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Conversations about race
- 2. Tajah Hamilton – Senior Project Officer (Attainment) Pronouns: They/Them Conversations about Race x King’s College London
- 3. Session Outcomes • What is Conversations about Race? • What do we need to run a session effectively and bravely? • Experience a mini session • Think about how we can utilise the student voice for university-wide action
- 4. What is the Conversations about Race programme?
- 5. How Sessions work • CaR is a journey rather than standalone sessions. Universal Mapping Session BME Specific Utopia Building Session Universal Action Planning session BME participants can choose either option for their CaR journey, or do both if they would prefer
- 8. How strong is your own feeling of belonging and inclusion? Can you identify some things that make you feel this way?
- 9. The Student Voice • There are multiple entry points for the student voice to impact the flow of CaR. • Direct quotes are the foundation of the case studies that participants work on. • Students have been trained to deliver focus groups and CaR sessions for their own departmental contexts, working alongside their departments to design the types of questions that should be asked.
- 10. To end… Rebecca Solnit - “Hope in the dark” “Hope is not a substitute for action, but a basis for it” Alt-Text - A building overlooking the River Thames at sunset. The sun is hitting the windows.
- 11. Thank you Contact details/for more information tajah.hamilton@kcl.ac.uk car@kcl.ac.uk © 2020 King’s College London. All rights reserved
Editor's Notes
- Hi everyone! Thanks for attending today’s Conversations about Race x Officially King’s session. A little bit of background to CaR – originally a student created initiative giving students the opportunity to talk about their experiences of race. It has evolved in recent years to be an in-house King’s offering, to work on closing the attainment gaps for BME students at King’s. It aims to do this by highlighting some of the obstacles in place for BME students, to ensure we can work on eradicating them.
- CaR is an initiative initially created in partnership with Citizens UK (A community organizing Organisation working across the UK ) and now run entirely by King’s College London. Its goal is to to work on closing the attainment gaps for BME students at King’s. It aims to do this by highlighting some of the obstacles in place for BME students, to ensure we can work on eradicating them.
- CaR is split into three sessions – the universal mapping session open to all, the Utopia Building session which is only open to those who are racialised, and the action planning session again open to all. The reason we do this is because we recognise that conversations about race affect different people in different ways. BME people are more likely to have been in situations throughout their lives (and including within HE) where their identities had to be defended, legitimated or explained. We don’t believe that conversations about race should just focus on filling knowledge gaps, it can also be about imagining better worlds where race can be talked about without mentally gearing up to defend yourself. About building the utopias that you want to be educated within. As of this year, the Universal Mapping session has expanded to include delivery from students who took part in our ‘Train the Trainer’ sessions, who are supported by a member of staff within the team. (7 mins elapsed)
- In sessions where aspects of a person’s identity are discussed, we really need to make sure that everyone feels safe and brave enough to contribute. That is where creating collective agreements come in. Ensuring that there is ALWAYS time for collective agreement setting BEFORE getting into the meat of the discussion ensures that all participants feel they can contribute, and they also know that if anyone deviates from these agreements, there will be some kind of consequence, even if that consequence is someone reminding them of the collective agreements. It gives people a framework to work within, and having it be a fluid living document that everyone has contributed to referenced throughout means that participants are much likelier to abide by them. SHORT EXERCISE – lets collectively pull together some ideas for what we’d need to contribute during this session. I can start – lean in / lean out – a community organising principle where if you find that you’re a person that talks a lot in group spaces, you would ‘lean out’ and give someone who usually takes a step back in group spaces to ‘lean in’ and share their stories and views. (3 mins? With post-its – will I need to bring my own??) (10 mins left)
- However, in this workshop, we’re going to focus on the Universal Mapping session. For about 5 mins of our final 10 or so minutes, lets break into small groups and discuss some of the Qs that we answer in our sessions. In a real CaR session, which is around the 2.5hr mark, we would have had time for everyone to have introduced themselves already, so I’m aware that you may not want to actually divulge information to each other, but hopefully with the collective agreements we’ve set you’ll feel comfortable to share something with the group. (question on next slide)
- In groups of 3, please discuss this question (5mins)
- The student voice is at the heart of this project, because as mentioned at the beginning, it was once a project created by a King’s student. Taking it in house meant we needed to ensure it did not lose what made a project like this so powerful. Over the years we’ve seen different ways in which students have interacted with CaR, and ways that they want to interact with it. Lightning Lunches have been added as a CaR offering because after running some student-led focus groups we found that not all students felt ready to jump straight into talking about their experiences and action-planning – some wanted to partake in a more passive manner. The lightning lunches are student-created and delivered, and give both students and faculties an opportunity to hear what students find important on the topic of race.
- As we part ways, I want to leave you with this quote from Rebecca Solnit – “Hope is not a substitute for action, but a basis for it”. If we want to make changes in our institutions, then we need to actually do it, and not just hope that change happens.