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(I mainly talk about issues for global majority people here, alongside other protected characteristics – rather than attempt even-handed discussion of all the protected characteristics. Race politics is the lens I am most focused to look through just now, particularly because it seems as if this is a peculiarly deeply entrenched privilege/prejudice in society and in our Higher Education institutions.)

Interest and use of the concept ‘intersectionality’ has increased exponentially since Crenshaw (1989) first introduced this key term, building on Black Feminist Standpoint theory and Critical Race Theory. (A good account of Standpoint Theory can be found in Harding, 1986, and there are articles about Critical Race Theory on OpenLearn’s Race and Ethnicity hub.) ‘Intersectionality’ has been key in opening our minds to the understanding that discriminations (and also privileges) do not happen one at a time, that many people may be subject to many different prejudiced perspectives of our position in society all at once.

Here I would like to suggest we might build on Crenshaw’s concept, to introduce the idea of ‘articulation’. Intersectionality identifies the multiplicity of issues faced by Black women or Black lesbian women or LGBTQ people with a disability. ‘Articulation’ can help identify how to overcome ways privilege operates to silence and contain people with protected characteristics. From identifying ‘intersectionality’, we could move to asking: “Are we enabling articulation?”

Definition of key term: articulation.

‘Articulation’ has two meanings:

• Speaking, putting into words;
• Two or more things connected in a way which allows them to move together.

Both of these are restricted for people experiencing ‘intersectionality’.

Example 1: class and ethnicity

For example, class privilege, in particular, sometimes works to over-write or speak over the top of other protected characteristics. Class privilege already of course means that those from upper/middle class backgrounds are articulating at the expense of those from lower/working class backgrounds, however I want to focus here on how privileges articulate together to strengthen other privileges.

Those from global majority backgrounds might appear to have the same social networks as global minority people from the same socio-economic class background. However, we are not always able to articulate – in the sense of speak our points, and in the sense of move together fully joined up in society – as easily as global minority people. Where social networks are based more on class identity than ethnic community, upper class people of global majority backgrounds, or from LGBTQ communities, or with a disability, may be treated with initial suspicion until emphasising an accent or talking loudly about where we were at school/college proves our credentials. Even then we may not be regarded as full members of that network. Those who are successful in negotiating upper class dynamics of power relations usually have a deep understanding that people with protected characteristics are not as powerful as those with the full set of privileged identities, and therefore not as useful in the network (‘social capital’, as Bourdieu would call it). They are therefore less likely to engage as closely (“articulate”) with those with protected characteristics.

The increased anxiety of those with protected characteristics to prove credentials in an upper class social network with the advantages this offers, also works to further instate socio-economic class privilege.

Global majority working class people, too, are often counted as from Black, Asian, minority ethnic communities, separate to working class communities. Global majority working class and global minority working class people are pitted against each other by campaigns which try to persuade global minority working class people that global majority people are unfairly taking jobs, housing and other resources. This disguises the fact that the funding for social resources is being unequally distributed across class lines, not race lines.

Example 2: ‘white saviour’ behaviour

If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

(Lilla Watson, drawing on thinking of an Aboriginal Rights Group she had belonged to in Queensland, at the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women Conference, Nairobi.)

In ‘white saviour’ behaviour, by stepping in to ‘help’, people take up a position of privilege they belong to and ‘reach down’ to those below them. In so doing, they re-state their power. The very act of ‘helping’ paradoxically fails to offer full articulation to those they want to support. When those in a position of power speak for them, the authentic voice of those being ‘helped’ is over-talked by the voices of the powerful. Those in power move for them. Those with a protected characteristic are not enabled to engage in “articulation”, either in speaking for ourselves or making our own moves.

This is not diversity, but the co-option of diverse voices into dominant power and culture. As an example in Higher Education, we see this when research projects are conducted about those in a position of disadvantage by those in a position of privilege, for which the researcher may both earn a salary/fee and gain kinds of cultural and social capital that enable them to advance their career. Meanwhile, those they are writing about have their views expressed at second hand, and are not necessarily enabled to articulate beyond that.

The researcher may genuinely hope their project will lead to change, but figures about the issues faced by global majority communities during the recent pandemic indicate that we have not come very far, very fast in tackling racial/ethnic disadvantage. Even during the 1980s, for example in the 1982 collection of essays: The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS, 1982), researchers like Errol Lawrence were speaking critically of the way: “sociology generally and ‘race/ethnic-relations’ sociology too, are top-heavy with white personnel” (p.131). Of course it is important for global minority staff to take up a perspective which recognises issues of race politics, and to do work to tackle privilege/prejudice in their own field of study. However, it is now 40 years since The Empire Strikes Back was published. We do not seem to have moved very far during those four decades towards ensuring that global majority academics have equal opportunities even to research and write about the issues we and members of our own communities face.

One way of enabling articulation for global majority communities, then, is to look to create opportunities for members from those communities to do paid research that supports their career advancement. We can do this partly by mapping the researchers involved in these studies. If we are seeing that this research is being done by disproportionate numbers of global minority people, we should ask how it is that they are being enabled to articulate through this research. What is preventing us from recruiting more global majority researchers to the work? What could we do to enable better articulation for global majority researchers, and thereby communities, in this work?

A positive example of enabling articulation in Higher Education

One way of working to do this is the 100 Black Women Professors programme. Identifying that only 35 (now 41 61) of 22,000 Professors are Black women shows us the impact of intersectionality in Higher Education. Engaging directly with the teams who manage Black women who aspire to be Professor, the 100 Black Women Professors programme enables universities to understand how privilege/prejudice might form a barrier for groups of staff with a protected characteristic. Working together towards mutual liberation, enables Black women in particular and hopefully more staff who face similar barriers, towards articulation with and within the institution.

 A positive example of articulation, intersectionality at work.

Picture of a powerpoint slide that says:

A note of hope.
Pilgrim, 2000, p.144

Fashanu’s coming out was an iconic moment for a black lesbian and gay movement which had learnt from black and feminist politics and had experienced a decade of autonomous organisation. The Sun – at the heart of New Right discourse – was beyond reach, but The Voice was speaking the language of a black politics which had been inflected by a feminist understanding of plurality, and it could be addressed in that language. Just as racism can work to support homophobia, pluralist anti-racist discourse could be articulated to speak for gay rights.

I offered this quote from my PhD thesis in a recent talk I gave about Justin Fashanu and the exposé of his sexuality in the media. I discussed how a group calling themselves Black Gays and Lesbians Against Media Homophobia put pressure on The Voice newspaper, by pointing to the equalities policies of local government who were substantial funders of The Voice through placing job adverts with them. They were able to persuade the newspaper to change its editorial line to one that was supportive of the Black gay community of the time.

The Sun newspaper remains beyond the reach of equalities, diversity and inclusion activism. However liberal institutions are at least starting to recognise the detriment which privilege embedded in their own systems: systemic prejudice, institutional racism, causes to those with protected characteristics. There is uncertainty about how to move from a ‘white saviour’ mode, however the recognition that tackling prejudice and discrimination will not be straightforward or simplistic is a start.

To move on from this start, I suggest that we need to think not just about publishing pay gap data, and hearing from those whom the institution fails to resource, support and promote. The institution needs to think about what will enable articulation for all staff.

Fit with academic theory

In terms of academic theory, ‘articulation’ fits well in postmodern thinking. There are many tropes based around speech or text which are used to consider gender/sexuality (Butler using Austen’s “speech act”), and power in general (Foucault on “discourse”). The Marxist Structuralist thinker Althusser’s concept of “interpellation” of identity is also often used in postmodern thinking.

Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ also has congruence with an idea of ‘articulation’. I have referred here to two of Bourdieu’s four forms of capital: social and cultural. As well as economic capital, Bourdieu talks about a fourth form: symbolic capital. Symbolic capital is what the other kinds of capital translate into if they are legitimated. We all have social networks, but not all of them have the kind of power and influence that means they can translate from social capital into symbolic capital. Articulation is perhaps the means by which other forms of capital translate into symbolic capital.

