Category / Research themes

Equitable Partnerships in Global Health Research

conferences, international

Today is the first day of the Global Consortium for Public Health Research (GCPHR) 4th Annual Conference here at the University of Huddersfield.  This two-day Conference (July 6-7) has as its theme ‘Equitable Partnerships in Global Health Research’.  It brings together academics based in Ghana, the UK, Nepal, India, and Finland.  This 4th conference has a mixture of invited speakers, roundtable discussions, poster presentations and keynote speeches.

The conference was originally the brainchild of Prof. Padam Simkhada, who recently moved from the University of Huddersfield to the University of Chester.  The main organisers at the University of Huddersfield are Dr. Rajeeb Kumar Sah, Dr. Bibha Simkhada and Dr. Zoe Darwin.  Bournemouth University is represented in Huddersfield by Dr. Pramod Regmi and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

New Nepal-based paper published last week

international, open access, Publishing, Training, writing

Last week saw the publication of the latest article on Nepal by a BU academic.  This paper ‘Bridging The Skills Gap: Market-Relevant Skill Development Programmes in Nepal’s Health Sector‘ appeared in the Journal of Technical Education and Training [1].  This article explores the potential new diploma-level courses in the health sector in Nepal.

A qualitative research design was employed to identify new areas. Participants were selected based on their experiences in the health sector in both Nepal and abroad. A total of 25 in-depth interviews, and two interactive meeting events were conducted, and thematically analyzed. The health courses identified for diploma level development included: nursing, general medicine, Ayurveda, food science, and water, sanitation and hygiene, physiotherapy and rehabilitation, laboratory, health education and health promotion, medical records and data, health and social care, and radiotherapy. Courses identified as being in higher demand in Nepal and were: renal dialysis, radiotherapy, prosthetics and orthotics, audiology and language therapy, transfusion and blood banking, medical transcript, geriatric care, school nurse, palliative care, telemedicine and telehealth, cancer care, OT/anesthesia assistant, IVF and reproductive medicine, Panchkarma, herbs and shrubs, WASH and hospital hygienist, occupational therapy, health and social care, and data and medical records. 

The journal, based in Malaysia, is open-access and hence freely available to read for anyone with internet access.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

 

 

Reference:

  1. Acharya, D., Devkota, B., Adhikari, E.R., van Teijlingen, E.R., Thapa, K.B. (2026) Bridging The Skills Gap: Market-Relevant Skill Development Programmes in Nepal’s Health Sector, Journal of Technical Education and Training, 18(1):118-132.

  

Book edited by BU academics published

Publishing, writing

Last month Routledge published an edited volume ‘Criminology, Leisure and Sport Interdisciplinary Perspectives‘ in its series Advance in Leisure Studies.  This new book is edited by two Bournemouth University’s (BU) Social Scientists Mark Berry and Jayne Caudwell.  This edited collection takes a critical look at how leisure and sport intersect with crime and harm. It brings together leading scholars in criminology, sociology, sport science, social work and psychology, it shows how recreational and elite sporting spaces can foster prosocial development but also generate significant social inequalities and injustices.  Through diverse empirical cases – including sexual abuse in sport, environmental harms at mega-events, performance enhancing drugs, athlete criminality, organised crime, deviant fandom, policing, rehabilitation and desistance – the book provides readers with an analytically rich framework for understanding sport and leisure as dynamic areas where power, inequality, harm and social transformation converge. The book’s interdisciplinary approach offers insights into these current issues in society.

Several of this interesting book’s chapters are co-authored by BU academics: including Orlanda Harvey, Paul Fairbairn, Lucy Sheppard-Marks, and Edwin van Teijlingen.

 

Reference:

Berry, M., Berry, C., Caudwell, J. (eds). Criminology, Leisure and Sport Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Publication Date: 06/2026

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781032942018

BU students’ publishing success

BRIAN, NHS, PG research, Publishing, Women's Academic Network, writing

This week the international Open Access journal PLOS One published a paper co-written by BU staff and students.  The paper is called ‘Antenatal education for labour and postpartum pain: A scoping review of content, delivery approaches, evidence gaps, and lived experiences‘ [1].  This scoping review involves two M.Res students and one Ph.D. student and two of these students were originally BU undergraduate students.
Congratulations!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Reference:
  1. Sloyan E, Leddy E, Clark C, Dufour S, Harper R, Dunford A, Elam, Öl. (2026) Antenatal education for labour and postpartum pain: A scoping review of content, delivery approaches, evidence gaps, and lived experiences. PLoS One 21(6): e0330399. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0330399

LEGO® Serious Play and the Work of Embedding UN SDGs in practice.

