The University was established in 1900 with an equality opportunity ethos on its student admission. Today, we have one of the most diverse student populations outside of London. Our diversity highlights the importance of taking a whole-institution approach to embedding an inclusive campus culture. While a top-down mandate could steer institutional EDI priorities and policy change, a genuinely inclusive culture only flourishes bottom-up. Both the students and the staff must be engaged and be part of the solution.
We acknowledge that talking about EDI is difficult. As a diversity team, we also seek to spring conversations into actions. This is particularly challenging as our campuses are a shared community made up of members from different generations, nationalities, and wider backgrounds who could have differing views and considerable interest in EDI. Universities also have legal responsibilities to protect freedom of expression, and as well the Public Sector Equality Duty for fostering good campus relations.
Moreover, achieving inclusion requires a whole-institutional approach to take root, embedding in the way of doing things as an institution and the behaviours among members of the university community. This necessitates our diversity team working with our university community to navigate how we coexist and interact with members from a diversity of cultures, identities, and lived experiences. Thus, inclusion requires going beyond compliance and nurturing a culture of respect and openness for good campus relations as everybody’s responsibility. Therefore, the University’s Student EDI team launched EDI learning resources to generate culture change among our student population.
The bite-size modules with learning exercises in our online courses are co-created with students, staff, student union, and community partners. Our content in text, audio, or video multi-modal formats ensures full accessibility for different learners. The tone of the course is intellectual, reflective, and energetic for a campus audience. The topics are relatable to campus life and are transferable as workplace skills, such as intercultural teamwork and bystander intervention, so participants can transform their enhanced EDI knowledge into inclusive practices.
Another hallmark of our initiative is the tactically created partnerships for widening the engagement among our university community. Our Student EDI team’s promotion of these EDI learning resources via equality history months and partnerships with academics, professional services teams, and student groups have created sustainable interest in the voluntary courses throughout the academic year. For example, we co-developed the Shared Living module with our Accommodation team. The module seeks to support our students in developing their skills for co-living with students from different cultures and backgrounds at student accommodation.
Since launching the initial EDI learning content of our Student EDI course, we have attracted over 4,000 self-enrolled students and generated more than 300,000 page views from their sustained participation with the new content. Those students also demonstrated their enhanced EDI knowledge in the post-module exercises with an average course grade of 85%.
This development has helped in establishing a synergised momentum of cultural change for inclusivity. In other words, we do not only aim to diversify our curriculum through our academics, but we also are equipping our students to engage in informed conversations on equality topics in learning and teaching activities. This can be evidenced via our Personal Academic Tutors organising group tutorials to explore and reflect with their tutees together during Black History Month and other occasions.
The Student EDI team’s successful implementation of EDI learning resources for our campus community is built upon a thoughtful design of engaging and accessible content, an open attitude towards co-development, and established partnerships to embed our participants’ inclusive practices across the campus. These translate into the impressive uptakes of our courses and our sectoral recognitions, and ultimately equip our students and staff to embed an inclusive university culture for all and to build a fairer, more equitable, and more sustainable society.
Furthermore, our diversity team members are making our EDI learning resource open access outside the institution. We have already developed collaborations with several UK and European universities to scale up our initiative. This includes the creation of a no-cost arrangement for adopting our resources to be used by other institutions for enhancing EDI literacy on university campuses globally. We firmly believe that our team’s aspiration of cultural change through educating our stakeholders on EDI brings alive our institutional founding ethos of equal opportunity to a contemporary, modern, and diverse society.
