Inclusive reading lists: UWL approach and experience

Editor's Notes

• #4: I want to open by saying that all the principals of what I will talk about here are within your ability to replicate in your institutions. To create meaningful change, particularly cultural change is years of work – and today we are talking about work starting from 2017/18 academic year.
• #5: Inclusive Reading Lists or "IRL" originates with this Office for Students-funded project which ran between 2017 and 2018. SAP2 was a HEFCE and later Office for Students-funded collaborative project with University of Derby and Solent University. In 2017/18 I joined the Student Attainment Project (SAP2) at UWL in a champion role.   SAP2 was based on proven successful pedagogic practices, which we term "interventions". The main aim of the project was to narrow and eliminate awarding gaps between different student groups. We say "eliminate" because our view is it is not acceptable to design medium to long-term aims that maintain some inequality. The aim must be to eradicate it.
• #6: This is public data from Office for Students, what you can see here is the gap in 'good degrees' between Black students and White students. Our status quo is not equality or equitable outcomes. About the best thing we can say about this is, it is decreasing year on year. Nevertheless, this is a source of shame for higher education as a sector. This is national data, so do go and familarise yourself with your own institutions gaps. Your own students and applicants can of course see the same data. Within your institutions, your planning or data teams may have data like this down to the level of your academic departments or schools, which you may find very revealing.   Awarding gaps are complex and multifaceted, and changing teaching and assessment practices certainly are crucial to narrowing and eliminating them. So going back to library resources...
• #7: We believe to fully address unequal outcomes, we must work on a whole-institution basis across all touchpoints our students have with us during their study. This means, not addressing representation and inclusivity only in library collections or only in pedagogic practices for example, but working on these and many other aspects of our work with cross-institutional support. That means across academic schools and professional services and with student voice centred.
• #9: The point about cultural change is key. As a library team, we created a new strategic priority that the library would develop more inclusive and diverse library collections and reading lists, which situated within UWL's Inclusive Curriculum intervention.   In justifying this in theory, I base this on the argument made by Black, Asian and global majority student, academic and library leaders (eg. Clarke, 2022; Gyebi-Ababio, 2022; Wilson, 2017) that materials used in the curriculum to be inclusive must be diverse, and reflect and represent the diversity of students themselves.   So that core argument is based on descriptive representation, that is the concept that to be representative a group (such as our library staff) or a pedagogic artefact (such as a reading list) should resemble the community it is drawn from. Boudieu's concepts of cultural and social capital inform our work at UWL. For us librarians, our work involves intentional selection of and providing access to these cultural capital – in form of information resources and independent use of which is one way learners develop embodied cultural capital. It is the case that libraries act as a legitimising agent for these resources. If we provide very monocultural, very skewed collections and reading lists, we do give the impression of acceptability of that worldview.
• #10: Strategic priority for our five-year strategy ensures Library Services ongoing focus – this was something I knew we needed to work on over years, not a one-off project. We also developed a key performance indicator so we could track this work, which is based on assessing our purchasing of first-author titles by Black, Asian and global majority authors. Quantitative analysis like this is very unusual in our sector (I am aware of similar work at UCL by Lesley Pitman and colleagues). As far as I'm aware this type of KPI measure is unique. I know some colleagues object to the idea of setting targets. Using any kind of measure could be called out as neoliberal – of using the logic and measurement of markets to inform our work in higher education; which should be a public good. However, we thought that we did need to know both where we were starting from and have a measure by which to understand progress. This sits alongside a range of other evaluative measures both quantitative and qualitative.
• #12: Is this decolonisation, with or without the quote marks around it, or anticolonial work? There are risks in calling work like this "decolonisation" when it is not: you risk getting that "culture war" pushback and negative attention, while at the same time you are not actually doing any anti-colonial work. That is the worst of both worlds.   So, although we do not describe this as "decolonisation" there is overlap in our methods with similar projects in peer institutions that are framed in this way.