Knowledge Exchange, staff profile pages, Training, Women's Academic Network

 

There is a particular silence that falls over a room of academics and practitioners when you put a box of LEGO bricks in front of them and ask them to build what sustainability means in their work. That silence lasts about four seconds. Then someone reaches in.

This afternoon, colleagues from across the University’s Sustainability Academic Network (SAN) sat around a table and did exactly that. The question we had was one that we rarely give ourselves room to think about properly: how do we embed the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) into what and how we teach or work, in a way that means something beyond a line in a validation document or the curriculum? The method was LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP). Facilitated by Stefan Kleipoedzsus and me, it was, by any measure, a generative afternoon.

LSP was developed in the late 1990s by two professors, Johan Roos and Bart Victor, as a way to help senior executives think and talk differently about their organisations (Roos & Victor, 1999; Roos et al., 2004). Its native habitat is adults wrestling with challenging, ambiguous, organisationally-loaded questions, which is a fair description of curriculum design under a sustainability mandate. Released openly in 2010 and now used across start-ups, multinationals and universities alike (Kristiansen & Rasmussen, 2014), the method’s pedigree is corporate strategy, not childhood play with the bricks. Using it with academics is not a gimmick; it returns it to its roots.

But why does it earn its place in staff development?

The cognitive case is well established. Building externalises thinking: when we construct a physical model, we recruit the body’s interaction with the world into our reasoning, surfacing tacit knowledge that talk alone leaves buried (Barsalou, 2008; Wilson, 2002). This is the constructionist premise, that we think most powerfully when we are making something shareable (Papert & Harel, 1991).

But for educators and sustainability practitioners, there is a second, sharper reason. We largely teach as we were taught. If we want colleagues to consider experiential, active pedagogies for their own students, what we can do is have them experience one and then reflect on it. LSP turns staff development into exactly the reflective practice we ask of ourselves as professionals (Schön, 1991); not a lecture about active learning, but the thing itself, felt from the inside. What you do with a method after you have built it with your own hands is a different decision from what you do with one you have only heard described.

Sustainability is a difficult thing to discuss in a room. It is abstract, contested, unevenly understood across disciplines, and easy to deflect with the familiar moves, that’s not relevant to my subject, we already do that, whose definition anyway? A conventional meeting tends to reward whoever is most fluent or most senior.

Building changes the dynamics. When a colleague presents assumptions like height, weight, and form in bricks, it turns into an object on the table, something the group can analyse together rather than a claim to be swiftly rebutted. The convention that a model’s meaning belongs to its creator protects an idea long enough for it to be listened to. Across various faculties and departments with different languages for sustainability, models provided a shared, neutral platform. Statler et al. (2009 and 2011) describe LSP as a way to hold paradox and complexity openly rather than prematurely collapsing them, which is exactly the right approach for the SDGs, where the tensions between goals are not flaws but the core of the work.

But one excellent afternoon is a beginning, not evidence. The trouble with any workshop of this kind is that it generates energy and insight that have evaporated by the following Monday, a memorable session that embeds nothing. It is also true that the people in the room were a self-selecting sustainability network; the method’s more robust test will be the others who are indifferent or unconvinced, and we should not mistake a willing audience for a settled case.

So the test of this work is whether anything in our modules, our assessments and our everyday conversations actually shifts as a result, and whether the alignment with the BU2035 strategy becomes substantive rather than a matter of compliance. What the session did show was where colleagues are, made tacit assumptions visible and shared, and built the cross-faculty relationships that durable curriculum change depends on. We see this as the first move in something larger, and we are already thinking about what a sustained, evidence-based strand of practice looks like beyond a single afternoon. If the method’s history tells us anything, it is that adults do some of their most serious thinking when we let them build.

 

Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59(1), 617–645. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639

Kristiansen, P., & Rasmussen, R. (2014). Building a better business using the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method. Wiley.

Papert, S., & Harel, I. (1991). Constructionism. Norwood, NJ. Ablex Publishing.

