Category Archives: Creative Education

Journeys of the mind: summer 2023 at King’s College London

Posted on by

Dr Sarah Williamson is Executive Director of Summer Programmes at King’s College London.

People | King's People | King's College London

Escape through travel works…Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. 

The Beach, A. Garland 

Travel is often key to finding proper time away from the endless rush of everyday busy lives. Although travel in the mind is frequently facilitated by that of the body, physical removal of oneself from one place to another is a wonderful, but not intrinsic component of travel of the mind, as we all discovered through pandemic lockdowns.

This week, I welcome many who have travelled physically to enrol in a summer course King’s College London. But many others too who have only travelled a few yards to join our learning community as visiting summer students. Together we will all be taking our minds on a journey. New ideas, new friends, new architecture. Not to mention new lunch options, new nights out and new memories to be made.

Some of those summer students joining King’s today made an important journey before they applied to study with us. To come to this country as a refugee or forced migrant from war and trauma. Our scholarships in partnership with @UNHCR are especially for those students now living in England and looking for opportunities to take an academic course and become part of a learning community.  

Others coming later in the month will join us in England due to King’s relationship with  Aare Afe Babalola, the Nigerian lawyer and philanthropist who has also recently made a visionary gift to establish a new centre for transnational education to enable talented young Africans to make an ever-greater impact on the world on the foundations of access to stellar higher education. 

Summer schools need all the perspectives they can gather in order to be the most interesting, challenging academic ride into mind expansion. Over the coming weeks, summer students can expect to find their usual points of reference challenged as our large, hugely diverse student group comes together to learn in classrooms and out and about in London. Filling up mind and body with new knowledge, understanding ideas and ambitions before heading onwards to the next stop of their life journey after the summer.

Tour of Strand Aldwych: A work in progress

The home of Summer Programmes. Picture: London Architecture Diary

 Diversity finds a particular space to flourish in the short courses of summer programming. Our courses fit into and around people’s wider lives. There is something for everyone with courses for learners from 16 to 80 (and beyond! there is no upper age limit!) 12,000+ learners from 85 countries have studied with King’s Summer Programmes over the last few years. ​ Some are at the start of the good stuff in their education journey; others are nurturing a life-long interest. Some spend months with us; others spend a weekend. Many are enriching consolidated professional experience; others are only just deciding on careers.​ The programmes we teach marry market interest to King’s specialist knowledge and produce a programme that is the right content, for the right people, at the right time and place (- ​If there is not already something for you, tell us and we will build it!)

These days King’s surroundings are a haven right in the beating heart of the city. The newly pedestrianised Strand is a shady garden, putting peace and a space for reflection back where once a busy highway ran. Some years ago, Londoners started reclaiming public spaces from the machinery – both mechanic and bureaucratic – of the city and with that has come a common realisation of the vitality that quiet human spaces bring to a metropolis. Quiet powerhouses of thought and being, which are fundamental in any journey of the mind to new realisations and therefore growth.

Welcome to all who start their classes this week.
Thank you for giving us this chance to both teach you and learn alongside and from you.
We feel fortunate that you are now part of our lives as we are part of yours.
A precious gift indeed. 

Summer Programmes shares expertise at international education conferences

Posted on by

For the first time in years, international educators have come together in person at the key global conferences in Asia and the US this spring. King’s College London has a strong voice in these fora in the areas for summer schools and short-term international programming.

APAIE (Asia-Pacific Association for International Education), The Forum on Education Abroad and EAIE (European Association for International Education) are world-shaping international education network-led conferences and gatherings. We are pleased to report that following events by these three international organisations, the future of international education once again feels more open, fluid and rich in opportunity.

From left: Gorka Hernandez and Ben Jones at the Asia-Pacific Association for International Education conference in Bangkok.

Interacting with hundreds of participants, highly experienced teacher, Gorka Hernandez Ortiz, Programme Development Manager, and Ben Jones, Programme Developer, presented papers and held talks at APAIE’s conference in Bangkok on sustainabilities and the continuing case for short term mobility, in addition to focusing their practice-led contributions around Summer Programmes’ art-education based approach to pre-departure programming.

From left: Dr Alexander Heinz, Melissa Torres and Fahema Ettoubi at The Forum on Education Abroad conference in Seattle.

Dr Heinz subsequently joined a seminal meeting of the joint leadership for EAIE in Rotterdam in his elected role of Chair of the EAIE Summer Schools Expert Community, to shape decisions on restructuring the 24-year-old global network for a post-pandemic world. Talks on balancing the organisation’s size and shape with its CPD training responsibilities and industry’s need for networking were the principal areas of discussion and are strong areas of interest to Summer Programmes. The spring term concluded with the largest conference for international education globally, NAFSA in Washington DC. Dr Heinz, E-Learning Dean at NAFSA: Association of International Educators, gave a 15 minute interview to give testimony to the volunteer spirit of this remarkable organisation in its 75th year.

