Summer Projects '22 

My project has been to map ED&I into the Engineering curriculum, particularly focusing on how mySkills activities can be implemented into a standard 3-year undergraduate programme. This has consisted of producing long and short form reports, using Bloom's Taxonomy as a framework from which all of the 'Diversity and Inclusion' mySkills activities have been assessed based on their level of complexity, before being recommended for 1st, 2nd, or 3rd year students. The same has been done in collaboration with Ollie and Fudail, regarding the tutorials they have produced. A poster of the benefits of engaging in ED&I work and activities, which also includes the views of other DiCE project students, is also being produced with the aim of motivating students to engage with equality, diversity and inclusion content in the curriculum.

My self and Weixiang were tasked with planning a diverse graduate event for October 2022 and proposing an approach to mentoring and organising charter. Over the course of the last few weeks, we have been carrying out research in order to see how we can create an event that will cater to students from underrepresented backgrounds. Our main focus is on helping students from these minoritized backgrounds to become aware and comfortable with the resources that the university currently provides. From our research, we have found that a majority of these students lack confidence and a sense of belonging to their department. So, we aim to tackle this by holding tailor-made events such as this one.

Studies have found that there are ways in which we can potentially look at increasing this amongst our student body. The methods include collaborative group work and assigning students to academic mentors/tutors to guide them through their time at university. With our event, we have decided to make it a social careers event where students can socialize with each other and learn about what resources they have at their disposal. We look to collaborate with the BAME Engineers Society on this event in order to promote and increase participation in the event. We believe this is one way in which we can make our fellow students more comfortable attending such an event. 

Summary of what has been done: We now have an 'Inclusivity Calendar' in the navigation of the project's Google Site. The page consists of a Google Calendar link which is accessible to all the registered students and staff members within the university. When clicked on that link, one will be able to add this calendar onto their personal calendar. The Inclusivity Calendar has been prepared for the 2022/23 academic year starting from September 2022 to August 2023. The Google Calendar consists of most of the major festivals of all religions and also events of international/national importance and they all have been differentiated to each other by use of different colours in the calendar. When clicked on a particular event, it has a link which will take you to a third-party website which gives brief information about that event and also asks the viewers to let us know if there's any false information. Regarding the second part of my project I just have been looking over all the resources and findings of the projects from the past year and I will possibly create a well-organised Google Site in the near future which will help one navigate through all those past resources in an easily understandable manner. 

I am looking at how staff training within the faculty could be made more inclusive, along with providing potential training opportunities for staff when doing activities among students or within the department. One aspect is to look at the training already available within the university, with regard to various EDI-related subtopics. Then look at how it could be made more accessible to Engineering staff. If there is no suitable training available provided within the university, I will recommend further training packages run by external providers to broaden the understanding of EDI issues so that staff can continue to improve their understanding. 

This project involves researching the current and prospective ED&I (equality, diversity, & inclusions) practices and considerations of student-led societies, as well as best practice guidelines from external organisations and advocacy groups. Research is conducted through a literature review as well as interviews. The research would then inform the development of a proposal to provide training, resources, and expectations in terms of diversity and inclusion for all the faculty’s CCA activities. The output intervention includes a literature review, as well as ED&I strategy documents and toolkits targeted at both staff and students, covering areas such as inclusive events planning, inclusive team operations, and inclusive recruitment.

I'm working on a session to educate students about Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity, how it's important in university, future careers and most importantly engineering that's supposed to benefit humanity. A lot of my work has involved researching and writing up case studies for examples of failures in inclusion and diversity in an engineering context, and covering an example for nearly each discipline of engineering. Creating a session with this allows the students to answer prompts to make them understand these and then go away, do research, and write their own.