IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION A

Abstract

This paper offers a critical pedagogic reflection on the first delivery of Making Sense of Problem Substance Use in Scotland, a new interdisciplinary undergraduate course developed through the University of Glasgow’s Curriculum for Life initiative. Designed as a five week, 10 credit response to a distinctly Scottish ‘wicked problem’, the course invited students from varied disciplines to examine substance use through social, cultural, and public health lenses. The first run revealed a hidden curriculum of stigma. While students showed strong cultural familiarity with substance use as a visible Scottish issue, early teaching encounters exposed limited public health literacy and deeply moralised assumptions shaped by criminal justice framings and media narratives. These assumptions often appeared as simplistic hierarchies of harm that obscured population level reasoning and the social legitimacy of alcohol and drug related harms. Drawing on teaching reflections, assessment insights, and redesign decisions, the analysis conceptualises first run interdisciplinary teaching as a diagnostic pedagogic space where tacit beliefs become open to critique. Short lectures provided threshold conceptual scaffolding, while group public communication tasks and reflective writing acted as pedagogies of narrative disruption, surfacing tensions around disciplinary identity, discomfort, and epistemic authority. The paper contributes to scholarship on teaching socially contested health issues by demonstrating how interdisciplinary public health education can move beyond knowledge transmission toward the active disruption of stigmatising narratives. It concludes by theorising curriculum redesign, through both expansion to a 20-credit format and the introduction of a new “letter to the editor” assessment, as iterative pedagogic work responsive to the hidden assumptions surfaced during first delivery.