This page on the English Subject Centre’s Diversity and Inclusion Home Page is written by Dr Jonathan Gibson. 
It gives a useful introduction to the UK national context for issues of diversity, access and widening participation. His introduction highlighted two main things for me:
Gibson argues that research (he cites Watson (2004)) focuses on barriers to access in the form of:
- Situational Barriers, e.g. direct and indirect costs; loss or lack of time; distance from a learning opportunity, created by an individual’s personal circumstances.
- Institutional Barriers, e.g. admissions procedures; timing and scale of provision; general lack of institutional flexibility created by the structure of available opportunities.
- Dispositional Barriers, e.g. individual motivation and attitudes to learning possibly caused by a lack of suitable learning opportunities (e.g. for leisure or informally), or by poor previous educational experiences.
Secondly, Gibson is obviously focusing on the experience and challenges of English as a subject, but this raises issues of particular subjects having particular experiences, challenges and social contexts for their access and engagement issues.
Finally, Gibson points out that different institutions have different context. I have experienced this difference myself as I moved from Kingston University to the University of Gloucestershire almost three years ago. Amongst other things, Kingston has particular ethnic mix which is not found to the same extent here in Gloucestershire. However, despite radical changes to the ethnic mix of the institution over the 12 years I was there, the changes in Geography were relatively slow by comparison with other disciplines. Does this kind of institutional and disciplinary difference in experience indicate possible avenues for collaboration if our institutions have different (complementary) contexts and experiences?
For the purposes of the Forum are there any issues that we could focus around that merit research? Do we have sufficient breadth of experience or a sufficient range of disciplines or institutions represented to develop useful collaboration? Are there links to other themes? What is our pooled experience or expertise in this area.
My final thought in relation to Gibson’s page was that PRSI defines the theme ‘Engaging Diverse Communities’ in the broadest possible sense. What other communities could (should?) we be thinking of? For example the business community? The voluntary community? The local community (immediate to our campuses, our town/city or our county/region?)? The global community?
Kenny
