Making a SPLAS: this award-winning SELCS team is tackling the BAME awarding gap

Mazal Oaknin, Alejandro Bolanos-Garcia-Escribano, Haydn Kirnon and Marga Navarrete won the UCL Faculty of Arts & Humanities Education Award 2024 team award for enhancing belonging. This dynamic and tight-knit team has nurtured several projects in collaboration with SELCS staff and students to tackle major issues in higher education, such as the BAME awarding gap. Read on to learn more about their work!

Hi Mazal, Alejandro, Haydn and Marga – many congratulations on receiving the Faculty Education Award for enhancing belonging! Please tell us a bit more about yourselves and how you would describe yourselves as educators. 

We know each other very well as we’ve been co-teaching language and translation modules in SPLAS (Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies) since 2017. We worked hard to redesign the Spanish language programme that we had inherited, but what must be highlighted is that we are part of a very tight-knit team. Our personal lives – our personalities, ideas and beliefs – are very much entrenched within our professional lives, and we believe that our bond and cohesiveness can be felt in the way we teach and work.

From a pedagogical point of view, we have strived to align our teaching methods and materials to ensure progression across the three academic years of the BA in Spanish. As co-teachers of the compulsory modules on Spanish language in general, and pedagogical translation in particular, all undergraduate students of Spanish (as well as those who pursue postgraduate studies at SELCS/CMII) are taught by us at some point. This gives us an excellent opportunity to get to know our students closely, though it also allows us to identify challenges and discuss areas of improvement.

You’ve been working on a three-year project at SELCS titled “Turn on the heating! Tackling the BAME awarding gap by beating the ‘cold climate’ in our classrooms”. What a fantastic title! Can you tell us more about what inspired you to come together to work on this project? What did you observe about BAME/BIPOC students and the way that they encounter the educational system that inspired this project and its formulation?

In our teaching, we have also aimed at achieving best practices and we always endeavour to cater for our students’ needs. Our language groups are relatively small (12–15 students) and participation is highly important and strongly encouraged. Throughout the years we have become aware of the increasingly diverse racial profile of our students, and scholars such as Jason Arday, Kalwant Bhopal and Shirley Anne Tate have made it abundantly clear that the system fails to take into account the different needs of our students in terms of not only the curriculum but also student-staff rapport, pastoral care and teaching dynamics, among other key elements. This is something we had intuitively observed already and that has been validated by other scholars working on EDI-related topics in higher education.

In particular, the work of Shirley Anne Tate has been a source of inspiration to us. We were really empowered by her talk addressing the BAME awarding gap, in which she mentioned students’ “lack of sense of belonging” and the “cold climate” in higher education. Our research expertise lies beyond sociology, but as experienced educators these are issues that we had witnessed in SPLAS, so it became immediately clear that we had to do something to tackle them.

The project’s main goal is to reduce the awarding gap among BA students in Hispanic Studies through a series of multi-level initiatives over three years. You have done this through multiple initiatives, including electing BIPOC student reps. Can you tell us more about the process of working with students to identify and address ongoing issues? What are some challenges and possibilities that emerge from this relationship?

We worked very hard to submit competitive bids to fund our project. Our funding has been almost exclusively used to pay students for their work at a rate that would reflect the emotional labour that we believe is intrinsic to the role. We felt it was crucial to recognise their time and efforts.

In terms of the emerging possibilities, the relationships we have established with students have been transformative and deeply enriching, both personally and professionally. This project has led to many other student-teacher collaborations and to an increasing interest in pursuing PG studies among some student collaborators. Also, the lessons learnt are allowing us to fine-tune not only our materials but also our class dynamics, personal tutee meetings, research, etc. to make them more inclusive.

One ongoing challenge that we have identified is the possible reluctance of some students to identify publicly as BAME/BIPOC and so engage with the project by becoming BAME/BIPOC student representatives. There may be concerns that, in so doing, they become visible or set themselves apart from the rest of the student body in a way that, to them, may feel disadvantageous. Addressing this matter continues to be one of the aims of our ongoing research.

Motivation is key to the project, and it has been the impulse for all project members, staff and students alike. There have been administrative challenges throughout, which has been a considerable drawback. And, of course, there are significant time constraints, given that staff participation is a voluntary and non-remunerative task that has been taken on in addition to a packed teaching/research schedule.