From left: Gorka Hernandez and Dr Alexander Heinz at the NAFSA conference in Washington DC.

You can find out more about each of the conferences here:

Summer Education and Practice: Emancipatory Pedagogy using Google

Posted on by

Christoffer Guldberg recently finished his dual PhD from King’s College London and the University of São Paulo with a thesis on police-violence, authoritarianism and resistance in Brazil. He has worked at the King’s Summer Society skills programme and as an educator in the UK, Brazil, Denmark and Portugal, and is a member of the editorial collective of the Decolonising the Curriculum Blog: Comfortably Uncomfortable at the School of social Science and Public Policy (SSPP).

In this short text, I’d like to build on a recently published article from my work as an educator in Brazil and at King’s College London’s Summer Society skills programme (Guldberg 2022) providing an innovative and practical way that educators can go beyond decolonising the curriculum and bring decolonisation into the  very teaching situation. I found the method being particularly well-suited to engage students and prepare King’s highly diverse, international Pre-University and Undergraduate Summer School cohorts for the critical thinking skills that they will need throughout their academic trajectories and beyond.

I am founding my practice in two findings of emancipatory pedagogy and de-colonial theory, namely that 1) the concepts and institutions that shape our lives, whether they be universities, academic disciplines, or criminal law, are shaped by colonialism and racism, and 2) to be emancipatory education needs to start from the lived experience of the student to avoid recreating social and racial hierarchies implicit in the “banking model of pedagogy”, instead allowing for teachers to be co-creators of knowledge, following Paulo Freire’s method for education (Freire 1970).

I develop Freire further and use Googles Images and Maps to allow students to explore how concepts such as ‘international development’, ‘drug trafficker’, the ‘United Kingdom’, or ‘Brazil’ are shaped by colonial imaginaries and practices that feed into the algorithms of search engines, social media, and other forms of artificial intelligence.

In practice, this can take the form of asking students to do a Google Image search for any concept, including the above, and analyse the results keeping in mind de-colonial and critical theories of race, gender and international relations. As an example, the results for international development clearly demarcate a difference along lines of geography, race, gender and age between the beneficiaries of development and those “experts” in Western universities, NGO’s and development agencies, who – not unlike the teacher of the banking model of education – bring development to the Global South. Similarly, a search for former colonies such as Kenya and Tanzania reveals striking differences to the way the former colonising country is portrayed, with the former being largely portrayed as objects of tourist consumption and places of political instability, and the latter portraying political institutions that have historically benefitted from colonialism. This can provide a ground for discussion both of how the algorithm works, including the different results according to geographic location, and the ways in which the mass of searches and clicks, along with choices of content creators, create an unequal world, which reflects Western-centric notions of development as a linear, homogenous process.

In decolonising the classroom, this method gives students important tools for critical thinking, which benefit them in their academic trajectories, particularly how to think critically about concepts, something that is of course a key part of de-colonial thought and critical pedagogy.

 

 

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

Posted on by

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.

Shaping the new era: conference season

Posted on by

Alexander HeinzMatt Doherty

Throughout this autumn conference season the emergence of a new era in international education is increasingly visible, with colleagues globally dedicating their energy to developing education strategies for the future. King’s College London was prominently represented at the EAIE Community Exchange 2021. Dr Alexander Heinz, Co-Chair Summer Executive at King’s and Chair of the EAIE Expert Community for Summer Schools, hosted a roundtable on the marketing of summer schools and was a Spotlight session panellist discussing the para-Covid period. He also led the community in a very well attended campfire event on the future of short-term programming.

Later this month, Dr Heinz will be joined by Matt Doherty, Programme Developer at King’s Summer Programmes, to deliver a virtual presentation at the Global Inclusion Conference 2021 in Atlanta. They will be speaking about advancing inclusion through short term international programmes, making the case that short term programmes allow for creative ways of ensuring accessibility and learning about personal agency and responsibility for wider communities.

The Summer Programmes team is looking forward to continuing our conversations and partnerships with like-minded colleagues and organisations around the world as the year continues.

Summertime for new thinking

Posted on by

Dr Sarah Williamson is Executive Director of King’s Summer Programmes.

Sarah Williamson

What a time we have all experienced in the past 18 months. The extent to which Covid-19 has changed our personal and professional lives is nothing short of a revelation.

