by Dan Holliday 49

The impact of better design also has huge economic benefits. A 2010 ECOTEC consultancy article (Friedman, 2010) highlighted the costs for health, which considered previous important psychological findings concerning light and space. Health had an assessed cost of £600 million to the NHS from patients being physically and psychologically impacted by poor housing design.

The premise of my EPQ dissertation was founded on a traditional view of collaboration in which psychologists and architects would connect at the pre-design and design phase. This would enable psychologists to share their expertise at an early stage and help shape architects’ decision making. However, the insight, particularly from Bernheimer and Canter, proposed a possible alternative role for psychologists. Not only are psychologists experts on human behaviour, they are also experts in research methodology. So, perhaps their involvement could be more directed to gathering objective, quality data specifically from end users, while also ensuring the regime or culture within the building is one that promotes wellbeing, cohesion, or productivity.

Reflecting on my research, I identified three recommendations:

1. Case studies need to be more widely available to the design community - whether this is at a micro level, in thinking about factors such as light or colour, or at macro level when designing huge complexes. There are many cases studies with strong quantifiable data which show how wellbeing, productivity and crime rates can be improved with often small adjustments to design. These examples should also be discussed in academic settings with both architecture and psychology degree courses including cases studies from the other discipline.

2. Taking this a stage further, more studies, such as the Scottish student project, should be carried out. This takes the collaboration from a theoretical one into a practical application.

3. Have more collaborative events. A good example was the Conscious

Cities Conference held in London in 2015. This brought together architects, designers, engineers, neuroscientists, and psychologists. They would provide an opportunity for the two disciplines to meet and discuss the latest research and challenges and most importantly to make the connections that currently appear to be lacking.

BIO Dan Holliday is a former student who studied A Levels in Biology, Psychology, and Business Studies. He is studying Psychology at York University from September 2021.

Would a globalized curriculum be beneficial to students?

Globalization has become a ‘buzzword’ cited by various fields and education is one of the sectors interconnected considerably with it. The impact of globalization on education is supported by the popularity of international curricula: the International Baccalaureate (IB) is one of the most popular and well-known curricula adopted in more than 100 countries; Cambridge International General Secondary Education (IGCSE) is now the most popular course for 14-16 years old students worldwide. In addition, there are soaring numbers of international students around the globe. Nancy Brown’s Internationalising Early Childhood Curriculum: Foundations of Global Competence (2019) triggered me to explore the ‘Globalized curriculum’. I interpreted this term in two different ways: firstly, the curricula designed to be international (such as the IB); secondly, a curriculum that is borrowing and lending pieces of teaching methods and contents from other countries. Indeed, some national curriculums are transforming towards a global standard, as is well presented in the documentary Inside Singapore World-class Education System (SBS Dateline, 2019). It gave me a deep understanding of how globalized education is adopted in countries and enabled me to consider whether this is a definite beneficial transformation to students.

One of the most obvious trends of an internationalised curriculum is adding foreign languages to the curriculum, especially English language. Before Year 7 is the golden time to learn languages; it is innate in babies to distinguish different sounds, even the very similar ones. An experiment was conducted with babies aged 6 to 18 months and their parents in the BBC documentary Babies: Their Wonderful World (BBC Two, 2018). The result demonstrated that the innate ability to distinguish all the sounds in childhood diminishes after babies reach the age of 1 and then young children become only sensitive to the sounds in their mother tongue. The earlier children start learning languages, therefore, the better. A globalised curriculum, in most non-English speaking countries, helps children to start learning English early in schools without slowing down their first language teaching.

In addition, research shows that bilingual children have stronger brain activity (Nacamulli, 2015). When children are processing two languages, they use both hemispheres of the brain, while for monolinguals, only one hemisphere of the brain, usually the left, is used. Bilinguals’ brains are seen to have a higher density of the grey matter which contains most of the neurons and synapses and also more activity in various other brain regions when engaging a second language

(Nacamulli, 2015). The popularization of bilingual studies in a globalised curriculum in early years is bringing advantages to children in terms of development. The book Internationalising the Early Childhood Curriculum illustrates how the same topic is taught in different languages to the same group of children. The author points out that by learning the same projects in various languages, children are, in fact, learning how people speak the same thing but using different languages. Children can, thus, develop their global competence by learning knowledge in various ways. (Brown, 2019).

Understanding and respecting different cultures is important in this era, and language is now carrying meanings beyond itself. Indeed, when students are learning a language, they are also studying the cultures and history of that country. This is beneficial because children have a strong positive identity of their group by the age of three, and they begin to develop ethnic prejudice towards others by the age of six (Fitzpatrick, 2007). A curriculum that delivers culture-respecting content can strengthen children’s cultural understanding, in turn, generating positive results in changing students' behaviours towards various cultural backgrounds. The IB and Montessori curricula, for example, are encouraging inclusivity, tolerance, and respect. Northern Ireland is even developing a curriculum called ‘Respecting Differences in Early Childhood Education’, which will track children’s attitudes and behaviours over 10 to 15 years. The programme shows an optimistic result, improving children's willingness to play with others and develop empathy from a different background. The case in Northern Ireland demonstrates that culturepreference conflicts, such as not playing with those from a different background, are happening in schools and taking actions in schooling to diminish any form of cultural conflicts and inappropriate behaviours can be successful.

Due to the impact of globalisation, national curriculums are globalising as teaching methods and subject curricula are now also often shared and borrowed between nations. The National Curriculum even asks whether ‘globalisation has been driving convergence in the content of national curricula over time’ (The UK Department for Education, 2013). Science curricula, in particular, has experienced a convergence in the content over the years, according to the results shown in the TIMSS survey from 1999 to 2015 (Stacey, 2018). Countries that participated in this survey have shown a Although the curriculum is converging, the teaching and time management styles do still vary across nations. Countries are borrowing the ‘worth-teaching’ topics and adding them to the national curriculum, which makes science subjects more complete in general. There are other examples of curriculum borrowing as well: the ‘Master Approach’ in Maths is one of the most representative transformations in English Maths education. This is a methods of Maths teaching that is widely used South Asia, such as Singapore and Shanghai. These examples all exemplify how curricula are globalising, which is benefiting students worldwide as curricula become more accessible.

Students in globalised curriculums may feel rootless and unable to fully immerse into neither the home country nor the country in which they study. Globally, there are more than 10,000 international students, with the number of students in international schools increasing rapidly. As they are now being taught from more of an international perspective than ever before, they are learning more and more about the world to strengthen their global awareness. However, there can be a lack of case studies or examples relating to a globalised curriculum for specific countries. For example, A-level Economics is mostly about the UK and Europe. The schools outside the Europe that teach A-level Economics therefore cause their students to be unfamiliar with their own country’s economic performance. Overseas students and those in international schools are normally the group that experiences this due to not accessing enough knowledge about their home country in comparison to their peers.

Research shows that teachers with a better understanding of culture fostered a better classroom environment and have a better relationship with students. James Comer has pointed out that without a significant relationship, there is no significant teaching (Payne, 2008). Teachers who can set up a respectful relationship with students play a crucial role in schooling. Which means a globalised curriculum is not suitable for all students and teachers. One of the compelling points is that most international schools in non-English speaking countries tend to have a large number of native-English-speaking teachers, and these teachers could have significant

'When students are learning a language, they are also studying the cultures and history of that country'