‘Do you identify as under-represented?’ A wellness focused exploration of co-designing a reverse mentoring scheme in partnership with under-represented students

Abstract

Co-design and partnership work between staff and students in higher education contexts is a vast and growing field. However, the meaningful inclusion of diverse student experiences and voices in such work, the co-design of diversity and inclusion interventions (as opposed to curricular interventions) and the wellness impact of co-design and partnership experiences on students remains under-explored. This work sheds further light on these issues through exploration of a unique co-design project undertaken at a Russell Group University which saw 15 students who self-identify as under-represented recruited to a student consultation team. The author and students worked together during early 2022 over a 10-week period to co-design a staff/student reverse mentoring scheme to run within the same University the following academic year (2022/23) whereby students who self-identify as under-represented are mentoring members of academic staff across over 20 disciplines on issues relating to their lived experiences. This piece uses Deci and Ryan’s Self Determination Theory (SDT) and its three basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness) as an analytical framework to assess whether the co-design of a diversity and inclusion initiative such as reverse mentoring by students, who such an initiative ultimately seeks to support, can lead to positive wellness outcomes for the student co-design team. Students’ experiences were captured via recorded reflective conversations in pairs without the author’s presence. Findings suggest the co-design experience, intimately intertwined with students’ under-represented identities, had strong influence on students’ sense and feelings of autonomy, relatedness and competence, with relatedness being a particularly impactful outcome. According to SDT, satisfaction of these needs significantly contributes to wellness. Consequently, this piece argues that the achievement of student wellness should be a central goal for all co-design and partnership work with students, reflecting on the indicators and facilitators of this, as well as some of the challenges and pitfalls experienced in this project to inform and inspire future work in the field.