(Cardiff, 2022/ edited 2023)

(Some) references:

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1982). The Empire Strikes Back. London: Routledge.s

Crenshaw, Kimberle (1989) "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989, Article 8. Available at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8

Harding (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Cornell University Press.

 Pilgrim, A.N. (2000). Feeling for Politics: the translation of suffering and desire in black and queer performativity. PhD thesis. Goldmsiths College, University of London.

This blogpost was written to accompany a short presentation for the Future of Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning @ The OU (Online) Conference in June 2022. It considers whether small group learning might support better achievement for our students, and might help us close our awarding gap for Black, Asian and minority ethnic students. It concludes that pro-active inclusive forum moderation, if resourced through training and workload allocation, could provide support for all our students and particularly for those from groups who experience specific barriers in engagement with peer students online.

An understanding of discrimination and the disadvantages faced by those from global majority backgrounds was sharply brought into focus in Black Lives Matter and during the pandemic, when it became clear some communities lacked access to resources which others hardly think of as a 'privilege'. At the same time, the pandemic brought online learning front and centre stage as a means of supporting education.

Drawing on academic literature about how racism is experienced online (Noxolo, 2022; Noble, 2018), and a small review of literature about issues of race politics in online learning, this short talk will sketch out some of the issues faced by our global majority students.

During the pandemic, it became clearly evident that Black, Asian and minority ethnic  communities and families lack access to resources which others hardly think of as a ‘privilege’. The murder of George Floyd and subsequent publicity given to local acts of discrimination and abuse in the UK also made evident the systemic nature of racism in our society and institutions. DiAngelo (2018) had written previously about the insidious ways in which that systemic racism continues to institute a privilege which global minority people often take for granted, and the ways global minority people sometimes refuse to acknowledge that the ease with which they move in society compared to global majority people is other than a norm for everybody, or a natural state of existence in which they should be allowed to continue without change. Writers like Noble (2018), Benjamin (2019) and Noxolo (2022) show how that systemic racism instituted through privilege is also instituted online. Picower (see my blogpost here) describes the particular struggles for liberal-minded (school) educators to comprehend systemic racism.

It has become apparent in Higher Education, that being able to achieve to your full potential is one of those ‘privileges’ often taken for granted. Here at the Open University, as at other Higher Education Institutions, we have an ‘awarding gap’ for Black, Asian and minority ethnic students (Awan, 2020). The size of the gap varies between different courses of study. It is more substantial for Black students, and greater for some groups of Asian students than for others. It is clear that we are not providing all students with the same level of opportunity to gain the class of degree they deserve. For this reason, we choose to call this the ‘awarding gap’ – putting the responsibility for this failure on our institution, rather than an ‘achievement gap’ – which suggests that responsibility rests with individual students (Choak, 2022). We know that individual Black, and some groups of Asian students, are not getting a ‘level playing field’ in their studies at the Open University.

Using Learning Analytics, Nguyen, Rienties and Richardson (2020) discovered that BME students at the OU were 19%–79% less likely to complete, pass or achieve an excellent grade compared to White students. Yet their data also showed that BME students were studying for 4%–12% more time than White students.

These findings are echoed in other studies (not very many!) about race and online and distance learning (based in the United States). There is a shift in these studies from a qualitative approach (De Montes et al, 2002 and I’m going to include Triesman, 1992), to a quantitative approach (as can be seen in Nguyen, Rienties and Richardson’s 2020 study). 

Some studies are about registration rather than an ‘awarding gap’. They explore race and ethnicity together with other demographic factors (not as ‘intersectional’ identity - Crenshaw, 1989, simply as a set of groups who potentially experience disadvantage in Higher Education). They find that similar proportions of ethnic minority students apply to study online as to study on campus (Goodman et al, 2019; Doyle, 2009), although Wladis et al (2015) find that Black and Hispanic students are significantly under-represented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) courses online. 

Athens (2013) offers a more in-depth exploration of ethnicity, achievement and retention than other quantitative studies. In a similar finding to that of Nguyen, Rienties and Richardson, she found that young ethnic minority men were more engaged in their studies than other groups of student, yet got lower grades and were less likely to continue their studies (retention gap).

Athens’ study defines ‘engagement with studies’ as both engagement with course materials and interaction with peers. However an earlier study separates these kinds of engagement. In a study on calculus students, Triesman (1992 and see discussion in Steele, 2010) found that African-American students spent longer working with course materials, but did not ask for support not only from classmates (key in the success of other ethnic groups’ success) – even from class assistants and lecturers. Their achievement was significantly lower than both white students (casual chat about studies) and Asian-American students (regularly working in study groups in the library).  This suggests a possible explanation for the puzzling finding by Nguyen, Rienties and Richardson. BME students at the Open University may be spending more time studying: but in isolation. Triesman’s findings suggest that peer group study chat could be a factor in student grades. (This hypothesis is supported by a large body of literature on small group chat in online education.)

At the Open University, the main formal way students are supported to chat about their studies is through online fora. However, there may be good reason why global majority students would eschew forum discussions.

A small informal account of forum posting in support of study by Baker et al (2018) shows that while students would respond at similar levels to posts from other students with names suggesting diverse ethnic/gender identities, tutors were twice as likely to respond to a student with a white male sounding name than to other demographics of student. An earlier qualitative study on forum posting by De Montes et al (2002) found problematic exchanges between “Anglo”, “Hispanic” and “Navajo” students. Tutor intervention – in spite of efforts to be neutral and even-handed, made matters worse. Using a constructivist ontology with symbolic interactionism and critical theory, the authors identified how “Anglo” students exert privilege online. They found that when a tutor tried to intervene in a neutral even-handed way this further instituted white privilege. 

“Computers are not culturally neutral, they amplify the dominant culture” (Bowers, 2000, cited in De Montes et al, 2002, p.268). Like Google algorithms (Noble, 2018), online education is designed and run by (white) humans. These two studies begin to show how white privilege can be continually re-inscribed into online learning. This makes group learning opportunities uncomfortable and sometimes even hostile spaces for global majority students.

At the Open University, there are usually two, sometimes three, kinds of fora provided on each module:

• a forum for a group of 12-25 students run by their own tutor (Tutor Group Forum),
• a forum for the ‘cluster’ run by tutors who are in a team, usually teaching across a geographic region (Cluster Forum),
• a ‘Module Forum’, on which the Module Team or Associate Lecturers employed on separate contracts, will engage with students from across the module as a whole.

The amount of time Associate Lecturers spend moderating their own and the Cluster Forum varies considerably according to personal teaching preferences. (While some invest time in group forum moderation, others prefer to offer synchronous one to one tutor-student interaction.) Associate Lecturers can voluntarily sign up for training in forum moderation. The training, provided by Peer Associate Lecturer Support and Associate Lecturer Staff and Professional Development teams, is of a high quality however it is unpaid and busy ALs are unlikely to prioritise it.

The human support provided by tutors, with touches of humour and with sympathy or empathy in difficult situations, is highly valued, especially by under-confident students who need reassurance to fully engage with their studies. Moderating fora, and particularly doing so through pro-actively inclusive exercises, is a technical skill. It can be a time-consuming and emotional labour. Engaged and open-minded forum discussion could support all of our students to achieve better. Providing this effectively requires resource investment in training and workload allocation for our teaching staff.

What can I do?

Central academic staff: explore whether forum exercises are part of the module materials. Can these be designed to be more inclusive of global majority students. Is there scope to allocate teaching hours to bring Associate Lecturers together for team discussion about how to manage forum moderation, and perhaps also for workshops on inclusive teaching practice and forum moderation skills.

Staff Tutors: discuss with your team of Associate Lecturers whether there are ways to manage forum moderation so that it is more consistent and more inclusive (if paid time is available on the module for this discussion work). Many cluster forums are run on a rota basis, with the moderator changing every couple of weeks to a different tutor from the cluster: this leads to inconsistent forum support. On some cluster forums, one tutor or a team of tutors, can use teaching hours to undertake the forum moderation, with other tutors choosing to do more teaching via cluster tutorials. Consider which approach would best support students in your cluster. Can teaching time also be utilised to allow the tutor moderators to undertake training.