Unfortunately, there have been administrative hurdles that have impacted negatively on the development of the project. Although this has meant having to axe or postpone some tasks and initiatives, the project has also made us more resilient. We have learnt to do more with less.

You have also organised termly workshops that bring together SELCS teaching staff and external experts on the awarding gap. Please tell us more about the topics you’ve discussed, and some of the more memorable discussions or repeated themes which have emerged from these workshops!

A few social events were organised by our student reps. We as project members supported these events.

Apart from the student-led events, we offered workshops and talks led by world-renowned scholars who work on EDI-related topics in higher education. We were grateful that the speakers were all very enthusiastic about our initiative. They recognised the need for a project of this calibre.

Of particular importance is the fact that some topics were commonly addressed by the speakers in their talks, including the need for greater awareness of intersectionality and some of the most pressing issues HEIs are currently experiencing, including (lack of) sense of belonging, the degree awarding gap, unconscious bias, etc. Many of our colleagues have found these workshops inspiring and useful.

A list of our events is below:

• “The degree awarding gap: What do we want? Elimination. When do we want it? Now.” (Angela Jackman, 14 May 2024)
• “How has Black Lives Matter affected racism in education?” (Kalwant Bhopal, 2 May 2024)
• “Speaking Truth to Power …. and other Cautionary Tales” (David Dibosa, 29 February 2024)
• “Against mastery: teaching and thinking in the neoliberal university” (Pavan Mano, 12 September 2023)
• “Advancing the Dialogue on the BAME Awarding Gap” (Jason Arday, 13 June 2023)
• “Making a SPLAS: Why I’m Still Talking to White People About Race” (Haydn Kirnon, 8 March 2023)
• “Creating an inclusive teaching environment” (Madeline Young, 2 November 2022)

Among the questionnaires that students filled in, we have observed positive reactions to our efforts.

Can you tell us more as well about the BAME student-staff support network that you have organised? How would you describe the community that has been grown within this network?

Our reverse mentoring programme has proved successful in subverting the traditional student-staff dynamics, thereby allowing for more authentic collaboration and relationships on an equal footing. Student mentors took the lead in setting up regular meetings with staff mentees, and these took place in neutral spaces outside campus, including cafés, galleries, museums, parks, etc. This contributed to students’ empowerment, boosted confidence and motivation, and a greater sense of belonging. The relationships formed will continue after this project as our aim is to keep providing professional and academic guidance.

We as project leads soon became aware of the need to get everyone together and share ideas and reflections on how things were going. Therefore, we organised monthly social lunches for mentors and mentees to meet and discuss their involvement and to build a greater sense of community. At the end of the project, we also invited all participants to join us for dinner.

We are particularly proud of our students, some of whom have already expressed their motivation to pursue further studies and continue collaborating with us. The mentor leads are currently working on materials such as a toolkit and a reverse mentoring guide under our supervision, which will turn into their first academic publication. This has sparked their interest in research, so we have encouraged them to go down this route and consider PhD studies.

As a group, can you also tell us a little bit about what you’ve learned from navigating these issues as a team, rather than as individuals?

We have learnt from each other by brainstorming and sharing common concerns. Given the nature of this project, we chose not to impose very rigid deadlines or milestones and instead opted to allow for further flexibility. The project evolved organically following our discussions with the students, and we took actions accordingly. We encouraged each pair to define their own objectives and tackle the issues that were more pressing to them.

We ensured that our project remained open to everyone, and it soon sparked interest among colleagues and students, so we were incredibly happy to welcome new collaborations that were motivated by everyone’s approachability and friendliness. By doing this, our project has become a safe space for everyone involved, of which we are particularly proud.

What are some of your observations about current translation and modern languages curricula? In what ways has your research informed your teaching, and vice-versa?

From the outset, we joined efforts to reconsider the materials that we used in class. Because our SPLAS Translation and language modules have a pedagogical function, we made a concerted and holistic effort to revamp not only the selection of authors, but also the topics discussed.

We discussed how this research has informed our teaching practice in a recent article published in language and translation journal Alfinge: https://journals.uco.es/alfinge/article/view/16370

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