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EDUCATE

SYMPOSIUMS

Workshops

Workshops are fantastic opportunities to develop new skills and techniques in groups of 10-30 members. By facilitating discussions, workshops provide an active learning environment to not only learn, but to acquire practical skills to enable you to see and impact narratives.
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The Union provides a platform to discuss and debate global and domestic affairs. However, members may not feel confident in doing so. These workshops provide the skills needed to engage with others, allowing members to learn from each other in a safe and friendly environment. The workshops provide skills and knowledge that can be applied to real-life, to critically think and reflect on the world around us to reach the truth. The workshops are a rich educational experience to engage in active learning, using evidence-based approaches and techniques and applying them  to current global and domestic affairs.
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London Union Society is an inclusive space. Meaning, the workshops are for anyone and everyone! They have been designed to provide balanced overviews of how to use academic and professional abilities in current affairs.
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The workshops have been developed using evidence-based strategies, using a broad range of activities to enrich the learning experience. We will use feedback from Union members to help design the final workshops to meet your needs and expectations, and continually review them to ensure they benefit future members of the London Union legacy.

Academic Workshops
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Weeks 1-2: What is knowledge/evidence/critical thinking?
In order to better understand our world, we first need to understand what knowledge is. What is the difference between believing and knowing? These workshops will take current issues regarding belief and truth, and promote discussion around freedom of speech versus slander and incorrect statements. What is fake news? What is pseudoscience? How can we identify it?
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Weeks 3-4: How can we generate evidence?
When we have ideas or thoughts and we wish to make an argument, we need evidence. Evidence can take many shapes and forms. These workshops will help you to understand what we can use as evidence, and how if we have a question we wish to answer, what evidence do we need to support it?
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Weeks 5-6: How can we understand and evaluate evidence?
In order to reflect and engage, we need to be able to understand how ideas generated from evidence are concluded. To do this, we need to understand what the evidence actually tells us, by critically appraising it. These workshops cover how to appraise evidence and how to make your conclusions from it, and to evaluate the conclusions others have made.
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Weeks 7-8: How can we find and use evidence in our work/network?
There is a lot of evidence already available. If we have a question or a thought and we want to discover the evidence on that topic, how do we best find it? And, how do we show we have reflected on evidence in our thoughts? This workshop covers strategies to find evidence, and how to reference the evidence that we use, to give credit where it is due.
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Weeks 9-10: How can we make real-life changes based on evidence?
With the best available evidence, this is worthless unless we use it effectively to change our practice or behaviours. These workshops discuss and provide the skills to understand how organisations, individuals and you can use evidence to change your practice, whilst also considering other determinants of practice or behaviour, such as personal preference, society, culture, environment and genetics.