Associate Lecturers: inclusive education teaching is often additional work which should be part of your paid hours. (If some of us undertake additional work voluntarily, while others stick to core contractual teaching tasks, it will not be possible to support a fully inclusive environment at the university.) If you have got scope in your paid teaching duties to develop inclusive teaching as part of forum moderation, you might like to consider:

• Putting up a thread at key dates (see blogpost);
• Highlighting material in the module which allows students to have a discussion about equalities;
• Putting up material about topical events or other items about equalities, which are also of relevant interest for the students on that module, for moderated discussion.

References:

Athens, W. (2018) ‘Perceptions of the persistent: Engagement and learning community in underrepresented populations’, Online Learning Journal, 22(2), pp. 27–58.

Awan, R. (2020). ‘The awarding gap at The Open University’ on OpenLearn. Available at: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/education-development/the-awarding-gap-the-open-university (accessed 17/06/2022).

Baker, R., Dee, T.S., Evans, B. and John, J. (2018) ‘Race and gender biases appear in online education’. Available at: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2018/04/27/race-and-gender-biases-appear-in-online-education/ (Accessed: 11/072020).

Benjamin, R. (2019) Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Choak, C. (2022). ‘Decolonisation and Higher Education: Closing the Degree Awarding Gap’ on OpenLearn. Available at: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/education-development/decolonisation-and-higher-education-closing-the-degree-awarding-gap (accessed 17/06/2022).

Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139, 139–167.’, University of Chicago Legal Forum. 

De Montes, L. E. S., Oran, S. M. and Willis, E. M. (2002) ‘Power, language, and identity: Voices from an online course’, Computers and Composition, 19(3), pp. 251–271.

DiAngelo, R. (2018) White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Allen Lane.

Doyle, W. R. (2009) ‘Online Education: The Revolution That Wasn’t’, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning. Informa UK Limited, 41(3), pp. 56–58.

Goodman, J., Melkers, J. and Pallais, A. (2019) ‘Can Online Delivery Increase Access to Education?’, Journal of Labor Economics. University of Chicago Press, 37(1), pp. 1–34.

Nguyen, Q., Rienties, B. and Richardson, J. T. E. (2020) ‘Learning analytics to uncover inequality in behavioural engagement and academic attainment in a distance learning setting’, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 45(4), pp. 594–606. doi: 10.1080/02602938.2019.1679088.

Noble, S. U. (2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.

Noxolo, P. (2022). ‘Dreading the Map’. Talk given at the Royal Geographical Society, on 28 Apr 2021. Details: https://www.rgs.org/geography/news/dreading-the-map/ (Accessed 17/06/2022).

Steele, C. (2010) Whistling Vivaldi: how stereotypes affect us and what we can do. New York: W.W. Norton. 

Treisman, U. (1992) ‘Studying Students Studying Calculus: A Look at the Lives of Minority Mathematics Students in College’. The College Mathematics Journal Vol. 23, No. 5 (Nov., 1992), pp. 362-372. 

Wladis, C., Hachey, A. C. and Conway, K. (2015) ‘Which STEM majors enroll in online courses, and why should we care? The impact of ethnicity, gender, and non-traditional student characteristics’, Computers and Education. Elsevier Ltd, 87, pp. 285–308.

Last week I asked colleagues to consider voting for the Hands Off Mangrove garden at the Royal Horticultural Society's Chelsea Flower Show. There was a great response, people were enthusiastic about the opportunity to show our support for both racial justice and re-forestation. 

Probably none of us are surprised that the garden didn't win - and wasn't even in the top three. There is a long way to go before racial justice is a popular cause - particularly in places like the RHS Chelsea show. However, it was great to be able to discuss social issues in this elite context. 

I did laugh when I saw that the garden which won was the one that I admitted was my personal favourite - which I had set aside in the voting in order to support my political convictions. However this choice by so many other people made me think. 

The Perennial Garden: 'With Love', had won a silver medal, to the disappointment of its designer. Loose, wilder planting (including a beaver dam landscape) had been more highly favoured by the judges. Hands Off Mangrove, which will be relocated in inner city London, is about reclamation of an urban site with a loose informal mixture of flowers and edible plants and won a silver-gilt medal. 

However, the Victorian formality and the romance of The Perennial Garden: 'With Love', was a big favourite among the visitors. Two couples even got permission to go into the garden and propose marriage under the Tennyson quote on the neon sign: If I had a flower for every time I thought of you. Unlike many of the large loosely planted garden sites, those of us with ordinary gardens to plan could see how we might take a section of the garden and replicate it, in even a small space. I myself liked the garden because it helped me realise that loose planting (which I generally favour), needs formal structure to support and contain it, otherwise it becomes messy, and that tall spires of white flowers will add depth and perspective to a flower bed. 

I have put aside a square of garden for loose wildflower planting, but in the rest of my garden I use arches and a trellised arbour seat to give a sense of structure.  

Richard Miers is not really looking back in a pastiche nostalgia. His garden has modern art installations as well as the formally clipped Victorian look. However I suspect that it was chosen by people who are looking backwards, in a time of great uncertainty about the future. The uncertainty we face is made even more difficult under a government which has been severely criticised for the way it manages the economy. Families on low incomes are under intense pressure, while ever more money appears to have flowed into the pockets of those already in the top 1% earners in the population. Policies which feed people's fears about Black, Asian and minority ethnic refugees and asylum-seekers, and by extension - UK citizens too, are used as a distraction from this poor record. 

(This is why it is significant that Hands Off Mangrove was built at RHS Chelsea, showcasing the work of two Black gardeners. We had the chance to both think about issues of social and environmental justice, and to realise that Black - and Asian and other minority ethnic, people are not that exotic; we might be gardeners as well as political activists.) 

Paul Gilroy has written about the phenomenon he calls 'postcolonial melancholia', originally in his After Empire and now in a book called Postcolonial Melancholia. This is an idea which adapts Freud's 'melancholia' - the state in which people fall when they are unable to let go of someone who has died, and properly mourn. Freud's argument is that people behave strangely in order to avoid acknowledging that death. 

At a social level, Gilroy argues that many are in denial about the loss of empire and consequent descent of Britain from Greatness into ordinariness. This is evidenced in strange behaviour like chanting: "Two world wars, and one world cup," which English football fans would shout at German fans, or Brexit, or the constant cultural impression created by anti-immigration legislation that Britain is under threat from immigration, when in fact we depend on immigrant workers to keep vital services like the NHS going. (My students on DD102: Introducing the Social Sciences, are about to write an essay in which they could use evidence from the module about this.) Why would we want to shut hard-working people out of our country, instead of welcoming in help for our failing economy?  

Historically, white working-class cultures and people get pitted against Black, Asian and minority ethnic cultures and people. Upper classes do not have to introduce economic management which redistributes to those on low incomes if they can identify a common enemy whom they encourage people to blame for problems like high unemployment. Tapping into nostalgia for an era when Britain was Great (conveniently forgetting that it wasn't particularly great for those in e.g. Manchester slums - again see DD102 material showing one of Engels's sketches of how factory workers' houses were laid out, without any gardens) takes people's attention away from the worrying problem of spiraling energy costs and food prices. 

Are the Emperor's clothes starting to look skimpy even to those with postcolonial melancholic longings? While much of the population are still reliant on newspapers owned by the elite, which unsurprisingly continue to claim that it's the elite who are best placed to manage our economy, I am not confident we can soon move to a vote for social and environmental justice - in elections where this would not just be a symbolic vote. However, with a garden like Hands Off Mangrove built and shown on prime time television, so we can discuss its message openly, maybe we are slowly getting there. 

What would I like to see in the future? Well, maybe a garden by someone like Cleve West that is formal and that showcases how much we have gained from the rest of the world: roses, lupins, peonies - all classic Victorian/Edwardian flowers featured in The Perennial Garden, and all immigrants from elsewhere in the world. Or a cottage garden that is not full of flowers and nostalgia: that shows clearly how 'cottage gardens' were for people who had to use whatever space they could find to grow food and medicinal herbs after they had finished a hard day's work. Maybe a garden that is a solitary auricula in a pot, like weavers used to keep because that was all the garden they could afford.   

