Engineering a Grimm approach to enhancing student engagement with health and safety lectures: a new perspective on an ancient pedagogy

In this article, we cast a critical eye over the current approach to the presentation of health and safety information and question the efficacy of conveying its relevance through isolated inductions and pictograms on lab scripts. An argument is made for the adoption of a more integrated approach to the delivery of the material to facilitate greater student engagement and provide a more coherent and repetitive reinforcement of the central messages. A strategy for revitalising student engagement is presented and relates to an exploration of storytelling as a medium through which to recognise the significance of safe practice. An innovative approach to the proactive involvement of the student body is presented that adopts the emerging literary techniques of flash fiction and harnesses eSerialisation to aid dissemination. The approach is eminently transferable across the engineering, life and physical sciences disciplines and can be implemented with few administrative or technological overheads.