My insight into Diversity Mark and improving learning today

Tamika Adamson, Student Success Diversity Mark Officer, talks of her reasons for joining the Student Success (EDI) Team as a Work Study Intern, and her aspiration for the change she hopes her involvement will bring about.

The Diversity Mark project is primarily centred around decolonising the curriculum through contextualising western views of the world, and to allow more marginalised perspectives to come towards the forefront.

I initially wanted to get involved with this project because I am a Politics and International Relations (IR) student, and with that there are elements of race and diverse perspectives within my course inherently, yet as a student I felt that more could be done to elevate the voices and opinions of authors from particular countries, or states which often remain in the background (e.g., Rwanda or low-income countries in general which are often left out of the conversation).

In the next year, I’m looking forward to meeting with convenors and collectively trying to improve and diversify their reading lists. As well as that, I expect by taking agency within my own learning and taking account of different perspectives involved in this project, that I finally reach an end where the appropriate measures would be taken to diversify and ultimately improve resources for learning.