Barriers to engagement at UCL

Authors

  • Jenny Marie UCL
  • Sally MacKenzie UCL
  • Steve Rowett UCL
  • Moira Wright UCL

Abstract

This case study considers the views of ten University College London (UCL) staff about ‘hard to reach’ students. Staff were chosen so as to give an insight into the issue for different types of engagement: academic, support, union activities and volunteering. Focusing on these types of engagement together confirms that part-time students face barriers to engaging in many aspects of university life and that all students face barriers to some aspect of university life. This paper also draws attention to the potential risks inherent in focusing on ‘hard-to-reach’ students as an approach to improving inclusivity. It also raises the issue of how barriers to inclusion interact and whether we should be considering ‘staff engagement’ alongside ‘student engagement’.

Author Biographies

Jenny Marie, UCL

Jenny is the Director of UCL ChangeMakers, which aims to forward staff/student partnership for educational enhancement at UCL and to enhance the quality of education at the university. She provides pedagogic advice to the Engineering Faculty, co-leads on the evaluation strand of UCL’s Assessment Review and teaches on UCL’s professional development scheme for education, UCL Arena.

Sally MacKenzie, UCL

Sally is Head of Student Engagement at UCL, ensuring that students feel that their opinions are valued and acted upon and that they are aware of opportunities to collaborate with staff as partners.  Sally also oversees the UCL Global Citizenship Programme, which brings together around 1000 students every year from across a variety of disciplines to explore our biggest global challenges. Prior to joining the team, Sally has worked for a number of other universities including Macquarie University in Sydney and King’s College London.

Steve Rowett, UCL

Steve leads the Digital Education Futures Manager at UCL. This small team explores technologies that are coming over the horizon towards higher education, and helps prepare the institution and its people to adopt them. His current projects include building an academic social network for learning at university, learning analytics and the potential of data, and building a student-as-researcher toolkit.

Moira Wright, UCL

Moira joined UCL in 2007 working for UCL CALT and moved to Digital Education in 2014 - previous experience in HR, recruitment and business consulting with employers from Blue Chip to start-ups on business services for high tech companies. Moira has a focused interest in student digital and information literacy skills for employability.

References

Crewshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiractist Politics’ University of Chicago Legal Forum 140, 139-167. Available at: https://philpapers.org/rec/CREDTI (Accessed: 11 August 2017).

Marie, J., Rowett, S., MacKenzie, S., Wright, M. and Lusk, S. (2017) ‘Which Lenses Best Help us Make our Practices Inclusive?’ Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change, 5.

Porter, A. (2013) ‘Meaningful Engagement with Disabled Students.’ In: Dunne, E. and Owen, D (eds.) The Student Engagement Handbook: Practice in Higher Education. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Ltd., 181-196.

Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change cover

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Published

10/02/2017

How to Cite

Marie, J., MacKenzie, S., Rowett, S., & Wright, M. (2017). Barriers to engagement at UCL. The Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change, 3(1), 286–292. Retrieved from https://journals.studentengagement.org.uk/index.php/studentchangeagents/article/view/586

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2017)

Section

Reaching - Whose Responsibility?

License

Copyright is held by the journal. The author has full permission to publish to their institutional repository. Articles are published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence.