting together options for summer students. This year’s Pre-University Summer School participants certainly think so! 600+ of them, all high school students aged 16-18, will be heading to class to explore engineering, politics, science, history and literature, and so on. That’s 600 developing minds filled with ideas and opinions and ready to shake things up. Where better to do so than at one of the best universities in the world?!

Summer Education Abroad students in Berlin

Education abroad courses are also in the portfolio. King’s has long championed studying abroad as a stalwart of an internationalised curriculum and this year we kicked off the summer study season with a course that uses Berlin as its classroom. 50 students studying for King’s degrees flew out to explore civic engagement Berlin-style, taking a journey through the social, economic and political change in Germany. A key component of this course and many of our other summer courses has been exploring ideas around personal agency and asking how people exercise their personal agency to bring about changes in their communities. Not only is this line of inquiry a direct arrow into the heart of our university motto, “In the service of society” but also heralds King’s institutional strategy around “Service” that’s due to be published in the new academic year.

Pre-University Summer School students with their course ambassador

Education is a cornerstone of personal empowerment and there’s nothing like a truly international classroom to bring the richest of learning experiences to campus. One of the fascinating areas of any discipline is understanding transnational perspectives and their application within research hypotheses. And the summer classroom, with its intensive learning format (the summer is only so long!) leads the way on active learning. Increased contact time and an emphasis on experiential learning via practitioner speakers and academic-led site visits means that learning is intense and truly flavoursome. What the short course format of a summer education course loses in extended personal reflection time, it gains in peer-to-peer debate and a fearless critical thinking-infused classroom.

So, come July 2nd, take a moment to consider what you could be learning in summers to come. At King’s we never stop exploring. And if that idea resonates with you, you know where you should be. #summeratkings #everybodywelcome

The Benefits of the IB World Student Conference

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By Dr Matt Edwards

During the summer, I had the pleasure of working with the King’s College London Summer School team on the IB World Student Conference, where 240 students from 23 different countries, all in their penultimate year of high school, explored the theme of ‘well-being in a healthy world: personal responsibility and global health’. The aim of the conference was for students to devise projects they could take back to their communities to help elicit positive change – no small task, but the IB asks students to be agents of positive change, and opportunities such as this conference are a great place to start.

The IB has been referred to as the ‘gold standard of education’; students not only have to study a Language, a Science, Maths, English and a Humanity, but also undertake Service in their community, write a 4,000 word Extended Essay on a novel piece of research and question how we know what we know in Theory of Knowledge. Anyone who has taught the IB knows just how powerful the programme is, and it is difficult not to sing its praises. The students at the IB conference were exercising many of the skills gained in their first year of the programme – one could see how they were questioning assumptions about Human Rights, the challenges of cultural relativism and how one can elicit genuine and sustainable change in one’s community. Their thoughtful and nuanced approach to the design of their projects reflected the skills they have already acquired from their IB Diploma. They were already aware of what makes projects successful having worked on a range of Service projects already back in their hometowns, and the insight shown by the students towards the shaping of meaningful projects was impressive. I know that their skills will only get stronger as all the students complete their programmes.

To paraphrase the famous quote, young people today live in exciting times – the increasingly globally-connected world gives us numerous possibilities, but at the same time, significant challenges. The conference explored some of those challenges with respect to well-being and asked the students to create tangible solutions. It asked a lot of these young people – to take responsibility, which can be difficult, even for an adult. King’s provided an excellent place to start their journey, with quality lectures on mental health in the young, the global refugee crisis and the social implications of an ageing population. Once the students had explored the problems, we moved on to solutions – further King’s lectures on social entrepreneurship and how students and staff at King’s were innovating solutions to these and other problems.

Students spent afternoons discussing various diverse topics including human rights, failure and project development, so they could move towards projects they could build themselves. The material provided by the lectures was invaluable in shaping these ideas. Over the course of the week, it was incredible to see young people from all parts of the world working together to tackle issues that were common to them all – parental pressure for success, the stigma of mental health around the world or tackling assumptions about race, gender and religion. Students made teaser videos of their projects to hone their message, and presented their project in a ‘dragon’s den’ style pitching session to members of the King’s team. It was a wonderfully fun week and there was a genuine buzz during the whole time.