Daily activities, including a wider range of jobs that anyone would have initially thought possible, have all been taking place online. We have gone from being rooted in our homes via national lockdowns to leaping into new ways of living via our electronic devices. Now, as we begin our second year of online summer teaching we are taking a moment to reflect on how far the world has come despite being forced to stand still geographically.

When Covid-19 began to affect our lives, we decided very early on that we would not let it curtail our summer learning programmes and summoned up all our ideas and energy to launch the King’s Summer Online programmes. The Summer team worked tirelessly to find the best ways to connect with you all via virtual means last year and this year they have taken those good beginnings and enhanced each aspect further. Digital inequalities have become a pronounced strand to our often uneven world and here at King’s Summer it has become an important consideration for our thinking and research plans. But as our lives have progressed, we have all experienced first hand some of the incredible value and ability that moving in an online education sphere enables and it is now clear that our future educational experiences will be all the better for seizing the opportunity to make use of the best of e-learning alongside the best of face-to-face learning. Why choose, when we can work a bit harder and have the best of both worlds?

Of course we all wish that we could come together in this great city of London – the original think space! – and share its dynamism and beauty in real life, but we are certain that though our connection this year may be digital, there is nothing virtual about the very real experience you will have with King’s this summer. And as soon as we all can, we want to welcome you in person to campus. #summerisreallife #summeristheonlyseason

Thought leadership online

Posted on by

Connecting with other thought leaders from the field of international education has never been more important. Though attending conferences in person has not been possible this academic year, our Summer Education Programme continues to engage with and have influence on best practice in short course learning and teaching globally. 

A virtual conference

Michael Salmon, Associate Director – Curriculum Renewal, spoke at the Higher School of Economics/Coursera eStars Conference in December 2020, sharing his thoughts on Retaining the human factor in the move to online international education. The question of how international education functions online – whether in terms of student experience, pedagogy, cultural exchange or various other aspects – is one that we continue to take a great deal of interest in as we look to create sustainable, innovative online programming for the long-term.

Michael continued exploring this theme at the British Council International Education Virtual Festival in January 2021, delivering a paper titled Virtually abroad: a useful conception for short-term mobility? This well-received session formed part of a wider workshop on innovation within UK higher education as a response to the pandemic.

In March, Summer Programmes will be hosting the 3rd TNE Hub Symposium, and we are looking forward to connecting with researchers and practitioners in transnational education. Dr Alexander Heinz, Chair of King’s Summer Executive and Hannah Bond, Associate Director – Learning & Teaching, will be speaking on the topic of Creating effective learning communities in TNE.  

Also in March, Dr Heinz has been appointed to the honorary role of e-Learning Dean for an expert course on Short Term Programming at NAFSA: Association of International Educators. 

As the world slowly emerges from the COVID pandemic, exciting new perspectives for international educators are coming into sight. We as a sector will need to be prepared. 

Summer Teaching: A Professional Crossroads

Posted on by

Stefan Mandelbaum

Dr Stefan Mandelbaum taught International Commercial Law on King’s Undergraduate Summer School in 2012 and 2013. He is now a Senior Lecturer in International Law at Anglia Ruskin University and a member of the Senate at his institution. 

Teaching for King’s Summer Programmes as a doctoral researcher turned out to be an important crossroad in my academic career. Coming from a strong legal-philosophical background and responding to a 2012 call from the Summer School for module suggestions, I initially proposed a course on “dispute settlement in international investment law”, simply because my doctoral work already focused on this subject matter. During the interview, Summer Programmes put to me that a course on International Commercial Law would give me the opportunity to merge different aspects of international law into one course. While the course development and delivery turned out to be as challenging as preparing a fairly new subject for HE teaching naturally is, the course, with me as a lead tutor in 2012 and 2013, eventually ranked among the most popular courses in the Summer School curriculum. The in-class, organisational and pedagogic challenges which only a summer course poses, together with being involved in considering an audience even before their application  became experiences which have shaped my lecturing style ever since. In the following, I would like to give two examples of the impact my summer school teaching had on my career as a teacher in HE, one concerning the acquired pedagogic skills when dealing with an array of educational and cultural backgrounds in class, the other addressing the direct link between the subject of teaching and my current position.

Peer learning

In both years, the summer module on International Commercial Law cohort consisted of students of very different backgrounds, ranging from first year UG students and Masters students of various subjects to judges and business people. Overcoming this welcomed but also challenging mix of sometimes very different abilities led me to develop an in-class tutoring scheme in which I prescribed an overall task (e.g. case study, moot problem) for all students while appointing the most senior class members as group leaders. This method enabled a study atmosphere where the junior class mates were learning from me and their peers whilst the more advanced students were recognized as leaders and had to learn how to teach what they already knew. While this model of hierarchical participation originated in the diverse composition of an international summer school class, it developed over time into a critical pedagogic method which I have continued using ever since. From good student feedback in my previous years to a 100 percent satisfaction rate in both my King’s summer courses, the facilitation of such an integrative learning environment had led my last semester’s course on “International Commercial Arbitration” to be among the 10 top-scoring classes out of 2.500 at my present institution, Anglia Ruskin University.