Roos, J., & Victor, B. (1999). Towards a new model of strategy-making as serious play. European Management Journal, 17(4), 348–355. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0263-2373(99)00015-8

Roos, J., Victor, B., & Statler, M. (2004). Playing seriously with strategy. Long Range Planning, 37(6), 549–568.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2004.09.005

Schön, D. A. (1992). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315237473

Statler, M., Heracleous, L., & Jacobs, C. D. (2011). Serious play as a practice of paradox. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 47(2), 236–256. DOI:10.1177/0021886311398453

Statler, M., Roos, J., & Victor, B. (2009). Ain’t Misbehavin’: Taking Play Seriously in Organizations. Journal of Change Management, 9, 107 – 87. https://doi.org/10.1080/14697010902727252

Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(4), 625–636. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196322

First publication for two CMWH PhD students

NHS, Publishing, Women's Academic Network, writing

Congratulations to CMWH doctoral student Jennah Evans who has published the first paper from her PhD in the Journal of Human Lactation. The scoping review protocol outlines a transparent and reproducible method for investigating the relationship between stress and the human milk ejection reflex, addressing a significant knowledge gap in the literature.  Jennah and her supervisors (including CMWH member Dr Dominique Mylod) are also aiming to improve understanding of D-MER, a challenging condition associated with intense negative emotions during breastfeeding.

Congratulations are also due a second  CMWH doctoral student Louise Barton, whose paper ‘Southampton’s approach to smoking cessation has been accepted by MIDIRS Midwifery Digest and the paper will be pubished its June issue.  Smoking during pregnancy is the leading yet preventable causes a whole range of illnesses.  Louise’s PhD is an assessment of Southampton’s Midwifery-led Integrated Antenatal Care Pathway.  Her PhD is supervised by CMWH academics Dr. Daisy Wiggins and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen.
References:
Evans, J.M., Paul, R., Wezyk, A.B., Mylod, D. (2026) Exploring the Association Between Stress and the Experience of the Milk Ejection Reflex: A Scoping Review Protocol. Journal of Human Lactation Online First https://doi.org/10.1177/08903344261433846

Barton, L., van Teijlingen, E., Wiggins, D., Loader, R.-A., White, A. (2026) Southampton’s approach to smoking cessation, MIDIRS Midwifery Digest, 36(2): 145–151.

New chapters published in maternity book on risk

international, PG research, Publishing, Women's Academic Network, writing

A few days ago Palgrave Macmillen published Risk and Uncertainty in Maternity Care: Putting Risk in Its Place.  This edited book examines the way risk is defined and employed in maternity care across the world.  The 25 chapters reflect in different ways on how the management of risk shapes the organization and experience of maternity services. Drawing from investigations of the way risk operates in contemporary society, the authors challenge taken-for-granted understandings of risk in maternity care and early parenting, showing how risk is not simply a value-free assessment of potential harms but is, in fact, a complex social and political way of seeing, knowing about, and performing pregnancy and birth.

This edited volume contains two chapters which have co-authors associated with BU.  Chapter 15 ‘Communicating Maternity Risks Using Social Media in England and Australia‘ is written by Sheena Byrom, Mandie Scamell, Hannah Dahlen, Joanne Rack.  This chapter addresses childbirth in the digital age. Over the last two decades, social media—a group of internet-based applications that facilitate the development and sharing of information—revolutionised the way we connect and communicate. These new media are now an ever-present part of our daily lives. The authors explore how social media shapes the way risk is understood by all of those involved in pregnancy, labour, and birth.Sheena Byrom holds an honourary doctorate from Bournemouth University, and Joanne Rack is doing her for-year Clinical Doctorate in the Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH) specialising in personalised care for women of advanced maternal age. This PhD study is matched-funded by University Hospitals Dorset (UHD) NHS Foundation Trust and Bournemouth University.

Whilst chapter 16 From Uncertainty to Risk: How Mass Media in the UK and the US Generate Fear of Childbirth is co-authored by professors Hundley and van Teijlingen who are co-leads of the CMWH.  This chapter addresses the growing intolerance for the uncertainties associated with childbirth. While research has yet to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between media representations of pregnancy and birth and societal views of the childbirth experience, analysis of mass media accounts of childbirth can help explain why those involved in childbirth—maternity service users and providers alike—increasingly define birth as a site of risk. Existing studies of the representation of birth in mass media allow us to examine how the complex interaction between media, culture, and birth amplifies perceptions of risk. The authors illustrate the ways mass media influence, not just attitudes towards birth, but the way birth is managed.