Reflecting on the conference, I was thinking that these young people will soon be heading to university, voting for the first time and making decisions about their (and others) future; having a university-like experience at this age helps them to better understand what is available to them, and how they should value that opportunity and grab it with both hands. The time they spent at King’s has given them a set of skills to go and change the world for the better – and I was pleased to be a witness.

 

Academic discovery and personal development: the Pre-University Summer School

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Untitled design 2As we said farewell to the 255 high school students who joined us this summer for the Pre-University Summer School it struck us once again how dramatically the programme has grown since its inception in 2013.

Starting with 50 students in its first year the programme now looks and feels very different, but its core objective remains the same: to offer students a taste of university life in London at one of the world’s best universities, King’s. With a packed timetable of lectures, seminars, group activities and skills based workshops this two week programme allows students to experience the style and demands of undergraduate level study and to build their skills and confidence for the future. Many of them also opt to live in our halls of residence which provides a valuable cultural opportunity, as one student put it, “to understand how people from all around the world think and live”*. It is an intensive and highly rewarding experience and as we begin to plan for our 5th summer we have been reflecting on the successes of this year’s developments to inform our approach.

Diversifying our offer
Summer 2016 was when we launched a newly designed Pre University Summer School. It had a lower cost to participants than previous programmes that we had offered and had a larger range of academic course options that we’d been able to offer in the past. As a result, we were thrilled to receive 40% more students on to campus and into our learning community.

Medicine, Psychology, Law, Business Management, Politics opened King’s doors to a whole new set of students. The appetite for the health-related courses in particular was huge. Student feedback suggests that in the case of vocational subjects, where study involves a heavy investment of time and energy, the chance to ‘try out’ the subject and find out what it entails is an attractive proposition –“I came in being unsure about my future prospects, I left almost positive that I wanted to pursue psychology”.

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Developing the curriculum
We recognised that the students applying to our summer school had strong academic capabilities so we designed the 2016 programme accordingly to be as challenging and immersive as any of King’s rigorous undergraduate level programmes. An extended timetable included afternoon seminars in the daily schedule, allowing students to engage with academic literature and case studies which would feature in degree-level study. All courses also set their students two assignments, designed to mirror the undergraduate assessment patterns of the relevant subject. One class was even asked to submit their written assignment (to critically assess a referendum as a decision making tool for government) via the plagiarism software Turnitin.

Summer learning is a natural extension of King’s faculties’ teaching agenda and so summer students get access to the same active and experiential learning as year-round degree students, with hugely popular visits to laboratories, research facilities and training centres. On the Medicine course, for example, students spent a morning gaining valuable clinical skills experience at the Chantler Simulation and Interactive Learning Centre and this was cited as one of the best aspects of the course in the end of course evaluation. With 96% of students stating the programme helped them develop their academic skills and with a 10% increase to 91% of students agreeing that the overall programme met their expectations we will continue to challenge and extend our students through a dynamic and rigorous academic offer.

Enhancing our pastoral care
At its heart the Pre-University Summer School is also designed to offer an insight into university life: independent living, being a responsible adult and building positive relationships with a new and diverse group of people. As such, and with a 54% increase in the number of residential students this summer, we implemented a change within our pastoral staffing to better support students outside of the classroom. Every year King’s employs current King’s students as student ambassadors to supervise the Pre-University students due to their age (mostly under 18). However, this year we refined the staffing structure and placed a greater emphasis on the role of specialist pastoral ambassadors, who were assigned a discrete group of students within the accommodation for the duration of the programme. These ambassadors were instrumental in enhancing the feeling of a safe and secure environment and we therefore scheduled more time on arrival day for introductions, icebreakers and briefings about the programme which were all conducted within these pastoral groups. This allowed students to get to know their assigned ambassador, and vice versa, but also fostered a sense of community within these small groups. One of our returning students noticed these subtle developments, commenting that it “was amazing to see that by the end of the programme the flats were more like small families”.