On Instagram recently, an event caught my eye: epitomising some of the differences I have begun to think through about ways that global majority scholars go about our research. Even the fact that the event was being advertised on Instagram, rather than just via a scholarly email list, was different. The programme is not aimed at peers with influence in the editing boards of prestigious journals, but at PhD and doctoral researchers: at reaching out to upcoming scholars. It offers different approaches to research: dance, music and creative writing as method; finding your 'voice', community transformation in research (Ebony Initiative, 2021). 

During my own research career, initially as a PhD student, now as an academic educator, I have been conscious of struggling to fit my ideas into mainstream academic writing. Here I reflect on some of the different ways in which those from the 'global majority' might slip through 'global minority'/'global North' (Europe, USA, Australasia) ways of measuring and capturing academic thought. This makes us look as if we are not achieving well in the ivory tower of a white higher education system. 

Referencing - "standing on the shoulders of giants". 

Ironically, the difficulty I have referencing the sources for my ideas has given me a powerful awareness of the importance of global North referencing systems. I lay strong emphasis on referencing with my own students. 

Newton (referencing other scholars! he may have been drawing on a seventeenth century writer: Robert Burton, or the twelfth century bishop Bernard de Chartres - who was drawing on the Roman Priscian), said in a letter: "if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". To my own students, I explain that their own idea may be good but it will surely be even bigger and better if they can build it on the work of previous thinkers. Testing out our thinking both in line with and against the thinking of others is the standard means by which academic writing is built up in the global North. We both demonstrate this development of thinking, and affirm it, and undertake it, through referencing. By describing my view of academic thinking as built on that of Newton, I am able to use his tried and tested metaphor and also to get authority for the idea. 

But what if there isn't a written source which we can reference? Much of my own early thinking about the intertwining of race politics, sexuality and feminism came from intense discussions I was part of in the black lesbian 'community' in London ('black' then having a political meaning which now might be covered by 'people of colour'), from attending performance art shows and photography exhibitions at which I absorbed ideas that were not conveyed in words. Although in many instances these radical thinkers and activists were drawing on books and essays (Moraga and Anzaldua (eds), 1981; hooks, 1981; Lorde, 1983), they gave these a British inflection and we developed the ideas in them in discussion. I still write with these ideas in mind, but I can't acknowledge them in the standard way. (In some cases, I only managed to afford to put the books on my shelves some years after absorbing and using their ideas.) 

In the writing of my students from a global majority background I also see them drawing on lived experience and verbal discussion with family and friends. The global majority experience is rarely documented for us to reference so their argument can be rich and nuanced, but the marking scheme may make it look as if it is thin and poorly substantiated. (One solution here is to add some of the references from material that is ostensibly from a global minority perspective, and which supports the case being made - this then allows the argument to be rewarded with the marks it deserves.)  

I'm not saying that referencing is not a good way of working out academic thought; only that there are other (black and minority ethnic) ways of developing thinking which it's difficult to properly recognise in a white dominant mode of writing. (Similar ideas have been expressed about women's writing by Henrietta Moore (1994). You can see here how I lend my idea about a different mode of writing among global majority scholars and students authority by referencing the published thinking of a white author on gender.)  

Collaborative writing - the Empire Strikes Back. 

In 1982, a collection of essays was published by a group of young scholars at Birmingham University. Unlike other scholarly collections, it didn't bear the names of individuals who had edited it. It has to be referenced as (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1982). Inside, the scholars wrote of the way in which all had influenced each piece of writing, of how they had supported each other and thought through ideas being offered together. They didn't want to claim individual acknowledgement for the collection, they wanted to acknowledge their collaborative approach to writing. 

This is in stark contrast to the mainstream global minority academic publishing world. It is key in academia to be known as the author of internationally significant texts. Unscrupulous practices: naming lists of those who have had little to do with the research being written about, are common. Many stratagems for getting work into high level journals are exercised. This is because major funding is attached to being able to contribute to your own institution's Research Excellence Framework - which is based not on your actual research but on your published records of it. There are complaints that the work rewarded in a funding framework which is strongly supported by the older Higher Education Institutions (some of them are very old!), can be derivative, repeating itself and contributing little to change or scientific innovation in a struggling postmodern society. 

Playing the game

I wrote one article once that was capable of being put into the REF. I happened to be working for a short period in what's known as a 'Russell Group' university, where I was amazed at the conveyor-belt efficiency of the support provided for writing up REF-able academic articles. A colleague asked me in flattering accents to present some of my PhD research at their seminar series. When I had done that, and we had all enjoyed a meal out afterwards (it was a struggle to pay for my share, but it was nice to get out), he suggested I write up my presentation for a journal housed in the department - he was on the editorial board. I don't know who the kind person was who reviewed my article but their comments allowed me to transform my thinking, and they had even heard of a book which had relevance to my ideas - which I could reference properly. It was a wonderful, supportive experience. 

Unfortunately it was at complete variance with other publishing experiences I had. I was variously accused of plagiarism and under-referencing (!). I had comments on my paper about minority ethnic kinship patterns asking why I was not talking about community and security (because I'm writing about sexuality and kinship?). 

Not playing the game

As it became clear I was not going to progress in academia, I fell back on my teaching skills - I currently enjoy a richly rewarding teaching job. I lost the will to battle in what I found to be a sycophantic and bullying academic publishing culture, completely detached from community activism (academic journal articles are of no interest to my employer anyway). I write blogposts like this one, where I can focus on my lived experience (and which can be cited - I become my own written authority!). I write articles for accessible education platforms like OpenLearn and other more populist pieces - getting a far bigger readership and impact than through academic journals. I became a school governor, and then the member of a local government equality taskforce. 

Can we bring on board global majority thought in an academic system which is set up to recognise centuries of global minority thought? I don't want to throw out referencing altogether. I believe we can find newly developing open and accessible means of publishing and disseminating work (Weller, 2014), which will support more diverse ways of writing up research. 

References

Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, (1982). The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain. London: Hutchinson. 

Ebony Initiative, 2021. 'Creative & Decolonised Research Methods', Details available at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ebony-initiative-summer-institute-creative-decolonised-research-methods-tickets-163528085907 (accessed 8/8/2021). 

hooks, b. (1981). Ain't I a Woman: black women and feminism. Boston: Southend Press. 

Lorde, A., (1983). Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press. 

Moore, H. (1994). A Passion for Difference. Cambridge: Polity Press. 

Moraga, C. and Anzaldua, G.E. (1981) (eds.). This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, Mass: Persephone Press. 

Weller, M. (2014). The battle for open: how openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory. Ubiquity Press. 

There is anxiety among feminists, both those questioning and those supporting transgender politics. Transgender activists find comments from feminists questioning their identity particularly confusing and upsetting (compared to the expected critique from right wing thinkers), as the struggle for transgender equality is based in the feminist movement and thinking. Feminists feel that a gender identity they have fought hard to establish as strong and positive in the face of continual and ongoing patriarchal violence and backlash is undermined in the rise of ‘queer’.

Here I will explore some of these issues through my personal memories of gender and sexuality in the 1990s London scene, and academic thinking on gender identity. I hope to offer tools and insight about the positions both sides are taking. Using ideas about hetero-patriarchy and an ‘economy’ of sexuality, I hope to clarify what is at stake for each of these sides in a new ‘sex wars’. 

The 'Sex Wars' and other history.

I was startled and felt kinda old when I read about the ‘sex wars’ in books and realised that this had become history! The ‘sex wars’ could be seen as a fore-runner to the current transgender debate. This was an intense debate in metropolitan lesbian circles in the 1990s, when feminist lesbians turned our backs on standard male/female role models. The classic butch/femme identities in lesbian culture were widely questioned. I and my friends sought to dress in androgynous outfits (we couldn’t afford glamourous new clothes anyway!). One gay guy pal remarked to me: “But why do lesbian women have to dress in such an unattractive way?” and we both laughed as he went on: “I suppose you don’t want to attract men.”

