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Following the publication of the Eugenics Inquiry Response Group Report in 2021, a Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) team was established.
Context
Eugenics – the pseudo science of 'improving' human populations through selective breeding – had roots at UCL. UCL academics including Karl Pearson played an important role in developing and legitimising the study of eugenics in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This dangerous ideology cemented the spurious idea that varieties of human life could be assigned different value.
In January 2021, UCL issued a formal public apology for its history and legacy of eugenics. The apology and this project are part of a range of actions to acknowledge and address UCL's historical links with the eugenics movement.
Aims
1. Embed visibility and awareness of UCL’s history of eugenics across the organisation.
2. Actively engage with UCL’s eugenics legacy in relevant educational activities.
3. Understand and address the ongoing consequences of eugenics thinking today and incorporate this into inclusive teaching and learning activities where relevant.
4. Develop knowledge and critical thinking skills so that they might use their learning for working with other difficult and/or sensitive curriculum areas.
Our work
The ELEP team worked in collaboration with staff and students on the following:
- Support and develop professional learning opportunities for all staff and students.
- Create resources to support module and programme development.
We also offered a seminar series, small scale research opportunities, and shared findings from national and international experts.
It was important to protect and support people taking part in ELEP’s work, as we’re critically engaging with difficult and sensitive topics:
- Download our accountable space policy [Word], developed for members of our network.
- Download our values statement [Word] for the project.
The Eugenics Legacy Education Project report
We focused on five areas:
- Creating a protocol for teaching 'difficult knowledge'
As acknowledged in the response report, supporting staff and students to feel prepared to work with UCL’s eugenics legacy is an important task. We aimed to share a protocol with the UCL community that has been developed, implemented, and evaluated in collaboration with staff and students.
- Staff learning and development activities
Supporting staff to develop and extend their knowledge, understanding, and confidence in working with UCL’s eugenics history is vital. In collaboration with Arena colleagues, this strand was an exciting opportunity to think about the following:
- productive pedagogies for teaching difficult knowledge,
- the related assessment implications,
- the role of staff/student collaboration in generating student-led content.
- Student engagement and student led activities
This strand involved working with the ChangeMakers team. We included students in planning content, providing feedback, and evaluating activities. We aligned with UCL's Pillars of Employability to ensure that students had meaningful participation in the project. Our focus was on working with students from minoritised backgrounds and securing their trust for sustained involvement.
- Resource development and curation
Providing relevant and useful resources for colleagues wanting to develop or introduce UCL’s eugenics legacy into their teaching is important. Here, the focus was on educational resources (rather than generic eugenics resources). We focused on collating empirical research from both national and international contexts in higher education in partnership with students, staff, and the wider community.
- External engagement – working beyond UCL
Public engagement in this project offers an opportunity to disseminate the project findings more widely and to support dialogue beyond the UCL community. This involved working with education colleagues beyond higher education and those from other disciplines such as the creative arts and charities. We collaborated with the LCCOS Prejudice in Power project, a programme of cultural activism for change against structural discrimination.
Meet the team
Helen Knowler, associate professor (teaching)
Helen led on developing the educational responses to the Eugenics Inquiry Response Group report and worked across all departments and faculties. She is a qualified teacher and experienced tutor at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. She has worked at the universities of Bristol and Exeter before joining UCL in September 2022.
Her expertise is in Inclusive Education, and has published widely on exclusionary practices in a range of education contexts. She specialises in developing inclusive approaches to teaching and learning related to controversial or problematic issues.
Hear from Helen in her Spotlight interview or take a look at her UCL Profile.
Tor Wright, project manager
Tor was the project manager for the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP). As a small team, that means she does a bit of everything with the overall aim of keeping the show on the road.
Tor has always worked in education and narrowly escaped becoming a geography teacher! She worked with children with additional needs for several years, before moving into the exciting world of university timetabling. She then joined UCL’s Medical School in 2016 as a programme manager and is on secondment with Arena to work on this project.
Richard Steele, communication and events manager
Richard helped organise the activities of ELEP with a particular focus on events and engagement activities. He works in the communications team of the UCL Centre for Longitudinal Studies for some of the week with a focus on training and engagement with data users. Outside of work Richard recently completed a diploma in Public Relations.
Wider ELEP team
ELEP was only possible with the support and collaboration of many students and colleagues across UCL and beyond.
Learn more about our student interns.
UCL colleagues can view our termly management reports, details about the governance of ELEP, and information about our advisory board on the ELEP SharePoint site.