Equity in Education & Society

This article presents an evidence-based case study of a co-creation research project aimed to build and improve a sense of belonging and community through co-created activities, events, and campaigns. Various activities brought together both students and staff across a post-92 university in the North of England. The co-created project gathered empirical data to explore how belonging and community were experienced by students, evaluated the impact of the co-created events and campaigns for students, and highlighted key areas for the university to further develop. These included recommendations for how the university supports students to feel a sense of belonging, the efficacy of its Race Equality Charter action plan addressing differential outcomes, the learning and teaching approach around using co-creation, embedding equity and social justice within both curriculum and student support services, improved communication systems with students, and ensuring the concept of belonging is at the forefront of student experience. The article concludes by highlighting the intrinsic connection to retention, progression, and success for students with feeling a sense belonging in higher education and describes how co-creation can be used for social justice and equity activism to bring about positive changes to benefit a whole university community.

In the United States, disparities with respect to race, ethnicity, and gender are common across academic institutions, particularly those that are large and have health research-oriented missions. Disparity-affected issues include leadership roles, funding, tenure, and salary. This paper presents a review of the current literature describing those disparities, with a focus on health professions serving major universities in the United States, and proposes approaches to create greater diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) within them. While many organizations nationally are working to address DEIB disparities, academic institutions can benefit from implementing structured approaches and training to nurture their cultures, foster DEIB, and promote psychological safety. We present a literature-based 10-component approach institutions can adopt with relative ease and thus positively support advancing their DEIB engagement. These 10 strategies include the following: Clearly stating DEI values; Conducting gap analyses to identify issues; Using incentives to propel change; Removing bias from recruiting processes; Implementing blind applications processes; Diversifying selection committees; Creating inter-institutional partnerships that truly represent shared power; Developing people and the pipeline; Formalizing mentorship and sponsorship programs; and instituting anti-bias training. Easily implementable strategies can both foster change and build the will and confidence to pursue larger DEIB goals in the future.

The modern development of women’s sports in the United States begins in an opportunistic manner with the passing of Title IX in 1972 as an amendment to the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act. The multiple-decade impact of the renamed Patsy Takemoto Mink Equal Opportunity in Education Act is impressive—it allows women access to sports, and provided access to scholarships for them to obtain a post-secondary degree. Title IX also grew the pool of women athletes worldwide (mainly through U.S. college athletic recruiting) that would horizontally develop semi-professional teams and vertically develop younger women’s sports team as feeder systems. While acknowledging that Title IX has experienced controversy, missteps, and unintended outcomes as described in this article, this federal law is noted as the most successful civil rights statue in history. The direct application of Title IX has seen its days in court and on the field. Even with this colorful history, Title IX has educated generations of women and has brought reality to the words “level the playing field.” This article travels through the history of Title IX, summarizes key points, reviews issues and successes, provides relevant data, and closes with a current look at the law’s implementation.

Since the murder of George Floyd, there has been much more focus on tackling racism and other forms of structural and institutional inequities in ways not seen before by many. This moment of reckoning has, for the first time in recent history, resulted in individual and institutions grappling, with structures, systems, policies and processes that mimic and perpetuate unequal experiences and outcomes. A consequence of these grapplings has been individual and institutional galvanising, aimed at reducing gaps in experiences and removing barriers to equitable outcomes. This paper presents evidence from one primary and four secondary schools, of leaders contending with racism through people, processes, policies and systems to improve experiences and outcomes for staff and students between May 2020 and December 2022.

The Higher Education Sector in Britain, United Kingdom (UK) is currently being taken to task regarding issues of structural inequality and unfair outcomes for student learners from non-white backgrounds, also referred to as the degree awarding gap. How do we disrupt the narrative concerning race, and more specifically as part of our learning, teaching and assessment practices? Using Critical Race Theory, a project, ‘Disrupt the Discourse,’ an initiative launched in 2021 is a small scale case study piloting the application of the aforementioned theory as part of learning and teaching in a Higher Education Institution based in London. The project explored issues of curriculum design, and assessment practices in response to the issue of the degree awarding gap. The initiative explicitly explores uncomfortable conversations about race as part of learning and teaching practice and by working with a team of anti-racist scholars, a curriculum framework and digital toolkit to explore the lived experiences of student and staff was created. Feedback from the pilot was encouraging, academics from different curriculum disciplines and cultural backgrounds saw the initiative as instrumental in re considering assessment practices, curriculum content and pedagogy as part of learning and teaching practice.

This study aims to assess reliability and construct validity of the Greek version of the Attitudes Towards Teaching All Students Scale. All teachers were employed either with preschool or first-school-age children. In Study 1, we performed exploratory factor analysis in order to assess the factor structure in a sample of n = 253 in-service teachers. In Study 2, we performed confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the proposed 3-factor structure in a sample of n = 610 in-service teachers. Results suggest that the Greek-adapted version of ATTAS-mm is a reliable and valid research tool and they are discussed in terms of pre-service and in-service teachers’ training.