Shaping my career

Learning how to cater for the varying abilities and expectations of summer school participants, however, is only one of the pedagogic upshots for my career. The subject of “International Commercial Law”, rather peripheral at the time to my research expertise, has been pivotal in getting the lectureship that I am holding now. My teaching orbits not so much the very specific doctoral topic I was working on (the market for such a position is rather thin) and my first appointment outside King’s College London as well as the leeway to my permanent post now was via a “visiting lectureship” on “Transnational Commercial Law”. I can honestly say that if it would not have been for King’s decision to opt for the ‘commercial side’ of international affairs, I would not teach and do research in this field, and I would not be able to now expand my research collaborations to the business aspects of international sports law or management studies, both of which emerging into cutting edge fields of scholarship.

EAIE 2019 in Helsinki: Summer as a Creative Space

Posted on by

In the coming week, members of King’s Summer Programmes team will be attending the EAIE Annual Conference in Helsinki. In a schedule packed with encounters with partners new and old, King’s Summer Education Programme will form a key part of the wider conference programme.

Dr Alexander Heinz, Associate Director (Research & Innovation), will be speaking on summer schools as a creative space for education; sharing a platform with Nita Kapoor, Director of the University of Oslo Summer School, and Jason Kinnear, Assistant Dean for Study Abroad at UNC Chapel Hill.

As Vice-Chair of the EAIE Summer Schools Expert Community, Dr Heinz will speak at and co-host a summer school health clinic, as well as a large reception for sector professionals.  He will also lead a campfire session for peers from around the world.Together with Lorraine Ishmael-Byers, King’s Associate Director for Disability Support and Inclusion, Dr Heinz endeavours to whet the appetite of other institutions to follow into the footsteps of Dialogues on Disability, a sector-leading programme by King’s, the University of Delhi, Humboldt-University, the Autonomous University of Mexico and others, and to encourage colleagues to think beyond national boundaries about mobility for and policy discussions among disabled students.

Fahema Ettoubi, Academic Services Manager, and Emma Carlile, Assistant Programme Development Manager, will attend EAIE for the first time and will be available to meet with partners and members of the wider international education community.  Both look forward to showcasing King’s Summer Programmes portfolio to current partners but also new institutions, enabling us to stand out from the crowd.

Ten Years of Summer at King’s: A Pivotal Space

Posted on by

Professor Soelve I. Curdts, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, and Visiting Lecturer at King’s in July 2010, reflects on the value of transitionality.

Incredibly, almost a decade has passed since I taught at King’s Undergraduate Summer School in 2010. The experience turned out to be pivotal in ways I could not have foreseen at the time, and its layers grow more multifarious with each passing year. In fact, such layering over time is one of the things we – hopefully – share with our students beyond the subjects we happen to be teaching.

Arrivals and Departures

For me, 2010-2011 was a time of transition. I had studied and taught in Germany, France, and the United States, and was in the process of contemplating where to go next, both literally and metaphorically. The world was all before me – a prospect that filled me with a sense of uncertainty, to be sure, but also of exhilaration. The latter was fostered both by London as a pivotal space, and by the Summer School at King’s College London as a place that brought together scholars, teachers, and students who reflected on (their) transitionality in intellectually stimulating and productive ways. In a world where we increasingly discover states of transition as the norm they have perhaps always been, such reflection, which the summer school at King’s College London is uniquely positioned to enable by creating rare constellations of international students and teachers, is of crucial significance. In my own teaching and scholarship, I try to sustain a sense of those very moments of transition which, precisely as they claim neither origin nor end point, are constitutive of thought.

“The summer school offered a privileged space, where students could explore areas of inquiry they would not otherwise have engaged in.” Soelve Curdts

Thinking between arrivals and departures happened quite literally that summer at King’s, as a community of scholars and students gathered for a brief period of time. Our students came from—and would go back to—not only different parts of the world, but often entirely different fields of study. In this, too, the summer school offered a privileged space, where students could explore areas of inquiry they would not otherwise have engaged in. I would like to think that the occasional business student reading a work of literature, or the English major tackling the intricacies of a physics problem can make – has made – some kind of difference.

King’s College London welcomed me (back) to Europe after a long absence with a preciously open and heterogeneous vibrancy which spoke – to quote one of the poets I taught there – of something evermore about to be.