SDG 4 aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Browse books and journal articles relating to this SDG below and find out more on the UN Sustainable Development Goals website.
Goal 4: Quality Education
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 2,346 items
This article explores the transformative potential of improvisational techniques in reshaping interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (ITD) learning environments offering art-based exercises and tools for this work. By integrating active research with improvisational methods from theatre and music, we propose a pedagogical shift that transcends traditional academic roles and disciplinary boundaries, fostering a culture of co-creation, mutual learning and innovation. This approach aims to tackle the inherent challenges of ITD research and thus enhance ITD research groups’ ability to address complex societal ‘Grand Challenges’. We argue that improvisation within both ITD research and educational communities serves as a crucial catalyst for nurturing trust, embracing failure as a growth opportunity, and redefining success. Embodied practices based on improvisation help bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical applications, enabling academics to navigate the complexities of collaboration and engage in shared learning experiences. This article introduces techniques from improvisational theatre aimed at fostering trust and collaboration in transdisciplinary research and educational settings. Drawing on over 25 years of combined research experience, we show how these tools enhance mutual understanding and collective problem-solving among students and research teams. Ultimately, we advocate integrating conventional knowledge delivery models with a framework characterised by regenerative practices, care and explorative processes. This integrated approach would offer new opportunities for addressing the intertwined wicked problems our world faces today, promoting a more inclusive, participatory and creatively fulfilling academic community.
Introduction:
Sexual and reproductive health (SRH) is an important global health issue linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Adolescents in refugee settings face specific SRH needs and risks, and limited access to needed services. This research, therefore, aimed to develop an understanding of SRH needs of, and risks to, adolescent refugees, to inform adolescent sexual and reproductive health policies and programmes.
Methodology:
The study employed qualitative approaches. Seventeen in-depth interviews were conducted with adolescent refugees and nine key informant interviews with stakeholders, including representatives from NGOs, health facility workers and refugee leaders. We performed content and thematic analysis drawing on the ecological systems theory framework.
Findings:
Reproductive health issues presented by adolescent refugees included menstruation supplies, reproductive health education and contraception. Participants reported several reproductive health risk factors that include risky sexual relationships, child abuse in homes, early marriage, teenage pregnancies and forced marriage, and sexual and gender-based violence.
Conclusion:
The findings highlight significant gaps in adolescent refugees’ knowledge and access to SRH services. These gaps are shaped by cultural norms, limited service availability, and lack of targeted SRH education for young people in refugee settings.
Recommendation:
Targeted training is vital to guaranteeing efficient delivery of SRH services; with humanitarian organisations ensuring their personnel is appropriately trained to support adolescent refugees and their SRH needs. Culturally appropriate services are required to ensure greater buy-in and build trusting relationships with the population.
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) has been at the forefront of feminist struggles for equality; however, movements to prevent VAWG have been depoliticised, particularly by Western voices, with processes rooted in colonialism and patriarchy. Despite a growing movement to decolonise violence prevention and centre voices and experiences of the Global South, many continue to navigate power-imbalanced partnerships. To dismantle power imbalances within North–South and South–South collaborations, it is necessary to reflect on positionalities and ‘power within’, explore deep structures of partnership models, technical assistance and funding mechanisms, and collectively harness the ‘power to’ create systems promoting trust, mutual learning and accountability.
We conducted a qualitative retrospective and prospective, multi-site case study to generate evidence on effective technical assistance and partnership models for adapting and scaling VAWG prevention programmes and contribute to discussions on feminist funding approaches and devolution of funder power. We examined partnership models and power dynamics among funders, programme designers and implementers involved in adapting Program H (Lebanon), Take Back the Tech Campaign (Mexico), Safetipin (South Africa), Legal Promoters Training and Community Care Model (Cape Verde) and Transforming Masculinities (Nigeria). This provocation builds upon findings from this research by offering first-person reflections from some members of the study team, Study Advisory Board and study participants. Authors respond to provocative statements by drawing upon experiences from this study and other projects for how funders, programme implementers and researchers can better work together to accelerate efforts to achieve social and gender justice within and beyond the violence prevention field.
This chapter explores the law on abortion and contraception in the UK through a feminist lens, considering ethical perspectives on reproductive autonomy and critiques of the current law from this viewpoint. This chapter introduces two key abortion law reform debates: decriminalisation, in light of increasing investigations and prosecutions of suspected illegal abortions; and abortion on the grounds on fetal disability, following recent legal challenges to this ground. Perspectives from disability rights advocates are introduced here to highlight the discriminatory nature of the law. Finally, this chapter introduces the reproductive justice framework – a concept developed by Black women in the US context – and applies it as a critique of court-ordered abortion and contraceptive decisions for people with intellectual disabilities.
This chapter explores the relevance of ethnicity, sexuality, and age in the law of assisted reproduction and infertility. We consider the extent to which the law engages with the interests of individuals of different ethnicities, LGBTQI+ individuals and families, and different age groups. The impact of this, including the symbolic messages that the law communicates through to the effect that clinical practice has on families undergoing treatment, can be felt at several levels. With this in mind, this chapter explores the ways in which the voices of non-dominant groups become marginalised in discourses surrounding assisted reproductive technologies and how we can foreground a more diverse range of voices in relation to this.
This chapter is concerned with medical decision-making for, with, and by mature children. Through a combination of academic discourse absent from the dominant literature and a case study from fiction (The Children Act by Ian McEwan), this chapter conducts a fresh exploration of ethical dilemmas that arise in child medical law. This chapter discusses the incremental changes in interpretation and application of the Gillick test, sections 2(1) and 3(1) of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, and section 8 of the Family Law Reform Act 1969 to understand minors’ power to consent and the much more limited power to refuse.
Clinical research is the controlled experimentation of drugs, devices, and procedures tested on human participants. Ethics of clinical research is the systematic investigation of the ethical issues that arise from this practice. The ethical knot at the centre of clinical research hinges on the question of how to balance the benefits for future patients with the burdens and risk for current participants. The chapter first discusses the roots and foundations of clinical research ethics through a historically informed outlook. We then present two key and interrelated concepts in research ethics: clinical equipoise and therapeutic misconception. Second, the chapter discusses the emergence of adaptive and platform trials in the COVID-19 pandemic and unpacks the ethical and epistemological implications of adaptive trials for the concepts of clinical equipoise, and therapeutic misconception, the long-standing idea in clinical research that we should strive to keep the aims of research and the aims of care as clearly separate.
Confidentiality, the protecting of patient information to keep it private, is a key facet of good healthcare that is recognised by the law. Health data is highly sensitive and is protected by the law surrounding data protection as well as the individual right to privacy. However, confidentiality is not always absolute. Sometimes patient information can, or must, be shared where necessary to protect the public interest or the patient themselves. Deciding when disclosure is both lawful and the right thing to do is challenging for health professionals. This chapter explores two case studies that exemplify the importance of confidentiality and the complex dilemmas it can present: safeguarding (adults and children) and abortion-reporting requirements.