Later I was to realise that my own identity is high femme. I find it affirming and enjoyable to dress in exaggerated feminine style. (I used to say I was a drag queen in the wrong body.) I recently posted a meme from Some Like It Hot on our office internet chat board, saying I was going to practise walking up and down my hallway in heels as I wanted to look more like Tony Curtis coming out of lockdown than Jack Lemon. 

LGBTQ people can now choose from many more diverse ways to express ourselves and are not expected to represent our politics in an Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick, 1990). It seems absurd now that back then we were saying ‘Thou shalt not dress’ in any way at all, but in that time of political repression (I am old enough to remember Section 28 being brought into effect, as well as being repealed) everything was a gesture at attempts in the broader discourse to control us. Insisting that we existed was a political act that brought violence in response. I remember pictures of Adam and Steve on one Australian Pride float in a retort to right wing Christian groups who would hold up posters saying ‘It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’. People like Harvey Milk paid the ultimate price for being publicly out as gay. This activism followed feminist protest in the 1970s, marching in the streets to ‘take back the night’ after being told that if we wanted to be safe from rape and murder, we should stay at home.

On the London scene, I remember ideological debate exploring the way that two women living together were economically disadvantaged, while two men usually had much better household incomes (DINKies – Double Income, No Kids). Lesbian separatists would refuse to talk to bisexual women, as being traitors to the cause. Lesbian women who accidentally fell in love with a gay guy pal were castigated and banned from friendship groups, as if their choice of partner meant they could no longer think clearly about feminism or gay rights. The publication of texts explaining how to artificially inseminate, and campaigns for gay and lesbian marriage rights led to further intense debate about ‘queer’. Were these efforts to be a 'family' just propping up hetero-patriarchy? The HIV/AIDS epidemic, and moral judgements about this from the Christian right wing, made a culture of casual sex built up during centuries of oppression in gay male communities suddenly life-threateningly problematic.

This historical background offers an epistemological tradition of community discussion about sexuality and gender as context to the current debate about transgender. Hopefully lessons can be learnt from the past too, about how to engage in this debate in ways that don’t exclude and hurt those who are in need of our support – on both sides. 

Current debates about transgender. 

For ease of reference, let’s take JK Rowling’s tweets, widely criticised as transphobic not only by general commentators, also by actors and actresses made famous by starring in her films like Daniel Radcliffe and Emily Watson.

In an interesting twist, the media host Jonathan Ross initially posted strongly in support of Rowling, then after discussion with his daughter, retracted his support saying he had re-thought his stance.

Meanwhile, Rowling entered a fresh media storm, blogging to explain that her concern about transgender arose from her history in a relationship where she was abused by her male partner. The Sun newspaper was censured (what a surprise) for interviewing her former husband who made controversial headline-grabbing statements about the violent manner in which he had behaved towards Rowling.

This is a core part of argument about transgender rights. Cases are cited where men have posed as transgender, gained admittance to women’s facilities (eg prison) and perpetrated ongoing abuse. Feminists who have long battled against the violence and exploitation in male supremacy which is so routine and mundane that it often gets accepted without question, are horrified at what appears to be tantamount to opening the door and holding it open for psychopathic rapists to gain access to women whose reasons for being institutionalised are often linked to abuse they have previously suffered, but which the State does not appropriately recognise. 

Academic writing. 

I’m going to put an existential question mark over this argument. Should there not be a distinction between the transgender identity and the psychopathic abuser identity – these two are not essentially the same. In guarding institutional facilities against a manipulative hyper masculinity, should our attention be focussed on transgender people; are manipulative psychopaths actually transgender or posing as transgender to achieve their aims?

• Are transgender politics part of hetero-patriarchy? Or,
• Does transgender politics offer further opportunity to dismantle a system which has long exploited binary sex-gender subject positions?

Below this concern about potential abuse, there is the anxiety about binary gender positions, and in particular the identity which many now call ‘cis-woman’. Having fought long and hard for society to recognise ‘the second sex’ (de Beauvoir, 1949a, 1949b) as a strong and positive identity, it is difficult to see it apparently being thrown under the bus in a movement away from binary sex/gender. Questions still remain about how to ‘be’ woman. Should women aim to break the glass ceiling and achieve as brilliantly in the board room as men? leaving their children and domestic responsibilities to others (quite often women who immigrate to earn money they send home to their own families while bringing up others’ children). Should we aim to change society so that men become more feminine as well as feminist, all of us aiming to balance a good home and family life with career ambitions? 

Focus on transgender may distract from these essential questions, leading to men quietly continuing to dominate positions of social power.

Is the transgender cause simply about being recognised and supported with appropriate interventions? which could be argued is a distraction from core feminist aims yet to be achieved. There’s also an argument that it is about changing our society beyond the binary sex/gender divide; that it is about undermining artificial male/female distinctions, and therefore is a feminist cause.

Judith Butler wrote that lesbian women and gay men are highly likely to find transgender troubling. Their sense of identity as much as that of heterosexual people’s, depends on a binary gender: if you are attracted to people of the same sex, then there need to be a different and a same sex for you to be clear about who you find attractive.

A good read to start with, in search of a better sense of how we have arrived at an unpicking of the binary sex/gender which seems so biologically fundamental, is Gayle Rubin’s ‘The Traffic in Women’: a Marxist exegetical examination of the work of Freud and Levi-Strauss – originally written as Rubin’s undergraduate student dissertation. Rubin argues for a ‘political economy of sex’ – an understanding of the binary sex/gender system as underwriting our social systems. “The organization of sex and gender once had functions other than itself – it organized society,” Rubin argues. “Now it mainly organizes and reproduces itself.” (p.65). “We are not only oppressed as women; we are oppressed by having to be women – or men” (p.61). In this classic account, we slowly come to see a system in which sexuality does not arise from there being two biological sexes: heterosexual, you are attracted to the opposite sex; homosexual, you are attracted to the same sex. Rather we come to understand that if sexuality is an ‘economy’, it needs the dynamism created between two different sexes (dynamic energy is generated by both attraction to different and to same sex). It is sexuality – as a crucial driver for society, that gives rise to the need to have two biological sexes. (The term ‘hetero-patriarchy’ acknowledges the key influence of sexuality as well as that of sex/gender.)

This leads us to Butler’s argument that gender is performative, which I haven’t room to go into here (except to say this is not at all the same as saying ‘gender is a performance’ – a persistent misinterpretation of her case which led to Butler having to write a whole second book!).

It’s a big ask to throw our sexual economy into the bin, and difficult to imagine erotic feeling without the accoutrements of the binary gender system: stockings and high heels – whether worn by women or men (when there may be the thrill of extra emphasis lent to gender by the cross-dressing); the suited power play of Richard Gere in Pretty Woman; butch/femme or the comfort and pleasure of being with someone of your own sex. It may be hard to imagine sexuality without these. 

At the same time, we have seen how these identity positions repeatedly lead to abuse of power: difference should not necessarily mean inequality instead of diversity, but somehow it nearly always seems to go there. Having a more diverse fluid concept of sex/gender might destabilise masculine dominance: it might not be so easy to be top gun in a range of identities, as when there are just two. Beginning to unpick the binary sex/gender economy through genderfluid and non-binary identity may offer us an even braver new world than Miranda imagined when she first saw (young) men in The Tempest. 

(In this image from Derek Jarman's The Tempest - from the British Film Institute, Toyah Wilcox looks at the elaborate shoe then she puts it on her head - she doesn't understand how to use this signifier of femininity.) 

References: 

De Beauvoir, S. (1949a [1979 reprint]). Le deuxième sexe I. Paris : Gallimard.

De Beauvoir, S. (1949b [1979 reprint]). Le deuxième sexe II. Paris : Gallimard.

Rubin, G. (1975) ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’ in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women. Monthly Review Press. pp. 157--210 (1975).

Sedgwick, E.K. (1990). ‘Epistemology of the Closet’. University of California Press.