• #13: The following slides show the work that was done by the Academic Support team and our academic colleagues. I am presenting it on their behalf and my thanks go to my colleagues for the work they have been doing.
• #14: We have approached this throughout in terms of library collection as well as reading list. But we are aware that by an item being on a reading list this is indicating to a student that the texts reflect authority and expertise. Meaning some voices are highlighted or elevated and others excluded giving students only a limited perspective. That is why for UWL it is so important that we consider reading lists so closely as well as thinking about the full library collection
• #15: We were wanting to know what our starting point was and then track progress. What became clear is that we should have gone with a KPI that reflected the intersectional approach that we were going to take. Our subsequent work does take that into account. We have kept the KPI as it is due to the importance we place on ensuring diversity in the ethnicity of our authors but we will change it for the new strategic plan. We can’t explain the difference in 19/20 and it doesn’t appear to be related to the impact the pandemic had in purchasing ebooks. The other noticeable difference in that year was the number of authors we purchased from. The KPI was started in 18/19 but we backdated it to 17/18 due to the difference we found in 19/20. Although we have never reported on this, we have also tracked for all 4 years so far, the gender of the authors as well. For gender, it has ranged from 28% to 30% women authors. The KPI covers first authors only and 2 independent members of library staff research the authors. Ideally we wouldn’t do it this way and would only base the KPI on ethnicity data provided by the authors directly (where they were happy to supply it)
• #16: Constantly meeting as a group to discuss what our progress was and what was causing us some delay. It is a standard item for the monthly team meetings and discussed at most 1-2-1s we have in the team. We were aware that there were different starting points in the different schools/colleges and that this project needed to go hand in hand with inclusive curriculum and assessment work. In October 2019, we had a review meeting with subject librarians, Andrew and Pro Vice Chancellor for Student Experience. Feedback at this meeting showed: Budget is needed to purchase inclusive content  Time is needed for module teams and librarian to research new items to add to lists  Would help if priority could be assigned to this by senior leaders in the school/college (where this isn’t already in place)   Availability of format is required from publisher  Availability of content from Black, Asian and Global Majority authors needs to be promoted by publishers and content commissioned from a diverse set of authors  Definition of what an inclusive reading list is needs to be made clear to module teams  Extra staff/time required for some modules especially if taught by HPLs  Need to consider further how we identify items where the content is inclusive but not the authorship (we will be piloting work on this shortly)  We embedded some training on creating inclusive reading lists within the compulsory training on the new Blackboard environment in early 2020. This was the first time we had more formally advised academics on inclusive reading lists.
• #17: We have tried 3 different ways of managing this. 19/20 – a separate budget but not. We had allocated the budget but the order went from the normal school/college budget. We didn’t want to consider the inclusive items as separate to our normal spending. This meant that in theory money would need to keep transferring between budgets. In practice this didn’t work. 20/21 – inclusive spending came from the normal school/college budget and we tried to keep track for through a shared excel document. Again in practice this was too prone to things not being recorded correctly. 21/22 – We formally ringfenced 15% of the budget and tracked spending per school per month. This worked much better but we soon realised we should have done it on title rather than spend. That was a more accurate figure of how much content was being purchased. We tracked both throughout the year and we were more consistent on noting which items were inclusive by incorporating it into the ordering process 22/23 – We thought 4 years in we would now be at the point of being stable on how we track it but new changes came in (good but challenging to track) Perlego.
• #18: Developed in January 2021 around the time we were developing a formula for the reading lists. Was to help us be more consistent and clear in the work we were doing. Underrepresentation of inclusive items does differ across the subject areas. Some subject areas might have a quite an even gender split in terms of authors for example. We have tried to consider this very much at subject level. And although I have only mentioned books really so far, we have been looking at this across different formats. What we were conscious of as we were analysing our spending was that we didn’t have a definition for defining a book inclusive based on content rather than authorship.
