The curriculum planning needs to be informed by a series of discrete yet interrelated activities. These activities were designed to ensure that the curriculum would both be informed by the research on learning design frameworks and be responsive to the particular needs of any students. It is necessary to cohere the project team around a shared vision of the bridging programme, what values would inform it, and what learning objectives might be engendered. Such activity is necessary for maintaining cohesion amongst the distributed project teams across the programme’s lifecycle. As our experience with FFA shows, it is also crucial for the resilience of the programme in times like the starts and interruptions of the pandemic years of 2020-2021. 

The following are activities that we found useful for FFA. They need to be adapted to your context but can, hopefully, provide inspiration.

Initial curriculum design workshop: representatives from the project team participate in a multi-day  curriculum design workshop to begin to map out the curriculum and identify the values and principles that would inform the pedagogy, alongside the learning objectives hoped to engender in students.

On-site design workshop: in this follow up design workshop, core project team members meet for further design activity, to cohere the beginnings of the curriculum that emerged from the curriculum design workshop, and to embed that in the practical realities of refugee education observed in practice. It is useful that this second workshop is on site or close to the proposed teaching site to best take into account those practical realities.

These initial workshops (more than two can be organised) provide a space to answer questions that might have otherwise gone unnoticed in a project lifecycle: What are our values? What do we believe in? How do we act? What do we promote? Why do we teach? Who are our (intended and likely) students?

Survey with students: surveys are administered to potential students to inform the curriculum design, to surface which courses and learning objectives were most relevant to their needs, and to ensure these were designed into the bridging programme. 

Feedback from students and tutors: the curriculum itself is never truly fixed in the sense that it was considered to be done. Rather, ongoing feedback from tutors and students as to what ‘worked’ and what could be improved informs ongoing iterations to the curriculum and course design.