 

References:

  1. Byrom, S., Scamell, M., Dahlen, H., Rack, J. (2026)  Communicating Maternity Risks Using Social Media in England and Australia [Chapter 15], In: Scamell, M., De Vries, R, Coxon, K. (eds) Critical Studies of Risk and Uncertainty in Maternity Care : Perspectives from Australia, Europe, and the United States, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 309-326.
  2. van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V., De Vries R. (2026) From uncertainty to risk: how mass media in the UK and the US generate fear of childbirth [Chapter 16], In: Scamell, M., De Vries, R, Coxon, K. (eds) Critical Studies of Risk and Uncertainty in Maternity Care : Perspectives from Australia, Europe, and the United States, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 327-346.

BU academics publish in Nepal national newspaper

Delicious links, international

Dr. Pramod Regmi and prof. Edwin van Teijlingen had a long article published today related to their work on migrant workers in Nepal.  The article ‘Nepal’s migrant workers: Data the new government can’t ignore’ appeared in both the print edition and the online version of The Kathmandu Post, which is one of the three English-language national papers in Nepal.  Both academics are based in the Faculty of Health, Environment & Medical Sciences.
https://kathmandupost.com/columns/2026/04/15/working-abroad-comes-at-a-cost-to-migrant-workers-health

New BU Physiology paper

BRIAN, PG research, writing

Congratulations to HEMS’s Dr. Malika Felton, Dr. Vikram Mohan and Prof. Vanora Hundley on the recent publication of their academic paper ‘Acute cardiovascular responses to slow and deep breathing in normotensive men and women‘ [1].  The BU authors outline that there differences in cardiovascular responses to different methods of slow and deep breathing (SDB) delivery.  They query whether utilising a multi-parametric approach to measuring cardiovascular variables reveal new/different responses.  Their key findings are that all SDB conditions elicited similar cardiovascular responses to each other when compared with spontaneous breathing. However, lower breathing frequencies elicit greater blood pressure oscillations, and higher breathing frequencies (∼8 breaths min−1) may not fully optimise cardiovascular responses. This has implications on the practice of SDB for management of hypertension.

Well done!

Prof.Edwin van Teijlingen

Reference:

  1. Felton, M., Mohan, V., & Hundley, V. A. (2026). Acute cardiovascular responses to slow and deep breathing in normotensive men and women. Experimental Physiology, 01–24. https://doi.org/10.1113/EP093086

Gender and street names

Delicious links, international, Publishing, Women's Academic Network, writing

Last week I was contacted by a Dutch journalist, Els Knaapen, about the live and work of Francijntje de Kadt.  The latter was the first chair of the Dutch Midwifery Association and I had come across her 30 years ago as part of my own PhD research.  Els was interested in the contribution Francijntje had made in the town of Enkhuizen after her retirement as a midwife.  As part of a radio programma called ‘Meer Vrouw op Straat’, refering to the fact that too few women have been given streetnames to honour their contributions to society.  Els was calling for the Enkhuizen town council to name a straat after Francijntje, just like the town of Vlaardingen had done a decade ago.
Some 15 years ago I proposed to the city of Vlaardingen argueing that Francijntje de Kadt deserved a street name, as highlighted in an earlier BU Research Blog. With my recommendation I sent the ‘Street Name Committee’ in Vlaardingen my Dutch-language publications on the work of Francijntje de Kadt [1-3]. A few months later the secretary to the Street Name Committee wrote to say that my proposal had been accepted and that her name would be given to a street in a new development of the former local hospital grounds.
Yesterday the radio programme, which is part of a progressive station BNNVARA, was aired in which Els Knaapen justified why Enkhuizen needs to honour its former citizen.  In Enkhuizen Francijntje was active in maternity care education and she was a member of the Assocation for Women’s Votes.  All this after she retited from being the town’s midwife of Vlaardingen.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
References:
  1. van Teijlingen, E. (2002) Ondergang eerste pensioenfonds voor vroedvrouwen (in Dutch: Decline of the first pension fund for midwives), Tijdschrift voor Verloskundigen (in Dutch: Journal for Midwives), 27(12): 684.
  2. van Teijlingen, E.R. (2003a) Berichten – Francijntje de Kadt (1858-1929), Tijdschrift voor Verloskundigen (in Dutch: Journal for Midwives), 28(12): 630-633.
  3. van Teijlingen, E.R. (2003b) Francijntje de Kadt (1858-1929). Vroedvrouw te Vlaardingen en eerste voorzitter van de Nederlandsche vroedvrouwenvereeniging, Tijd-schrift (in Dutch: Time-Magazine) 88: 14-23.