Some years ago, I was actually employed to deliver an access course in English Literature 😍 Quite frankly, I could not believe I was being paid to talk with students about poetry 😍😍 I do love the teaching I do now, but that does remain my favourite teaching I ever did 😍😍😍 

My daughter is heading for her GCSE English exam, so I'm drafting up a post for her and her fellow pupils based on one of the exercises we used to do in my classes. In this exercise, we looked at two First World War poems: one by Rupert Brooke, the other by Wilfred Owen. Here in this post, I'll consider a number of aspects of the poems. In setting them side by side: "compare (find similarities between them) and contrast (find differences between them)", I'm able to bring out more elements about them than I could do if I just set out to talk about them individually. It's common for literature exams to ask students to do this, because it helps them to think about literature like this, rather than be asked to think about one poem in isolation. 

As well as looking at each of the poems, I consider some historical and biographical background which is pertinent to the poems. I pick out details which tell us something about the poems, and also about the time and circumstances in which they were written. I'm trying to bring out how different our attitude is today to the way the poems were viewed at the time of their writing. I want to develop an appreciation of both poems, although if I prefer one I shall say so and explain why. 

NB I'm writing out what I do here explicitly. However it's better to do what in creative writing is called 'show, don't tell'. Rather than use words up saying: "Now I'm going to look at historical context", it's better to just do so (clearly, so the examiner can see you are doing it). In an exam answer, I would say less about what I'm doing here and talk more specifically about details of the poems - with more examples. 

(By British Government - This is photograph Q 71073 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3691918) 

Rupert Brooke was a well-connected and well-educated young man, described by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats as "the handsomest young man in England". He attended Rugby School (where his father was a teacher) and King's College, Cambridge. He wrote a famous poem about The Old Vicarage, Grantchester; the lines 'Stands the church clock at ten to three? and is there honey still for tea?" being much quoted by hungry undergraduates. 

(Photo from frontispiece of Owen's collection of poerms https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11769951) 

Wilfred Owen's father was a stationmaster, and he was educated mainly at Shrewsbury Technical School. He worked to support himself in studying English Literature. 

Both enlisted to serve in the First World War, both were officers, both died in the war. Brooke died relatively early, in 1915, of a blood infection just off the Greek Island of Skyros. Owen was killed just a week before the armistice, in 1918, in France. 

Rupert Brooke's poem The Soldier was widely celebrated as soon as it was published - by the Times Literary Supplement in March 1915, a year after the outbreak of war. The poem begins: "If I should die, think only this of me ..." It was read out in St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday: 4th April, ironically just days before Brooke's death. 

There is some evidence that at the time of his death, Brooke was starting to write a different, more realist kind of poem about the war of which he had then had some actual experience. 

Wilfred Owen's poetry is a powerful indictment of the brutality of war, bringing us graphic images from the battle front "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, / Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge," (Dulce et Decorum Est). 

Have a read of the two poems now, if you haven't already done so. 

When I used these poems as a comparative exercise, I used to ask my students which poem is 'best'. They would all answer immediately that Owen's was the 'best' poem; they disapproved of the romantic view of warfare and death conveyed in Brooke's The Soldier. We come to the poem after two world wars and with understanding of other wartime atrocities, such as in the Vietnam War, whereas those who heard Brooke's poem read out in St Paul's Cathedral in 1915 had no idea what conditions were like on the battle front. The last 100 years have given us access to increasingly more media to show us what warfare is like: images like Nick Ut's famous photo after a napalm attack, or films like Apocalypse Now and The Deerhunter made evident the costs of war to huge global audiences. In the First World War, it was still relatively easy for government to control what information the public had about war. 

It was partly to address this misinformation that poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon (a major influence on Owen's thinking) began to write work that gave a different picture of warfare. 

Although Owen's poem gives a better understanding of what war is like, does that make it a better poem? I used to ask my students to consider the literary aspects of the work. Brooke's takes us as reader smoothly through, using delicate imagery to convey a connection between the person, Nature and the specific countryside of England. Brooke suggests that although he will turn to dust, there will be a richness about that earth which comes from his life experience and connection to his home countryside: "Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home." Sentences and phrases are clear and usually close at the end of the line of poetry. Brooke has used the English sonnet form (as opposed to the Petrachan, which has a different rhyme scheme), although his sestet (the six lines at the end) adapts the rhyme scheme as classically used by Shakespeare, and makes it gentler. Shakespeare's use of a final rhyming couplet gives his sonnets an assertive conclusion, whereas Brooke's rhyme scheme eases us along to the end. 

Wilfred Owen's poem starts off looking like a sonnet. Then another eight lines get attached at the end. It's as if there is too much to be contained in the poetic form, his angry emotions spill over after he has described the effect of the gas attack, into an indictment of people back home who urge young men to go and fight in the kind of patriotic mood that marks out Brooke's poem. The poem starts with neat sentences fitting into the lines, but soon these too start spilling over into the next line: lurching like the exhausted men in the poem. The rhyme scheme of Owen's sonnet is like that of Brooke's, but he splits off the last two lines of his sestet as if they are a final conclusion as in Shakespeare's sonnets, and he repeats the word 'drowning' instead of finding another word which rhymes with it - giving extra emphasis to it. 

This particular poem of Owen's shows that he understood the power of the Classics: the Latin and Greek texts which upper class society would know very well. At the end he quotes the Horace line which many would have been mouthing at this time: It is sweet and proper to die for the nation. Yet Owen had chosen to study English Literature. (Brooke studied the Classics.) The two poets were living at a time of profound change. The World Wars did not cause the social changes which followed them: social class divisions becoming less obvious with increased celebration of working class cultures, women going into paid work; however they accelerated them. Brooke seems like the last spokesman for Romantic literature. British poets afterwards have a twist of cynicism in their writing, it seems as if they can no longer unselfconsciously write of the beauties of life and Nature. There is no hint of Romanticism, though, in Owen's dark imagery. Nature is only there in metaphor: the man dying of gas poisoning is seen through Owen's gas mask 'as under a green sea'. 

(A Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star, by Samuel Palmer - image available copyright free from Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Palmer._A_Cornfield_by_Moonlight_with_the_Evening_Star._Watercolour_with_bodycolour_and_pen_and_ink_c.1830..jpg.) 

The Romantic movement with its celebration of Nature and high emotion has produced some beautiful works of art. For me, Brooke's poem The Soldier belongs with those. The imagery, the tender humanist philosophy which suggests an intimate connection between the individual person and our natural surroundings, these are themes which the Romantic movement celebrated through its art. In spite of our radical change of opinion about warfare, Brooke's poem has survived to be enjoyed for eternal themes which we go back and back to: What is death? What meaning do our lives have after death? Are we humans not part of Nature, must we be 'social'? 

Yet, that does not mean that Owen's poem is 'worse' than Brooke's. I did a little trick on my students by forcing them to see that although they might not sympathise with the philosophy of Brooke's The Soldier in its wartime context, it is a magnificent poem in technical terms: so coherent, the imagery fitting together like the parts of a body, the lines flowing so easily one into the next. 

Owen's poem is fitful and spilling out of any formal arrangement: a sonnet with an extra octet. The images he conjures are harsh and stark. Yet that too is a great literary achievement, to make us feel as if we are staggering drunkenly from one line to the next like exhausted soldiers; to shock us with the repetition of the word 'drowning', then to drag us through another eight weary lines detailing the agonising death of a man whom we see turning horribly slowly from a suffering fellow human into the corner of a foreign field. 

Both are great poems. They stand at a point when society underwent profound change, very suddenly. A culture of high art, of the Classics and Romantic celebration of Nature was abruptly forced to confront brutal Realist understanding of the conditions of life for many ordinary people. It would take many years for us to grasp what that could mean, and perhaps we are still struggling with these twin perspectives on our lives. Perhaps we still want to celebrate that special connection with the Natural world which we do have, while confronted continuously with images of what human impact on Nature is really like. 

(Image from interview with Blue Planet producer.

Image from Australian conservation site.) 

Lakhi sits by Paul Gilroy's There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack. 

An Equalities and Human Rights Commission survey into racism in the Higher Education sector will close at the end of this month. Meanwhile the BBC published an article in December showing that ethnic minority staff are often put on lower pay grades and struggle against prejudice and bullying. Many did not want to be identified in speaking up about the poor conditions we work in. 

