At IDS, our teaching and support systems are designed to enable students to give their best and to be well equipped to work at the forefront of international development.
Modules explore decolonising perspectives
In line with our aim to bring a decolonising agenda into teaching, activists and speakers with grounded experience shared reflections with students on ‘local’ and ‘global’ realities, perspectives on social change and participated in discussions relating aid interventions to endogenous process of change.
One IDS fellow commented: ‘I think the opportunity to use the decolonial funds to broaden perspectives we share in our teaching worked well. A step further would be to also bring more decolonial theories into our sessions.’
Practical preparation for development careers
In the words of a recent external examiner commenting on the IDS experience: ‘Students receive excellent training for both further research and applied practice in the field of international development.’
Two ways we do this, in addition to our conventional master’s degree teaching, are: Skills week dedicated to sharing and developing professional skills among the whole IDS community; and Methods week devoted to examining different methodologies for qualitative and quantitative research, and other tools.
Mentoring is another practical support and a rewarding experience for students and alumni alike. In 2022, we added new dimensions to our alumni network mentoring programme:
- Matched mentoring – The alumni relations office matches pairs twice yearly for traditional one-to-one mentoring. This started in November 2022, and round two matching is under way. Initial feedback is positive.
- Group mentoring – One mentor works with several mentees at once in a group. A trial of this began in February 2023 with former student Roy Trivedy as our first Group Mentor. Feedback on this has been overwhelmingly positive
In recognition of the physical and mental health impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on our students, we also launched a Reasonable Adjustment system that supports staff to identify students’ specific needs.
Scholarships campaign
Studying at IDS with inspirational peers from around the world means our graduates leave ready to make a difference in their home countries. But many individuals face extremely high barriers to such international postgraduate study opportunities.
IDS Graduate Scholarships enable talented and committed individuals from low- or lower middle- income countries to come and study with us. Already, 22 students have enjoyed our scholarships. This year we launched a campaign to support another ten Graduate Scholarships.
Three leaders in international development have generously supported the Scholarship Campaign: Dudley Seers, the founding Director of IDS; Sir Hans Singer, a development economist renowned for work on trade and developing countries; and Sir Richard Jolly, the second Director of IDS and an ongoing, valued contributor to our work.
Thanks to their support, we are 60 per cent of the way towards our target – but we need to do more.
For more information about how you can help, visit www.ids.ac.uk/scholarships