Examining geographic bias in our curricula

This workshop will explore to what extent geographic bias (specifically a bias toward research and cases of practice and experience from high-income countries) exists in the faculty and the curricula at Imperial College London. This stems from the well-documented observation that research from prestigious institutions, many of which are in high-income countries, dominates the research publication and citation indices in the research literature. The workshop is an opportunity for you to learn more about this issue and examine your own practices. Imperial’s Geographic Bias reading list analytics platform will be demonstrated. This workshop is part of a larger research project funded through the Excellence Fund for Learning and teaching Innovation.

Who should attend?

This half day workshop, which is part of the Inclusive Learning and Teaching series, is intended for lecturers and teaching staff with responsibility for designing sessions and teaching undergraduate and/or postgraduate students at Imperial.

Key areas   

• Representativeness of your curriculum’s current content and application of the Geographic Bias reading list analytics platform
• Understanding unconscious bias: what it means, what it doesn’t and what to do next
• Existing barriers to including marginalised thinking and less privileged knowledge
• Critically reviewing and diversifying the sources of reading, evidence, research and methodologies used in your teaching

Prerequisites

This workshop builds on ideas introduced in the workshop Introduction to making teaching more inclusive but you do not need to have attended that workshop in advance.

Opportunity to get involved in research

After the workshop, you will be invited for a brief, voluntary individual interview about your views on this topic. We wish to conduct 10-15 interviews in total. These will be arranged on a first-come, first-served basis, and will be scheduled at your convenience. A Participant Consent Form will be distributed to volunteers before the interviews.

Imperial STAR Framework

This workshop would be valuable for those seeking professional recognition through the Imperial STAR Framework. It engages the following dimensions of the Professional Standards Framework (PSF 2023): A2, A4, A5, K2, K3, K5, V1, V2, V4, V5.