ELEP Case Study 2: Students-as-partners approaches

Discovering ways to bring staff-student partnerships into projects engaging with UCL’s eugenics legacy.

ELEP Case Study 2: Students-as-partners approach (a downloadable Word version)

Introduction 

An important strand of activity for the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) has been to work closely with students as we explore sustainable and inclusive ways to teach UCL’s history and legacy of eugenics. UCL has a strong track record in student partnership through the ChangeMakers (CM) initiative; we value learning about student partnership from CM colleagues and drawing on their expertise.

In this case study we explore the challenges of making our eugenics history and legacy visible to students across UCL, developing methods of engagement, and evaluating the importance of working with students as partners.

Our three examples showcase the work of students and staff collaborating to generate new ways of engaging with and learning about UCL’s history of eugenics: 

Jo Baines and MA Public History students working on the history of women working in the Galton Laboratory.

Stephanie Dickinson working with Department of Statistical Science students on understanding the history and legacy of eugenics in the department. 
ELEP fellows (illustrating doctoral student scholarship and engagement) designing and producing a podcast to boost public awareness of ELEP.

Objectives of ELEP staff-student partnerships 

Staff and student partnerships in higher education have been shown to offer numerous benefits, both for the students and the staff involved (Bovill, 2019). Students had an active role in the formation of UCL’s Eugenics Inquiry in 2018, therefore it was very important that students had a central role in ELEP’s activities, shaping and leading on the direction of post-inquiry learning. We had four objectives for collaborating with students in ELEP: 

Fostering a sense of community: we were keen to build a supportive academic community where students feel connected to the institution, their peers, and their tutors.

Enhancing learning experiences: fostering a deeper understanding of the ways that UCL’s history and legacy of eugenics continues to resonate today.

Developing essential skills: collaborative activities can help students to develop and extend skills such as communication, problem-solving, and teamwork, which are highly valued in the world post-graduation.

Promoting wider critical engagement with difficult histories: We wanted to encourage active participation with how we address historic information rather than passive consumption of information about UCL’s history and legacy of eugenics.

Developing staff-student partnerships 

Collaboration between staff and students in higher education around sensitive research topics requires careful planning and consideration. Here are some strategies that can be employed: 

Preparation: It’s crucial to prepare students for the introduction of potentially difficult or sensitive topics. This meant building in adequate preparation time to think about the impact of eugenics histories and legacies more widely, and understanding how student partners felt about working with a difficult topic over a sustained period.

Understanding ‘difficulty’: What constitutes a ‘difficult’ topic can vary among individuals. Therefore, understanding how ‘difficulty’ is defined can be a valuable first step in designing engaging resources. We needed to unpack how our student partners encountered difficulty in their own studies and then think about the challenges tutors might face in designing engagement and inclusive sessions (see microCPD Helen Knowler).

Inclusive learning: Incorporating direct engagement with difficult topics can drive innovation and creativity in teaching and learning. This process involved the team considering issues such as inclusive learning strategies, culturally relevant teaching approaches, and authentic assessment opportunities.

Critical thinking skills: Teaching difficult topics offers an opportunity to teach critical thinking skills. Our staff-student partnerships enabled us to engage in challenging conversations, to agree on productive solutions to teaching dilemmas and to think about broader concepts around social justice and equity.

Ethical considerations: Consider the methodological, ethical, and practical issues involved in the work. For example, taking into account the workload of students and staff in working on projects such as ELEP and how to respond as a team if staff or students disclose or discuss problematic practices they have observed or experienced.

Examples of ELEP staff-student partnership work 

Supporting student scholarship

Jo Baines, UCL academic liaison librarian/archivist, devised an exciting project in collaboration with ELEP for a group of MA Public History students in 2023/24 as part of their core module ‘Critical Public History’. They grappled with the role of women in The Galton Laboratory, an important space in the production of early eugenicist research at UCL and an unusually high employer of women. The students researched the women, updated their Wikipedia entries, and ran events on two UCL campuses (UCL East and Bloomsbury) to share their work with UCL’s unique collections. The project supported ELEP’s wider aims to increase the visibility of post inquiry work across UCL. It also inspired further student research into eugenics and provided vital feedback for the Special Collections team to consider how to compassionately use this material in future engagement work.

Image 1. Women in the Galton Laboratory event.

Supporting student experience

Stephanie Dickinson, a Teaching and Learning Administrator in the Department of Statistical Science, happened to notice several old objects and reference to eugenics and eugenicists when clearing out cupboards in her department and the fact that a bust of arch-eugenicist, Karl Pearson, loomed over students in their study space. This piqued her interest and ELEP encouraged her to apply for ChangeMakers funding to work with students to support her department to confront their eugenics legacy. She recruited a small group of statistics students who participated in workshops about UCL’s eugenics legacy, who then presenting their findings to their department leadership (and created a poster about their work). The department are keen to expand on this work, so are currently co-funding (with ChangeMakers) a project to create new resources for prospective students which includes content on their eugenics past.