New academic paper on Nepal

international, open access, Publishing, writing

Yesterday the international journal Health Policy & Planning published our latest article with the title ‘Understanding the formulation of non-communicable disease policies in Nepal: A qualitative study‘ [1].  The paper is part of the PhD work (at the University of Hudderfield) by the first author, Dr. Anju Vaidya, who is originally from Nepal. Anju’s thesis was supervised by Prof. Padam Simkhada (University of Chester), Prof. Andre Lee (The University of Sheffield) and by Bournemouth University’s Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen.

 

The paper recognises that there is limited evidence about the process through which health policies were formulated in Nepal. This study used Kingdon’s multiple streams framework to explore how NCDs (non-communicable diseases) were recognised and prioritised, how policy alternatives were decided, how policy windows were opened, and which contextual factors influenced the policy formulation process.  Anju’s PhD included a qualitative study to gain a comprehensive understanding of the formulation of major NCD-related policies in Nepal. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 key stakeholders, and policy documents were analysed using framework analysis.

The NCDs were gradually prioritised through the convergence of global and local evidence, sustained advocacy, and international commitments. Policymakers encountered several challenges, such as competing health priorities, the chronic nature of NCDs, donor preferences for communicable diseases, financial constraints, and multisectoral complexities of NCDs. The Package of Essential Non-communicable diseases (PEN) interventions were adopted as a policy alternative, informed by global evidence, World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations, and lessons from other countries.  While coordinated efforts by stakeholders brought the problem, policy and politics streams together, the role of policy entrepreneurs was found to be less relevant in Nepal’s context.

Health Policy & Planning is an Open Access journal, hence the paper is available worldwide to anybody with internet access.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health

References:

  1. Vaidya, A., Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen, E., Lee, A.C.K. (2026) Understanding the formulation of non-communicable disease policies in Nepal: A qualitative study, Health Policy and Planning, [online first] czag048, https://doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czag048

New HIV paper by BU PhD student

international, PG research, Publishing, student research, writing

The editor of HIV Research & Clinical Practice informed us that the paper ‘Stigma in UK health care: A key barrier to reaching zero HIV transmission by 2030’ has been accepted for publication [1].   This paper is based on the PhD research currently conducted by Mr. Tom Weeks in the Faculty of Health, Environment & Medical Sciences (HEMS).  Tom’s thesis focuses on the perceptions of stigmatisation of People Living with HIV in care settings in the UK and the kind of education health care staff (clinical and non-clinical) receive in relation to HIV.  His long-term aim in the PhD is to help improve education to reduce such stigma.  Tom is being supervised by Dr. Pramod Regmi and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen. 

Both supervisors have a long experience in studying social and health promotion aspects of HIV and AIDS.  Thirty years ago Prof. van Teijlingen worked in the NHS as a researcher in the Centre for HIV/AIDS and Drugs Studies based in Edinburgh.  Whilst Dr. Regmi conducted his PhD research on sexual health and health promotion in young people in Nepal.  Both supervisors themselves have published widely on the topic of HIV and AIDS [2-23].  The first of these many publication was a letter on community care for people living with HIV in the community which was published in the Lancet in 1993 [2]. 