I decided I would. 

I didn't want to name any institutions. All the many Higher Education institutions I've worked in have been equally poor at rewarding my efforts and recognising my contributions in research, publication, impact in the wider sector and teaching. 

At the worst times, when I did think I would be overwhelmed and just swept under without anyone noticing (except my daughter), I doubted myself. I couldn't believe it was true, that I was being discriminated against in such a blatant way; that the structures of the institutions were so integrally white, masculine and middle class that they could not see how their nobly worded policies were being contravened. 

For 20 years I've worked on casual and short-term contracts in Russell Group, post-92 and distance learning universities. This is a recognised fate for academics who are women and also for academics from ethnic minority backgrounds. Sometimes people do say to me "perhaps you just weren't good enough for the full-time position." Actually, if you are constantly having to be re-interviewed and prove yourself for your job, you have to be much better at it to stay in it for 20 years. 

Very often, I didn't get the job. These were some of the reasons I was given for not being appointed: 

• I never thought of you! Why not? Of course, you would have been perfect. 
• You can't teach quantitative methods
  • But I'm already teaching quantitative methods
  • Oh. Well, you can't do research. 
  • But I'm the only person in Wales doing sociological research on race and ethnicity, and you advertised the job saying you'd give special consideration to any applicants in that field.  
• You can't debate the uses of social science. 
  • (10 years experience teaching postgraduate research methods and writing social policy reports for government.) 
    
• You can't demonstrate the relationship between power, inequalities and evidence. 

It was that last one that provided the break-through. I am the author of an Equalities and Human Rights Commission review of evidence on Education and Inequalities, and I was being interviewed by an expert in film and television studies. Evidently he could not know better than me if I were demonstrating the relationship between power, inequalities and evidence. Some other small thing he said in the interview was actually racist. I was able to finally bring a legal case for discrimination, instead of being brushed off by someone from Human Resources saying (never in writing) "it's very unfair, but unfortunately it's not against the rules." 

The Dean of Faculty wrote to assure me that the Faculty treated such cases with great seriousness. They valued the qualifications and experience of staff such as myself. Unfortunately when he did this, he addressed me as Ms. while signing himself Prof. I had to write back and point out that a PhD was part of my application for the job, and a professional qualification in our field of work. After three days he wrote to say: "I note your concern about the use of your title." I knew he had had to go to the lawyers and that I had won. 

When I say 'won', I don't mean we were in court and I got proper recompense for losing that job. I mean that we came to a gentleman's agreement that I was sitting on a heap of embarrassing evidence about the way those in power were instituting inequalities and that I would give anyone who tried it on me again a very bloody nose. We both understood that I would be treated scrupulously fairly in the future in job interviews (not favoured - be treated fairly). Sometimes since then I have not got through in interviews, and I believe these were fair decisions; I understood the reason I was being turned down. I worked incredibly hard, putting in long hours to write up evidence and show how power and inequalities were related in my case. It was worth it, although I am still angry I had to waste such a lot of time and effort just to get fair and equal treatment. 

In this looking glass world, I did often doubt myself. I could not believe that people who would laugh and joke with me at other times, academics in the social sciences who did research and teaching on equalities, would treat my qualifications and expertise with such contempt in the vital context of a job interview. 

There were two kinds of people who made it hard to believe what was happening. Those who discriminated against me, and those who were so lacking in discrimination themselves that they couldn't believe a person like me - whom they respected and loved - could be the target of such irrational and cruel prejudice. They couldn't believe it was happening. They said things like: "Are you sure?" "Maybe he meant …" instead of: "Can I take your daughter for the morning so you can write your case out for the union to look over?" 

I survived because the union had my back. The union recognised what was being done to me, supported me and represented my case. United we stand. 

I've not had a high-flying career, but I have a job. I enjoy my job, but I don't put my photo up on my profile. I would rather people not take my cat profile picture seriously than not take my real photo seriously. 

What is to be done? Higher Education cannot become diverse by sticking different kinds of people into itself, colouring up the profile pictures. It must change from within. 

People in Higher Education must listen when women or ethnic minority or disabled or gay staff are concerned about how we are treated, when we say we are made to feel uncomfortable. The knee-jerk response to bring the shutters down and protect reputation must be replaced by genuine open-mindedness and willingness to question: Was it fair? I think I am treating this person as an equal, but perhaps they are actually smarter than me? Too often people in power feel anxious and uncomfortable around ethnic minority staff, and quickly move to thinking the ethnic minority person is a problem rather than the predominantly white working culture. 

It would also help if employers immediately started assuming they under-estimate black and minority ethnic staff, and 'artificially' increased their idea of how well we are doing. Then we might get recognised for some of our achievements instead of constantly over-looked. Then they might find they have much better numbers of black and minority ethnic staff in senior roles. 

Friends worry about me writing this blogpost, in case I experience backlash of some kind. I fear the opposite: that I will be met by a wall of silence, drowned out by white noise. ("We never think of you.") Even my friends will hesitate over the 'share' and 'like' buttons, made anxious and uncomfortable. Although even if one other person reads this (woman, gay, transgender, disabled, ethnic minority - just different), and realises 'it was true! It wasn't me, it was them,' that will be worth my making the effort to write. 

Partly I wrote this blogpost because I wanted to read Why I'm No Longer Talking (To White People) About Race (lent to me by a friend of Cornish/Irish heritage). I wanted to write about my own experience first. I'll make notes about my reading on Instagram and tweet using the hashtag #WINLTTWPAR. It would be a start great if you could check it out and give me some feedback. 

• My Insta account: https://www.instagram.com/anlecturer/
• Twitter: @ANLecturer 

(From webpage about origins of writing: cuneiform writing on a clay tablet.) 

This blogpost is about how to buy a tablet without having to look down the back of the sofa for spare pennies 

NB If you are an Open University  student, you may be eligible for a grant to buy new computing equipment or broadband provision - ask your Student Support Team for details 

I recently gave a presentation on the use of WhatsApp to support students (and lessen the workload for tutors). I was suggesting we could move from using our personal mobile phones to using WhatsApp. For many people, WhatsApp already is on their phone, however I have it on a tablet I acquired about a year ago. I find it helpful that I have a separate number on the tablet which I can use as a 'work' number. This means I can put the tablet away at night, for example, and lessen the risk of being woken up at 2 am by text messages. 

(I don't think students are callously sending me texts at 2 am because they want an instant response, BTW. I think they sometimes don't realise this is my personal number so that I will be picking it up if they send a message. Sometimes, too, the mobile signal in their area is not as strong; they write the message at 4 in the afternoon, but it only wings its way to me in the early hours of the morning.) 

My colleagues at the presentation expressed wistful envy as I described how useful I find my tablet: for checking over my powerpoint on train journeys while travelling to tutorials, for reading electronic versions of academic papers, accessing email and the module forums while on the move - and chatting to my students on WhatsApp, then being able to shut the tablet and put it away so I don't feel obliged to chat with them all night  It takes nifty photos too 

(Wildflower seeds)

You may be surprised to hear this, but unfortunately in our work as Associate Lecturers at the Open University we don't get paid our weight in gold. So my colleagues were puzzled as to how I could splash out money on such a high end product. I explained that I had found a handy affordable route to get my tablet, and this is it:-

I first thought about getting a tablet when the new Apple iPad came out. Boasting an impressive amount of functionality (I think that's the right word ), this was about half the price of older iPads which could do a similar amount of stuff. It weighed in @ £399, not quite cheap enough for me to rush at it in the way I do when there are shoes on sale at my favourite shoe shop, but enough for me to linger over it and wonder if I could cut back on vegetables for a couple of months, or even something essential - like kitten heeled slingbacks. 

It's easier to do without shoes in the summer - in South Wales, anyway. This is the beach at Saundersfoot. 