• #19: Although we have for the last 4 years considered the authorship of the items, we have only in the last few years been considering the content within the book as well. This is still very much a work in progress as we consider the best ways of trying to be consistent in this work. For 22/23 the subject librarian for Film, Media and Design has drafted some guidelines. We are currently working on a 50% mark for the inclusiveness of the content but will be testing this throughout 22/23 to see whether this should be a higher percentage. Example from the guidelines Displacement  The content of the book relates to the lived experience of those who have sought, or are seeking, asylum or refugee status  Ethnicity  The content of the book relates to those from the Global South, or those with heritage from the Global South  The content of the book relates to Indigenous peoples, or those with Indigenous heritage  The content of the book relates to Roma or Irish Traveller communities, or those with Roma or Irish Traveller heritage  The content of the book relates to white privilege or whiteness studies 
• #20: Developed to assist with the APP work to ensure some consistency across the schools and colleges. We were conscious when developing this table that the length of reading lists were quite different across the subject areas, not all had essential reading and that we wouldn’t always know the inclusivity of some items on the list. Main issues faced is that we haven’t systematically checked each reading list against this formula. We apply this formula generally to new lists or lists where we know an academic (potentially with their librarian) has been working on diversifying the content. Therefore there is potentially quite a lot of RL that we don’t know are inclusive as they haven’t been checked. Of the ones we know about we estimate that only 8% are between medium and very high in inclusivity so we know we have a long way to go yet.
• #21: This academic year we are trying to do more consistent checking of lists to see their level of inclusivity. A colleague looked at a subject area’s L4 and L6 reading lists. There were several lists that they were unable to decide upon due to the lack of information so the above only reflects the lists that could be researched. We do think taking a more consistent approach will be beneficial especially when hand in hand with the guidelines being developed.
• #22: Started co-create campaign in 20/21 but not much interaction with it from students. Towards the end of 21/22 we redesigned it to be much clearer and easier for the students to suggest material. Now includes examples to help inspire students on the content we are looking for. The book is authored by a person from a marginalised and/or underrepresented group.                      For example: an LGBTQ+ writer; a writer with a disability; a writer from a working-class background; a writer from the Global South; a writer with heritage from the Global South. The book is authored by a person from a contextually underrepresented group.                                    For example: a woman writer in a field dominated by male writers. The content of the book relates to a marginalised and/or underrepresented group.                              For example: indigenous populations; queer studies; fat studies.
• #23: We wanted to hear directly from the students and felt this would be useful in discussions with academic colleagues as well as publishers, content providers etc. We didn’t expect that this exercise would elicit different responses to the comments that students from other institutions had provided in other research but we felt there was a real power to hearing from UWL students. We asked 10 questions.   During your studies this academic year, have you noticed for any of your modules whether the reading list was inclusive. Is this something you would naturally look for at the start of using the reading list or something that you become aware of during the module?   Do you see any value in having an inclusive reading list in your module? Why do you feel that way?   What impact does having an inclusive reading list have on your learning and engagement in the module?   If you do see a benefit, does this extend to your full course or do you find the benefit only in the module with the inclusive content?     How important is having an inclusive reading list to you in terms of your success in the module and course?   What is your expectation of what an inclusive reading list looks like?    We would consider an item inclusive in terms of authorship and/or content (case studies, examples, edited chapters etc) What would be your expectation of an inclusive item?   Has there been a change in the amount of inclusive content you have seen in the library (not on reading lists) throughout your course and does this have an impact on you?   For modules you study without an inclusive reading list, what would be your message to the module teams and library about this?   What would you say is the most crucial thing the library and university should do in the coming 12 months in terms of inclusivity? 
• #24: These two quotes I found very powerful and impactful. A theme from the research was in addition to the above how important the subject relevance of the materials are
• #36: Module level analysis 
• #37: Student level analysis 
• #40: Module level analysis