 

 

References

  1. Weeks, T., Regmi, P., van Teijlingen, E. (2026) Stigma in UK health care: A key barrier to reaching zero HIV transmission by 2030, HIV Research & Clinical Practice (accepted).
  2. Huby, G, van Teijlingen E, Porter M., Bury, J (1993) Care for HIV in community (letter) Lancet 342: 1297-1298.
  3. Huby, G, van Teijlingen, E, Robertson J, Porter, AM (1993) Community care & support for women, In: Johnson F & Johnstone M. (Eds.) HIV Infection in Women, Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 123-32.
  4. Bury, J.K., Ross, A., van Teijlingen, E., Porter, AMD, Bath, G. (1996) Lothian GPs, HIV infection & Drug Misuse: Epidemiology, Experience & Confidence 1988-93 Health Bulletin, 54: 258-269.
  5. Huby, GO, van Teijlingen E, Porter, AMD, Bury, J. (1997) Co-ordination of care on discharge from hospital into the community for patients with HIV/AIDS in Lothian, Health Bulletin, 55:338-50.
  6. van Teijlingen, E, Huby, G. (1998) Evaluation within a policy-making and contracting culture: reflections of practice, In: Barbour R.S., Huby G. (Eds.), Meddling with mythology: AIDS & the social construction of knowledge, London: Routledge, 218-33.
  7. Lowis, G, van Teijlingen, E, Sheremata, W. (2000) AIDS in developing countries: A comparative epidemiological analysis, In: Rose, J. (Ed.), Population Problems, Reading: Gordon & Breach Science Publishers: 133-61
  8. Scotland, G., van Teijlingen E., van der Pol, M, Smith, WCS. (2003) A review of studies assessing costs & consequences of interventions to reduce mother-to-child HIV transmission in sub-Saharan Africa, Aids, 17: 1045-52.
  9. Nicholson, D., van Teijlingen E. (2006) Comparing level of expenditure on HIV health promotion & incidence of HIV in Greater Glasgow & Lothian Health Boards (1988-98), Salusvita, 25(1): 13-22 usc.br/Edusc/colecoes/revistas/salusvita_pdf/salusvita_v25_n.1_2006.pdf
  10. Regmi, P., Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen E. (2008) Sexual & reproductive health status among young people in Nepal: opportunities & barriers for sexual health education & service utilisation, Kathmandu University Medical Journal 6(2): 248-256.
  11. Wasti, S.P., Simkhada, P.P, Randall, J., van Teijlingen E. (2009) Issues & Challenges of HIV/AIDS Prevention & Treatment Programme in Nepal, Global Journal of Health Science 1(2): 62-72. http://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/gjhs/article/viewFile/2460/3474
  12. Regmi P, Simkhada PP, van Teijlingen E (2010) “Boys Remain Prestigious, Girls become Prostitutes”: Socio-Cultural Context of Relationships & Sex among Young People in Nepal, Global Journal of Health Science 2(1): 60-72.
  13. Regmi P., Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen E. (2010) “There are too many naked pictures found in papers and on the net”: Factors encouraging pre-marital sex among young people of Nepal. Health Science Journal 4(3): 162-174. hsj.gr/volume4/issue3/437.pdf
  14. Regmi, P., Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen E. (2010) Dating and Sex among Emerging Adults in Nepal. Journal of Adolescence Research 26 (6): 675-700.
  15. Regmi, P., van Teijlingen, E, Simkhada, P., Acharya, D. (2010) Barriers to sexual health services for young people in Nepal. Journal of Health Population & Nutrition 28: 619-27.
  16. Wasti, SP, Simkhada, PP, van Teijlingen E (Eds.) (2015) Socio-Cultural Aspects of HIV/ AIDS. The Dynamics of Health in Nepal, Kathmandu: Soc Sci Baha/Himal Books: 47-62.
  17. Aryal, N., Regmi, P.R., van Teijlingen, E., Dhungel, D., Ghale, G., Bhatta, G.K. (2016) Knowing is not enough: Migrant workers’ spouses vulnerability to HIV, SAARC Journal of Tuberculosis, Lung Diseases & HIV/AIDS 8(1):9-15.
  18. Ochillo, M., van Teijlingen, E., Hind, M. (2017) Influence of faith-based organisations on HIV prevention strategies in Africa: systematic review. African Health Sciences 17(3): 753-61.
  19. Sathian, B., Sreedharan, J., Asim, M., Menezes, R.G., van Teijlingen, E., Unnikrishnan, B. (2018) Estimation of burden of people living with HIV/AIDS in Kerala state, India. Nepal Journal of Epidemiology 8(3): 738-44.
  20. Hamidi, A., Regmi, P., van Teijlingen, E. (2021) HIV epidemic in Libya: Identifying gaps, Journal of the International Association of Providers of AIDS Care, 20 :1-5 https://doi.org/10.1177/23259582211053964 .
  21. Regmi, P.R., van Teijlingen, E.R., Silwal, R.C., Dhital, R. (2022) Role of social media for sexual communication and sexual behaviors: A focus group study among young people in Nepal. Journal of Health Promotion, 10(1):153–166. https://doi.org/10.3126/jhp.v10i1.50995
  22. Hamidi, A., Regmi, P., van Teijlingen, E. (2023) Facilitators and barriers to condom use in Middle East and North Africa: a systematic review, Journal of Public Health, 32: 1651-81 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-023-01923-3
  23. Hamidi, A., Regmi, P, van Teijlingen, E. (2024) Islamic perspectives on HIV: a scoping review, Discover Social Science & Health 4:6 https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s44155-024-00063-7.pdf