Stephanie shared her thoughts on the whole process with ELEP and our resident artist, Weihong Tang, in her story, Change or bust.

Supporting student growth

ELEP fellow and UCL PhD candidate, Yuncong Liu, successfully bid for additional funding from UCL’s Institute of Education Early Career Impact Fellowship initiative to turn an ELEP paper presented at King’s College London’s Freedom to Learn Conference (April 2024), into a podcast, Can Education Heal? What I Learned from Working with the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) Team on Reparative Pedagogies. The podcast has currently been downloaded by over 50 people and is an accessible and engaging to hear about student scholarship and addressing eugenics legacies at UCL.

Image 2. The ELEP team recording the podcast.

Colleague in these examples shared their thoughts on their work with ELEP and our student artist, Weihong Tang, available on the ELEP website.

Key reflections

Several core themes emerged from our reflection on the work on staff-student partnerships: 

Image 3. Reflections from a feedback session with MA Public History students.

Engaging with difficult histories and legacies is an ongoing process. The work was important in meeting the need to develop teaching and learning materials. However, some of the potential for harm (from long term engagement with violent or traumatic history) could not be anticipated.

Inclusion and equity are core values for partnership work. Eugenic ideologies infect many aspects of society and may impact staff and students in many ways. Partnership work needs to consider the psychological safety of contributors and allow space for supported reflection.

Students want to see the incorporation of this history in relevant and appropriate ways. Our student partners, and the students and staff they collaborated with, recognised the value of actively confronting and addressing eugenics histories at UCL.

Students can lead these conversations. Opportunities for students to lead on aspects of ELEP’s aims should be supported.

Conclusion

UCL’s history and legacy of eugenics provides an important reminder of the work that still needs to be done to challenge discriminatory attitudes, to create inclusive spaces across the organisation, and that the avoidance of similar mistakes requires vigilance. Culture change rarely happens overnight, but the work highlighted in this case study shows that with teamwork and multi-level support, people can make a difference. Drawing on the work of Sriprakash (2022) we advocate for an approach that centres reparative practice, where acknowledgement and healing have a prominent role in partnerships for change.

If we were to offer three tips for people keen on doing something themselves, they would be:

Just do it!: It will never be the right time, and you won’t know the exact right people to work with, and you will make mistakes. But once you start, you will find like-minded people and support.

Be a ChangeMaker.: There are currently two ChangeMakers application points each year at UCL. Alongside funding to support student engagement, the CM team also hold a wealth of knowledge and experience on staff-student partnerships.

Explore UCL.: UCL can be overwhelming. However, its size and scale means that often something already exists, you just don’t know about it. Investigate student societies, charity links, widening participation activities, communities of practice, and research opportunities.

Acknowledgements 

Thank you to the MA Public History team led by Jo Baines, with students Julia Chaffers, Mad Chase, Breda Corish, Amelia Craik, Jahanara Rafique, and Minyue Wu.

The staff and students who participated in the Statistical Science ChangeMakers project including project lead Stephanie Dickinson, Prof Gianluca Baio, Teresa Lee, Zhouyan Gong, Benjamin Meaby, Ray Wang, and Nasrin Younga.

ELEP fellow Yuncong Liu, Xiaoyan Guo, Havva Görkem Altunbas for their work that led to the podcast.

Finally, thanks to all the colleagues who continue to support this work, far too many to mention.

Further resources 

In collaboration with a group of PhD students, the ELEP team have written a paper, Can education heal? Staff and students exploring reparative pedagogies in the context of institutional harms in higher education.

The UCL ChangeMakers website holds information for staff and students interested in requesting funding for a project to enhance the learning experience at UCL.

An Inclusive Education Training Programme (designed by Dr Manjula Patrick) - we recommend all staff and students work through.

There are a plethora of UCL teaching toolkits available to support teaching across and beyond UCL.

References 

Altunbas, H.G. et al. (2025) “Can education heal? Staff and students exploring reparative pedagogies in the context of institutional harms in higher education”, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education [Preprint], (35). Available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi35.1337.

Bovill, C. (2019). Student–staff partnerships in learning and teaching: an overview of current practice and discourse. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 43(4), 385–398. https://doi.org/10.1080/03098265.2019.1660628

Sriprakash, A. (2022). Reparations: theorising just futures of education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(5), 782–795. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2022.2144141

Knowler, H., Lazar, I., Godfrey, J., & Rivera Lopez, M. (2024). Exploring experiences of educational exclusion for engineering undergraduates: reflecting on the value of staff-student partnerships for researching sensitive topics. The Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change, 9(1). Retrieved from https://www.journals.studentengagement.org.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/1216

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