Rethinking Transformative Education.

The IGP Dissertation Workshop: Research as a Community Practice.

Abstract

This case study examines the experience of a staff-student partnership to evaluate and co-design a postgraduate dissertation module. The article explores the motivations of students and staff for developing this partnership and its impact on participants' experiences in higher education. The article is based on The IGP Dissertation Workshop: Research as a Community Practice, a ChangeMakers project at University College London, where students and staff from the Institute for Global Prosperity (IGP) planned and developed a series of activities to improve research training as well as the academic and wellbeing support students get during the dissertation period. The project's reflections enriched previous conversations on module and programme improvements and the conviction that an authentic transformative education needs to be grounded in a constant horizontal dialogue between staff and students. This dialogical process enables a turn from dominant models of education where students are passive receivers of knowledge, which Paulo Freire (1970) called the "banking concept of education", and walks together towards a learning process where both students and academics teach and are taught while being co-responsible for their growth and transformation.   

The IGP promotes the idea that innovation can serve social justice and equality and that different communities have different dreams and understandings of prosperity. With this project, we asked what prosperity and innovation would look like in a student's dissertation module while reflecting on the challenges and opportunities to nourish equity and inclusion in their learning journey. The project engaged well with IGP's ethos and commitment to transdisciplinary approaches to create prosperous futures for all. 

The co-development of this case study provided a unique opportunity for the authors to explore the project experience and its influence on the continuous evaluation and improvement of the IGP dissertation module. Moreover, building on the project experiences, the article offers recommendations for co-design and co-creation partnerships to develop transformative postgraduate education.