Building Ventures from Bricks: Why LEGO® Serious Play® Belongs at the Heart of Entrepreneurship Education

BU Challenges, Business Engagement, Knowledge Exchange, Student Engagement

There is something quietly radical about placing a box of LEGO bricks in front of an entrepreneurship student and asking them to build what it feels like to start a business as a woman. It looks playful. It feels unfamiliar. And that is precisely the point.

Gendered barriers to enterprise, unequal access to networks and capital, and the legitimacy penalties faced by women founders are not peripheral concerns — they are central to how entrepreneurship actually works. Yet they are among the hardest things to surface in a conventional classroom. Lectures can name them; discussions can debate them. But neither easily reaches the experiential, affective layer where structural disadvantage is felt and processed. LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) –  a structured, facilitated methodology in which participants construct physical models as a vehicle for thinking and sense-making – offers a compelling answer.

The theoretical roots of LSP lie in constructionism (Papert & Harel, 1991 cited in Imholz and Petrosino, 2012), extending Piaget’s Constructivism, the premise that humans learn most powerfully when actively making something shareable. In entrepreneurship, this matters enormously. The field is inherently uncertain, relational and situated (Neck & Greene, 2011), demanding that practitioners navigate ambiguity and construct meaning from incomplete information — precisely what traditional pedagogies rarely train students to do.

LSP addresses this through embodied cognition — the well-established view that cognitive processes are rooted in the body’s interactions with the world (Barsalou, 2008; Wilson, 2002). When students physically manipulate bricks, they activate neural pathways associated with memory, association and imagination, surfacing tacit knowledge that verbal reasoning cannot access. The cognitive and reflective processes generated map directly onto the experiential learning cycle entrepreneurship education has long sought to replicate (Kolb, 1984).

Nowhere is LSP’s capacity to make the invisible visible more valuable than when the subject is gender and structural disadvantage. When a student is asked to build what barriers look like — giving them height, weight and spatial relationship — something categorically different becomes possible. The model externalises and legitimises the experience: it makes the barrier an object in the room for collective examination, rather than a contested assertion subject to instant pushback.

The LSP rule that the meaning of a model belongs only to its creator — and that no one may impose their own interpretation (Gkogkidis & Dacre, 2021) — creates protective distance between the student and their experience, allowing difficult realities to be surfaced through metaphor before being verbalised. Reduced perceived risk is precisely what enables more diverse voices to emerge (Gauntlett, 2011). Benesova’s (2023) study at the University of Leeds evidences this: students from high power-distance cultures reported that building gave them expression, bypassing the social hierarchies of the seminar, with one noting it was “much easier to build it than say it.”

The Entrepreneurial Learning Case

Fox et al. (2018) identify active, reflective, situated, and crisis-based learning as the key dimensions that effective entrepreneurship pedagogy must address, finding that digital simulations perform poorly on the affective and reflective dimensions and almost entirely fail to simulate failure and uncertainty. LSP does not share these limitations. Ball et al.’s (2021) case study from Northumbria University saw students complete a LEGO task with pieces deliberately missing — simulating resource constraints and ambiguity — and subsequently identify 68 distinct entrepreneurial skills and competencies including risk-taking, creativity and leadership. Creativity here means recombining knowledge, recognising patterns and imagining alternatives (Fillis & Rentschler, 2010) — and material, exploratory engagement of the kind LSP provides is precisely what develops creative confidence and problem-solving capability (Rauth et al., 2010). Zenk et al. (2018) went further still, designing an entire innovation course around LSP — guiding students through ideation, prototyping, pivot questioning and pre-mortem analysis in ways conventional course design cannot match.

