Decolonising universities has become something of a buzzword, guaranteed to turn Telegraph readers into frothing puddles of outrage. Every other week they publish an article about subjects getting ‘cancelled’ (also known as modules being updated) or lecturers being ordered to use Twitter instead of historical archives (also known as using an expanded range of sources). Well, buckle up, because that’s what my newest publication is about. Strictly speaking, it’s not decolonisation per se. That’s a deeper, longer, more transformative process that in my opinion might not even be possible without deconstructing universities as we know them. But the article is about diversifying the content of what we teach, and teaching it in a different, more inclusive, more culturally aware way, with the goal of creating a learning environment that is less hostile to students of colour.
This new paper, published today in the London Review of Education (https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.20.1.01) is co-authored with 12 other people! The long list of authors is because it was really a collaborative effort and we wanted to recognise that, although the writing itself was done by the first four authors listed. The others contributed to the project design and the data collection and analysis, as well as bringing their insight and knowledge. Some of these people are colleagues in different schools at the University of Kent or from the university library, while others are undergraduate student researchers (some of whom have since graduated).
We report on an ongoing project at the university which reviews reading lists for modules in terms of their ethnic and gender diversity, and then supports teaching staff to increase that diversity if they want to do so. It’s necessarily optional, for several reasons: for example, we need to avoid alienating people who have a lot of freedom in their roles and often resent obligatory policies that they don’t see the purpose of (which is what has happened in the past when originally good ideas were imposed top-down without the rationale filtering through). It’s also got to be on top of an already overburdened workload, a problem we note in the article. Perhaps most importantly, the work is only meaningful if it’s done with care and genuine desire for change; simply bunging a few Black authors on the list is at best missing the point and at worst actively harmful. But for those who want to do the work, and are able to do so within their contractual constraints, the library staff and the Student Success Project team have worked up a whole lot of resources to help with this, so the idea is that small interventions like the one we report on can lead to longer-term change across the institution.
Working with the student researchers was the most rewarding experience. From the recruitment process onwards it was eye-opening to see how much they knew about the topic already, how committed they were, and how important it was to them. We specifically recruited (paid) researchers who themselves identified as from the category known in UK HE as ‘BAME’ (Black, Asian, or minority ethnic) as our methodology meant that it was important that they bring their own experiences and stories to bear on the work. One of the researchers in particular found an especial enjoyment of—and flair for—giving talks and presentations on the work, during which he was able to reflect on the importance of the project to him personally in a way that really helped the largely white audience to understand the purpose. He got rave reviews both in the department and at the conferences where we presented the work.
For me, a really interesting aspect was the interviews with staff. I interviewed 70-something members of the school, at all levels from graduate teaching assistants to the Head of School, and from academic and professional services teams. I approached these interviews in a very loose, informal way and kept them fairly short so as not to burden people and turn them against the project. Still, some conversations ended up being very long as people often had a lot to say! The most valuable of these, for me, were the ones that turned out to be a real conversation between me and the interviewee, both of us learning and discussing the topic, and ending up with action points or ways of proceeding with the goal of diversifying reading lists. Sometimes, this was with someone I’d never really spoken to before, but who then became an ally or a go-to person for further conversations, and someone who I knew was pushing forward the aims in their own departments. It also, unfortunately, revealed to me people who were set in their ways and refused to see any other viewpoint, or who believed that the goal was the obligatory, quota-driven approach dispelled above. You can’t change everyone’s mind, and nor should you necessarily, but I was keen to listen to people’s reasons for disagreeing with the goals of the project and sometimes those reasons showed a lack of understanding about how discrimination works and a lack of willingness to learn and grow.
This was my first truly cross-disciplinary project, working with (primarily) sociologists and library specialists and using theories and methods from their fields. Our primary theoretical tool was Critical Race Theory, also much in the press these days, which holds that racism is baked into our systems (in this case, reading lists, courses, university structures). CRT began as a legal theory but is applicable to fields beyond its origins, and has been used in education research before. It was this that helped us to determine our methods and the way we approached the qualitative data obtained from interviews, and it was the reason for the majority of the authors (and all of the student researchers) being people of colour, as the effect of lived experience is a crucial part of the work which I, as a white person from the Global North, couldn’t contribute. I was, however, happy that some of my linguistic practice did end up in the piece, in that the student focus groups I conducted, which produced some extremely rich data, were run following the methods of a sociolinguistic interview such as ones I’ve done in the past. Learning the theories, methods and conventions of a different field has been hard work, but it’s definitely been worth it.
If you click through to the open-access article, you can see the results of the reading list review of the departments in our study, the findings of the interviews with staff and students, and the outcome of the project in the form of the resources for shifting the balance to better reflect the population of our university.
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