King's College London

This proposed project is an impact evaluation of King’s cultural competency programme. It aims to gain a comprehensive understanding of its impact on students and staff across the College to shape a culturally competent King’s. This will be achieved through a mixed method approach using survey and interview data.

Defined by King’s as “The ability to see the world through the lens of others in all their diversity”, cultural competency is increasingly being recognised as an essential competent of professionalism and practice for the current and future global workforce, and is central to King’s Internationalisation 2029 Strategy.

With this mind and spearhead by Professor Funmi Olonisakin Vice President (International, Engagement & Services), the Cultural Competency Unit (CCU) was established in 2021 to address King’s strategic requirement for cultural competency development for all staff and students in order to shape a more culturally competent King’s.

This agenda involves a strategic comprehensive approach to transforming King’s internal structures from its local departmental and faculty level to its institutional strategic level by improving our teaching, learning and research environments.

Appropriately, the CCU has developed two credit-bearing College-wide undergraduate modules providing interdisciplinary cultural competency education

1) The flagship level 5 module ‘Cultural Competency: Professionalism & Practice,’ launched in September 2022.

2) The level 6 module ‘Cultural Competency: Mixing Methods, from Knowing to Doing,’ launching this September 2023.

The CCU is unique at King’s in reach, an unprecedented opportunity to both understand and improve student engagement across a wide and varied demographic. Nonetheless, we are keen to better understand whether and if so, how the CCU through its module offerings have adequately addressed/is addressing King’s strategic agenda of cultural competency.

Conduct a detailed and in-depth mixed-method review of the King’s Cultural Competency across the College

• This will include a College-wide survey to gain a broad understanding of student/staff perceptions, understanding, experience and expectation regarding the cultural competency programme.
• Additionally, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with students who have taken the cultural competency modules and/or those involved in their creation.
• We will also interview senior leadership, teaching and PS staff who have engaged in the Cultural Competency modules in different capacities, as co-creators, KEATS module developers, advisors, and programme managers. It will capture a comprehensive understanding of how these various stakeholders perceive and experience the cultural competency learning process on their academic and professional journey at Kings.

This knowledge will facilitate evidence-informed improvements to the CCU cultural competency programme and the development of a College-wide culturally competent environment.

Importantly, the solicitation of student feedback as meaningful contributions to and partners the research process undoubtedly questions hierarchies of knowledge, knowledge production and asymmetrical power relationships. This is an ethos underpinning CCU cultural competency development where knowledge is not owned by the CCU academic ‘experts’, nor is the education we provide. Rather, students are ‘co-creators’ of knowledge within participatory spaces making impactful changes and contributions to their own education.