Best practice and case studies
Sharing resources and experiences with academic colleagues both at Kent and beyond can support your work to diversify your materials. If you are just starting this work you can find examples of best practice in different ways:
Case studies at Kent
Visit the Student Success Diversity Mark website to discover Kent convenors who have already been awarded the Diversity Mark for a module they teach. You can ask them to share their experience and point to useful resources.
Case studies in HE sector
If you want to look further afield, then searching online using key phrases such as ‘HE’ and ‘Decolonise’ or ‘Diversify’ and your discipline should help you find examples of practice. Using these terms in Google Scholar or in databases like the British Education Index or ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) will also find relevant articles, chapters and conference materials. These often provide insights,resources and even academic contacts for this work.
Here are a few examples of recent studies we have found and used to support work in diversfying.
- Psychology – Diversification tips – BME Psychology (wordpress.com)
- Sciences – Decolonising and diversifying the biomedical sciences (youtube.com)
- Engineering – Equality & Diversity HUB | College of Science and Engineering (ed.ac.uk)
- Law – 26b-Diversifying-Decolonising-Full-Report.pdf (lse.ac.uk)
- Design – Decolonising Design
- Computing – Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in the CS Curriculum | Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research (kent.ac.uk)
Professional, Statutory and Regulatory Bodies
Many of these are now addressing EDI with their own research of the sector and are developing recommendations to build inclusion in their profession. These organisations are a great place to understand what the challenges are within that specific sector and how this might be addressed in recruitment, teaching and research at universities. For those bodies that provide programme accreditation there might be some specific guidance or initiatives that are helpful to you. At the very least, their reporting on EDI might make an interesting discussion on future employability with students.
Reading lists
We have compiled a collection of reading lists and toolkits from other acdemic institutions on Padlet. These may also be a good starting point when thinking about making changes to your own. These are resource lists from colleagues that have already done this work and shared them publicly with others outside their institution.
Please feel free to add others that you find to this padlet!
Join networks, blogs and mailing lists to keep up to date:
Higher Education Race Action Group (HERAG) has a JISC mail list that promotes conferences, papers and other initiatives across the UK HE sector.