BAME Awarding Gap Funded Project: Department of Biochemical Engineering (2)

BAMEhack: a scalable staff-student collaboration to reveal BAME stakeholders in academic disciplines to help delivery of inclusive curriculum content

Darren Nesbeth, UCL Engineering

Project dates: March 2021 – March 2024

Summary

BAMEhack establishes a 12–15-month process, scalable to any HEI, that brings staff and students together with a common purpose to re-discover and highlight (‘unhide’) BAME stakeholders and their contributions pertinent to a given academic discipline/sub-discipline, with the explicit aim of revising and updating programme content . This takes the form of sessions which adopt the model of ‘wikithon’ events where appropriate entries and contributions to any given topic or discipline are documented, using both word of mouth and search engines, such as Google, and databases such as UCL IRIS, PubMed and Web of Science. However, unlike a ‘wikithon’, the output will not be a Wikipedia entry but a resource pack, provided on a platform such as Moodle, available to Programme Directors and Module Leads.

Discussion of Programme and Module Amendment forms will be formal agenda items for both the BAMEhack and Synthesis sessions, and explicitly badged as the desired output of the activity overall. This will embed an expectation in both staff and students that the overall objective of the project is to make changes to course content.

The evidence for the project was drawn from qualitative research in the Faculty of Engineering and research that suggests that programme reform can reduce awarding gaps (Choat, 2020; McDuff et al., 2018 and Frings et al., 2020).

References:

Choat, 2020, Learning and Teaching in Politics and International Studies, doi.org/10.1177/0263395720957543

McDuff et al., 2018, Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning, 20:79-101)

Frings et al., 2020, Soc Psychol Educ 23:171–188