Torn between worlds: co-creating compassionate classrooms for wellbeing and success.

This presentation discussed how to implement compassionate classrooms and how these relate to broader engagement in the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI)

Co-creating compassionate classrooms.

The impact of co-creating compassionate classrooms with international students will be explored through the student success formula: equity + wellbeing + inclusion. It is well-known that many postgraduate students are balancing professional working lives, their caring responsibilities, childcare, family and financial commitments with the demands of undertaking Higher Education. These challenges are often compounded for international students, as they are away from their usual support networks. This inequity can potentially lead to poor mental wellbeing and engagement, despite a desire and drive to partake in their courses. "Every night my kids plead with me to come back home... the call ends in tears, then I have to sit and write my assignment. It's really hard". Student lived experience testimonials like this highlight an urgent need for compassionate pedagogy and flexible course design that takes into account students' diverse learning and wellbeing needs. In this session, delegates will be able to gain insight into how capturing students protected characteristics and caring responsibilities can successfully ensure equity measures are put in place across the student journey from induction to alumni engagement. The session aims to help educators reflect on their own teaching practices and empower them to work in partnership with minority background students to nurture a sense of belonging within an inclusive learning environment

The matrimonial culture in Cairo\u27s upper middle class: Capital, collective and consumption

This thesis focuses on discourses and practices relating to the journey to matrimony in Cairo\u27s upper middle class. In other words, I will focus on how members of this social class communicate and perform their beliefs about matrimony. It is a journey to matrimony in Cairo\u27s upper-middle class, with reference to the temporalities a bride undergoes in order to actualize the new ordinary of marriage through suitor selection, matrimonial practices, and consumption patterns. I will investigate the basis on which a bride selects her suitor and the extent to which a bride and groom involve their parents (and in-group members) in the suitor selection process. I will also examine the practices in which families engage to get acquainted with one another, with reference to the social and cultural meanings of such practices. I will additionally inspect the ways in which marriage deals are made, especially in terms of the allocation of matrimonial transactions, and the extent to which the collective plays a major role in the pre-material acquisition process, that is, matrimonial consumption patterns. I worked as an intern at an interior designer firm in Heliopolis, Cairo, where I met seven couples in the pre-marital material acquisition phase. My ethnographic toolkit is based primarily on un-structured interviews with the brides, supported by observation notes of the preliminary meeting with the interior designer, the bridal home furnishings, and the kitchen utensils shopping. Through this ethnography of the particular, I was able to observe that members of the same social class react differently to matrimony; due to their subjective life experiences. I classified the reactions to matrimony into three typologies. However, none of the nuances undermine the logic of the habitus as class motivated. The different reactions to matrimony show the way through which individuals create a sense of individuality in relation to the structuring structures into which they were born and raised. The couples seem to constitute their identities through the process of hailing in social interactions. In other words, the typologies suggested in this research show that none of the couples initiated a radical change, but, rather, engaged in adaptive strategies

Equity, diversit[y], inclusion: exciting first steps of a winding journey.

This presentation formed part of the "Inclusive Curriculum Design and Delivery" strand of the 2022 Pharmacist Education Summit. In the presentation, the author reflects on the results of working with pharmacy students at Robert Gordon University (RGU), in terms of aiming to improve the student experience and quality of teaching from an equality/equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) perspective

Global citizenship framework (GCF): co-creating a culture of equity and inclusion through celebrating diversity.

With increasingly international and wonderfully diverse cohorts in our universities, it's now more vital than ever that we nurture equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) - alongside sustainability and global citizenship, not in isolation. Our graduates need to be prepared for a world of work where diversity of thought and celebration of culture brings us together to solve wider societal inequities. The Global Citizenship Framework (GCF) was co-designed, piloted, implemented and evaluated with a range of pharmacy students - undergraduate, postgraduate, home and international - to embed EDI and the UNSDGs in healthcare curricula. GCF encompasses 3 Cs – Connect (connecting learners with community), Create (co-creating diverse curricula) and Celebrate! (celebrating personal, professional and global identity). The rationale behind this framework is to raise awareness of inequalities aligned to the UN SDGs, and to help foster students' sense of belonging to each other, their course and profession. The framework provides educators and learners with a flexible and adaptable structure to focus efforts within and beyond the classroom. The framework aims to help nurture the skills, values and compassionate thinking that are required, if EDI and sustainability are to be part of our day-to-day culture and not just a tokenistic add on. The branches of the framework and practical examples of each - such as alumni mentoring programme, together with impact testimonials - will be shared with delegates, who will also be given the opportunity to reflect on their own approaches to creating inclusive communities for empowered learning

Global citizenship: co-creating a culture of EDI-S in course design and delivery.

This presentation presents the context and rationale behind the development of a Global Citizenship Framework, to support equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in pharmacy education

Where did your EDI journey begin? [Blog post]

In this blog post, Leila Neshat Mokadem reflects on her engagement with equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) as part of her teaching practice

Global citizenship: let's connect, create, celebrate!

A novel teaching framework – The Global Citizenship Framework (GCF) - was designed in partnership with students and alumni to embed EDI and sustainability in healthcare curricula. The rationale for this was in response to feedback about student and staff lived experiences, and HE sector recommendations and wider societal calls to de-colonise curricula, tackle inequalities and nurture a sense of belonging amongst minority background students. The framework facilitates a holistic approach to inclusive curricula design and delivery, and encompasses 3 Cs – Connect (connecting learners with community), Create (co-creating diverse curricula) and Celebrate! (celebrating personal and global identity). The rationale behind this framework is to raise awareness of inequalities aligned to the UN SDGs and to help nurture students' sense of belonging to their course and future profession. Through a collaboration with the University Race Equality champion, module leaders and student partners, innovative Global Citizenship seminars exploring personal and professional identity, protected characteristics, UN Sustainability Development Goals and meeting the needs of diverse populations have been designed, piloted, delivered and evaluated at undergrad and postgraduate level within the School of Pharmacy and Life Sciences. Impact testimonials and evaluation of student learning shows an overwhelming positive impact, both in terms of sense of belonging and the beginnings of emerging as future global citizens. This session aims to provide delegates with: 1) insights into EDI challenges faced by minority background students; 2) the opportunity for delegates to reflect on their own curricula within and beyond the classroom; and 3) the chance to explore how they can adapt this flexible and easy-to-use framework within their own disciplines

Deep Learning for UAV Imagery Segmentation: The Detection of Elymus Athericus Spread in The Hallig Nordstrandischmoor

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesIt has been observed that Athyrics Elymus engulfs smaller species in low marsh habitats in different areas of Europe. To obtain automated segmentation of the Athurics Elymus in Hallig Nordstrandischmoor, a deep learning model based on the transfer learning technique presented in the VGG16 was implemented with a U-Net deep learning architecture and the data augmentation algorithm. In conclusion, the final results were good, and had been grouped into three levels of accuracy. These groups are also characterized by varying levels of diversity in their environments. The wildrye covers the majority of these single images, with a low percentage of other habitats in the first group with an accuracy greater than 96%. In the second group, the accuracy ranged between 91-95%, which included more elements of variation; however, wildrye was still included. Moreover, the third group, with an accuracy rate between 80-90%, did not seem to include wildrye very often, while at the same time including elements not found in the training dataset, such as surface water and dirt roads. Due to this, time and effort are significantly reduced while high accuracy is achieved