Author: Dr Tiffany Chiu
Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship at Imperial College London (lead) and the University of Reading are funded by the Advance HE’s Collaborative Development Fund 2022 on the ‘Inclusive institutions: enabling and supporting culture change’ project.
The team will collaborate with the AdvanceHE to showcase the impact of their current Supporting the Identity Development of Underrepresented Students (SIDUS) work that aims to promote inclusion, diversity and support success for Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM) underrepresented students and to develop a diverse and inclusive academic culture and community for all. The SIDUS work embeds an active and authentic student voice where interviews were conducted with 110 undergraduate STEMM students from underrepresented groups at Imperial College London and the University of Reading. The team worked with three student partners through the Student Shapers scheme at Imperial to co-produce student and staff support materials informed by these rich interview data. These pedagogical resources have been disseminated and implemented at Imperial and Reading to foster an inclusive and diverse culture. The team plans to create a suite of evidence-based examples/case studies of pedagogical implementation and impact to support institutional culture change.
Dr Tiffany Chiu
, Senior Teaching Fellow in Educational Development and Project Lead for the AdvanceHE and SIDUS projects at the Imperial College London said:
“The team wishes to undertake this project as part of our wider and strong commitment to share, reflect and disseminate good practice that drives culture change at Imperial, Reading and beyond.”
“We are excited about this project. The support of AdvanceHE will enable us to extend our current work, gather robust evidence of the impact of our initiatives and disseminate our research-informed resources more widely across the higher education sector.”
Prof. Martyn Kingsbury, Professor of Higher Education and Director of the Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship at Imperial highlights:
“Imperial has recently been granted Bronze status by Advance HE’s Race Equality Charter, demonstrating the College’s strong commitment to fostering a diverse and inclusive environment for all concerned. This project hence is very well aligned with the College’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity Strategy and Learning and Teaching Strategy.”
“We will continue to work with colleagues across the College to actively integrate and embed our pedagogical materials into student support and teaching and learning, accompanied by a review of the impact of the materials and culture change on students’ learning and the academic community”
Dr Billy Wong, from the University of Reading, added, “The cross-institutional nature of our project allows us to appreciate how to contextualise the pedagogical materials we have created, and how it can complement existing EDI works and initiatives.”