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Information on the events and training developed by, and available at the IGP
Bespoke EDI sessions
In November 2023, the IGP ran bespoke informative sessions for incoming students on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. These sessions provided our students with a baseline understanding of what we expect from interactions among themselves and towards staff in the academic and working environment. Amanda Pearce (Programme Administrator and Student Wellbeing & Support Officer) describes how she created and ran the sessions:
"I was surprised when I came to UCL – first as a student and then as a member of staff – how much focus there was on student wellbeing and ensuring everyone had an equitable experience. I had mentioned in my interview how I was interested in bringing EDII to the role, citing books like Taking Up Space by Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi as inspiration.
IGP Institute Manager, Yukiko Fujimoto, was very supportive in offering me the role of Co-EDII Lead. My first big project was to arrange EDII Sessions for the students and I took a chance and asked if the department would be happy to have me create the materials and lead the sessions, which they did! I set about making a presentation, which covered all the topics I thought were important, such as Unconscious Bias, Microaggressions, and Intersectionality, highlighting all the fantastic thinkers behind the concepts. This was particularly valuable, I felt, because the names of many great female academics/academics of colour get forgotten by history, even though they have contributed concepts many of us are familiar with.
Then I offered up real-world scenarios and asked the students to comment on how they would tackle these, bearing in mind the principles we had just learnt about. We did the same session three times with different groups, and I was surprised each week by how different the responses and questions were. This has been a great learning opportunity for me, and I am very glad to work in a department, which is so encouraging and supportive of my growth."
“Thanks to Amanda for a great session with a comfortable, not forcing atmosphere for interaction. The examples provided were excellent, easily relatable to both student life and life in general.
Going forward, we intend to integrate these sessions into an even more ambitious EDII project next year.
Active Bystander training
IGP students are enrolled on Active Bystander training, organized by the UCL Student Union. This is taken at the beginning of the academic year.
The programme aims to train students to recognise and challenge problematic behaviours, such as bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct both on- and off-campus. The programme is part of our journey towards social and cultural change and compliments other initiatives across the Students' Union and UCL, such as UCL's Respect and Inclusion module or sexual harassment training provided for clubs and societies by the Union.
The programme was originally launched as part of the Full Stop Campaign, which called for the UCL community to come together and say no to bullying, harassment and sexual misconduct. We recognise that to prevent these behaviours, we must address them as a community in which each member can do their part to challenge bullying, harassment and sexual violence.
Read more on the Students' Union website
Where do you draw the line? Training
All IGP staff are encouraged to take the Harrassment Prevention Training ‘Where do you Draw the Line?’.
The training begins with the proposition that harassment in contemporary academia is more commonplace and widespread than we would like to admit. Harassment is not always overt and can often be nuanced and coded. For example, harassment may be ambiguous and indirect, taking the form of 'harmless' insinuations and subtly inappropriate behaviour that is accepted as the cultural norm within a department or research group.
Underestimating the impact of harassment not only affects the wellbeing of individuals and their advancement in academia, it can be damaging to wider morale, performance, attrition rates and institutional reputations.
Read more on the UCL EDI webpages