Where LSP makes its most distinctive contribution is in the quality of reflection it generates. Gkogkidis and Dacre (2023) frame the four-step core process — pose question, construct, share meaning, reflect — as a pedagogical architecture that operationalises constructivist learning values. For universities seeking to embed entrepreneurial thinking across their culture, active, reflexive pedagogies of this kind are central to the entrepreneurial university mission (Guerrero & Urbano, 2012). When students have physically constructed the systems that disadvantage them, the subsequent reflection is grounded in something concrete and shared, allowing a group to move from “do these barriers exist?” to “here they are — now what do we do?” That shift, from debate to design thinking, is precisely the mode entrepreneurship demands.

In conclusion, gender, network access and legitimacy inequality do not sit comfortably in a traditional seminar. They are too personal, too politically charged, too easily deflected. LSP creates conditions in which these conversations happen differently: externalising structural barriers, equalising participation and protecting less powerful voices. For entrepreneurship educators serious about structural inequality, the bricks are doing serious work.

References

Ball, S., Quan, R., & Clegg, S. (2025). A case study of experiential entrepreneurial learning through LEGO® play. 20(1), Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Northumbria University.         https://doi.org/10.34190/ecie.20.1.3942        

Barsalou, L. W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59(1), 617–645. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639

Benesova, N. (2023). LEGO® Serious Play® in management education. Cogent Education, 10(2), 2262284. https://doi.org/10.1080/2331186X.2023.2262284

Fillis, I., & Rentschler, R. (2010). The role of creativity in entrepreneurship. Journal of Enterprising Culture, 18(1), 49–81. https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218495810000501

Fox, J., Pittaway, L., & Uzuegbunam, I. (2018). Simulations in entrepreneurship education: Serious games and learning through play. Entrepreneurship Education and Pedagogy, 1(1), 61–89. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515127417737285

Gkogkidis V., and Dacre N. (2023). The educator’s LSP journey: creating exploratory learning environments for responsible management education using Lego Serious Play. Emerald Open Research, 1(12) No Pagination Specified, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/EOR-12-2023-0004

Guerrero, M., & Urbano, D. (2012). The development of an entrepreneurial university. The Journal of Technology Transfer, 37(1), 43–74. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-010-9171-x

Imholz, S. and Petrosino, A. (2012) Teacher Observations on the Implementation of the Tools of the Mind Curriculum in the Classroom: Analysis of Interviews Conducted over a One-Year Period. Creative Education, 3, 185-192. doi: 10.4236/ce.2012.32029.

Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice-Hall.

Neck, H. M., & Greene, P. G. (2011). Entrepreneurship education: Known worlds and new frontiers. Journal of Small Business Management, 49(1), 55–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-627X.2010.00314.x

Rauth, I., Köppen, E., Jobst, B., & Meinel, C. (2010). Design thinking: An educational model towards creative confidence. In T. Taura & Y. Nagai (Eds.), DS 66-2: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC 2010). The Design Society.

Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(4), 625–636. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196322

Zenk, L., Hynek, N., Schreder, G., Zenk, A., Pausits, A., & Steiner, G. (2018). Designing innovation courses in higher education using LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®. International Journal of Management and Applied Research, 5(4), 244–263. https://doi.org/10.18646/2056.54.18-019

 

Four BU students at national midwifery conference

conferences, PG research, Women's Academic Network

This week four postgraduate midwifery students from Bournemouth University attended the Royal College of Midwives annual Education & Research conference in London.  Their contributions included studies on: (1) ‘A Unique Approach to Smoking Cessation During Pregnancy’ by Ph.D. student Louise Barton; (2) Investigating how women make decisions about prescribed psychiatric medication use during pregnancy by M.Res. student Jessica Correia; (3) Harnessing midwives’ research delivery expertise to encourage medics’ participation in research’ by M.Res. student Susara Blunden; and (4) ‘Personalised care for women of advanced maternal age, from conception to postnatal care: A mixed-methods study’ by Ph.D. student Joanne Rack. Joanne was also at this conference in her capacity of the newly appointed Editor-in-Chief of The Practising Midwife. 

Congratulations to these postgraduate students and their supervisors.

Profs. Vanora Hundley & Edwin van Teijlingen