Project title: Capture, evaluate, and improve: Co-creating a cycle of empowerment for underrepresented groups (Ca-pow!)
Funding awarded: £99,998.78
Summary:
Ca-pow! aims to co-create a cycle of empowerment for underrepresented undergraduate students by developing a means to capture, understand, and overcome alienating educational experiences. Undergraduates from underrepresented groups will co-lead activities in three workstreams, leading to immediate empowerment for those individuals and establishing the means to deliver sustained empowerment for future intakes of students. It will combine the expertise of the Faculties of Engineering, Social Science and Law, and Life Sciences.
What need does the project address?
Ca-pow! Focuses on students with multiple intersecting markers of disadvantage* to acknowledge the compounding challenge(s) that these intersectional students face during their educational journeys.
*Markers of disadvantage are defined as aspects of an individual’s identity and/or background that could result in barriers in their educational experience, including protected characteristics – such as disability and minoritised ethnic background – and widening participation characteristics – such as low socio-economic status and aspiring state-school background.
In the Faculty of Engineering, intersectional students often underperform compared to students with one or less marker of disadvantage. The likelihood of students who identify as global ethnic majority and disabled graduating with a first-class degree is almost half or one quarter of those who identify as global ethnic majority -only or disabled-only, respectively. Similarly, the dropout rate among global ethnic majority and disabled students is over 65% higher than for students who identify as global ethnic majority -only or disabled-only. This project will seek to support these students, and also to obtain intersectional data disaggregated by ethnicity to better understand the data.
What will the students experience?
Students will participate in co-creation and co-delivery throughout the three planned workstreams. Undergraduates will be recruited from the beneficiary group in Faculty of Engineering at elevated pay rates to co-lead/support all workstreams.
The three workstreams will involve:
- Capturing and analysing data about student journeys with surveys and focus groups
- Evaluating archival data to understand the impact of interventions on the beneficiary group
- Developing peer networks and improving academic personal tutoring schemes.
What are the expected outcomes?
The aim of ca-pow! is to deliver empowerment and equitable experiences before, during, and after university for students in the Faculty of Engineering with multiple intersecting markers of disadvantage.
The intermediate expected outcomes are:
- Establish methods for data capture and analysis to understand the impact of intersectionality on engineering students
- Detailed data from which future widening participation and equality, diversity and inclusion activity can be drawn
- Change to data reporting to include subjective data on journeys as well as quantitative data
- Understanding the links between subjective experiences and objective outcomes
- Training and guidance materials to improve support for students as they start university
- Establish methods for peer networking in engineering, across the disciplines