Changing Mindsets launches at UAL
The two year, HEFCE funded Changing Mindsets project launches at UAL in mid-September 2017, focusing on interventions to close the attainment differentials of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and working class students.
The project is led by academics at the University of Portsmouth and will be run as a series of student and staff workshops at Canterbury Christ Church University, University of Brighton and the University of Winchester, as well as UAL. Professor Susan Orr, UAL Dean of Learning, Teaching and Enhancement is the UAL project lead.
Changing Mindsets will involve around 5,200 university students and 800 university staff. At UAL, 715 students and 100 staff at Camberwell, CSM and LCC will be participating in the first year of the study. The first workshops for invited staff will take place from mid-September onwards.
Changing Mindsets aims to address the awarding gap and improve attainment for all students by building growth mindsets in both students and staff. A growth mindset is the belief that ability develops through effort and by embracing challenge.
Based on Dweck’s implicit theories of intelligence, and learning from UAL’s Breaking Bias staff development module, the workshops will address the barriers to learning created by stereotype threat (Osborne, 2007) and implicit bias (Staats, 2014). A growth mindset has been shown to challenge the self-limiting identities and other issues that stereotypes and biases can create in peer interactions, staff expectations and teaching and assessment approaches.
Want to know more?
You can find out more about the project on the Portsmouth University Changing Mindsets blog and follow @MindsetsProject on Twitter.
And, of course, bookmark this page to keep up to date with progress at UAL.
Contact Vikki Hill, Changing Mindsets Project Associate at UAL, v.hill@arts.ac.uk
Further Reading
Staats, C., (2014) State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review Kirwan Institute, The.
Osborne, J., (2007) Linking Stereotype Threat and Anxiety An International Journal of Experimental Educational Psychology, Volume 27, 2007 – Issue 1, pp 135-154