While I was contemplating the iPad, I went into my mobile phone shop about something completely different. There I saw the Apple iPad, and I realised you could get it for a monthly amount like you can a new phone. I was a bit hesitant, because if I did that I wouldn't be able to use my John Lewis credit card in John Lewis and get double points, but I began to be seriously "seduced" as we call it on DD102, after Bauman (1987) cited in Hetherington and Havard (2014, p.125). 

Then I saw that the mobile phone shop had a Samsung Galaxy - a tablet which also has an impressive amount of functionality  I was canny. I listened to the salesperson. (I mean, not properly like when people talk to me about shoes, but I nodded my head when he said things.) Then I came back with my daughter. She said: "Oh yes, mum, the Galaxy is for you because it has Microsoft Office on it, and it has a *something-titum-titum* camera, you will like that." There was quite a bit more; I was impressed at how much she knew about my computing habits - she is pretty good at observation research. 

Because I am already a customer of this mobile network, I got a loyalty deal. Instead of £19 per month, I walked out with the tablet @ £17 per month over 2 and a half years- that includes some decent amount of downloadable data each month which is worth quite a bit on its own. £17 per month is even less than I pay for cat food, and a lot less than I pay for shoes if I am in the mood, so I was a happy lady ... I mean, professional woman with a PhD to prove my credentials. 

I did also buy a couple of covers for the tablet from Fintie to protect the screen. One has a Bluetooth-able keyboard in it, and the other is just a cover - they both have a Japanese picture of a cherry tree on them. The one with the keyboard is for when I go away from home for a few days. It's quite heavy so normally I use the other one, and just use the keyboard on the screen (whatever the technical word for that is). 

The tablet fits perfectly in my (Radley) handbag  

One of my colleagues described himself as 'technophobe' - which is just like us Associate Lecturers. We can run an Adobe Connect tutorial with polls and breakout rooms to allow 30 students good quality discussion time, but we think our phones are Smarter than we are. If this reassures you so-called 'technophobes': my tablet has a nice size screen and easily understandable icons, and I have never yet had to ask my daughter to help me figure it out. I'm not of that generation called 'digital natives' (see Smith, 2012 for a critique of this concept), but this tablet is of a generation of computers that are human-friendly so I am good with it

References

Hetheringon, K. and Havard, C. (2014) ‘Consumer society? Identity and lifestyle’ in Allen, J. and Blakeley, G. (eds) Understanding Social Lives, Part 1, Milton Keynes: The Open University.

Smith, E. (2012) ‘The Digital Native Debate in Higher Education: A Comparative Analysis of Recent Literature / Le débat sur les natifs du numérique dans l'enseignement supérieur: une analyse comparative de la littérature récente’. Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology / La revue canadienne de l’apprentissage et de la technologie, [S.l.], v. 38, n. 3, nov. 2012. Available at: http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/26327/19509 (Accessed Sept 2018). doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.21432/T2F302.

In a talk to PhD students I heard him give, the sociologist Chris Jenks argued that all projects required the same level of rigorous ethics, regardless of the nature of the participants. He felt there was no such thing as more risk when handling data. 

At the time I didn't agree with him. Conducting research with lesbian, gay and bisexual British Muslim people, I was talking with people who had sometimes had to separate from families and move across the country. This was not just to protect themselves from physical harm. There was a high level of risk that their family's honour would be compromised if their sexuality became known, and that this would damage siblings' and even cousins' marriage chances. I was extremely scrupulous about protecting participants' identities and about the data I held on them and I felt that I did have to take measures which other researchers in less vulnerable communities might not have to. 

However I find myself more in sympathy with him today. My research now tends to be based in my teaching practice. There is a rigorous code around data protection of student records, particularly following the arrival of General Data Protection Regulation. However although we talk among ourselves about best practice in teaching, we aren't necessarily thought to be doing 'research' on it, so there isn't an automatic go-to framework for gaining permission from students to write about our teaching of them. 

My main aim in setting up WhatsApp groups for my students was to give them additional support so they have a better chance of keeping up with their studies, and getting information about how to manage their studies in a timely way. See this blogpost on setting up WhatsApp groups. However, as I began to write up how this was going, I realised I was also engaged in a research project which I not only intended to write up in the future, I was already publicly disseminating material about it. (This blogpost is an update on how my WhatsApp groups are getting on.) I of course did this in an anonymised way, but is that enough? My students don't appear to be 'at risk' in the same way as my participants in the LGB Muslim study, however I still ought to respect their participation in the project in a similar way. 

Well, I feel the best thing to do is to ask my students. Some of them are doing the M.Ed in Inclusive Practice so will be developing their own ethics frameworks to write about their teaching. They will have good insights to share about how I ought to go about advising them on how I am writing up my work with them 

I have now set up WhatsApp groups for two of my three student groups. I have emailed the third group inviting them to join me on WhatsApp. Here are some basic How To things which I found out as I went along. 

1 - Initially, you must email out and invite students to join the group. Ask them to email you their WhatsApp number even if you have their mobile number so you have clear written permissions. I did try to use WhatsApp to just individually message some of my students, but these translated themselves into text messages and cost me £0.82 - not as bad as the bill I ran up on my personal mobile once for £90 when I tried to call all my students at the start of their studies, while simultaneously buying my bijou maisonette - but not quite what I wanted. 

I have been able to offer a one-to-one chat on WhatsApp with a student for whom phone calls weren't as suitable a form of communication. This worked pretty well, much better than us emailing back and forth. As I have WhatsApp on my tablet rather than my mobile, it was easy for me to type up the messages. 

2 - Once you have students' permission (for General Data Protection Regulation compliance, and more importantly because it is the ethical thing to do, you must make sure you secure this in writing), you can start entering each student as a contact. 

You can't set up a New Group in WhatsApp, then put the contacts in it. WhatsApp is quite simple and straightforward so there are some functions you might expect to find, which are simply missing. Finding a group appears to be one of them. You can only find a group by spotting the 'chat' you've done with it, so you have to first set up some contacts, then make them into a group and send a message, then you can find the group again in your 'chat' list. 

You can assign each student an 'organisation'. The module code inputted there helps you to distinguish James-the-Student from James-My-Bestie, and avoid embarrassing mis-communications. This also allows you to pick out the whole list in order to set it up as the Group. At the end of the module, when under GDPR I must delete all the contact details from my list, I hope this will help me quickly find them to do so. (I plan to leave the group existing - some of the students may be able to stay in touch and support each other as they continue their studies.) 

3 - You can have an icon for your group, and since my aim in using WhatsApp is to encourage light-hearted chatting and mutual support rather than writing several paragraph messages on the 'real' meaning of 'ontology', I chose some jokey ones. I tried to get the students to choose a name for the group but they weren't forthcoming so I just called the groups by module code names. 

Progress so far

Of the two groups I've set up, all but two students have joined the one while only four students have joined the other one. 

In the first group, a student already asked a question which one of the other students answered in my absence  - so the answer was provided in a much more timely way. I saw that after an initial message, another student wasn't chatting much so I phoned and found they weren't well. We were able to talk about how to manage their studies and I could reassure them of my support. Generally students seem more comfortable about chatting and answering each other's messages on WhatsApp than they do on forums. 

I have a tutorial scheduled with the other group in about ten days. When that's closer I'll email them all to remind them, and I will ask again if anyone-else wants to join the WhatsApp chat. That group has progressed quite far in their studies, and are more self-oriented for study, so it doesn't surprise me that they aren't so keen on being in a group. They probably have good study support networks set up already. 

(Joan Miró's Dancer.) 

(Vintage badge for sale on Amazon)

A number of colleagues have been bigging up WhatsApp groups, which I believe are an obligatory part of some Arts module. They say that the opportunity to chat with each other and provide moral support means students are less likely to drop out of their studies. Well, we are all very keen to make sure students have every opportunity to complete on the modules they work so hard to study. Plus, although we are a 'distance learning' institution and so we don't get many chances to meet up, we know that sociable learning is a highly valuable means for students to embed knowledge and develop better skills - so Win Win 

This year I'm going to be asking my Tutor Groups of students if they'd like to join a WhatsApp group which I'll set up and monitor. I'll also encourage them to set up their own support groups. I'll suggest that they: 

• Find people on the same degree programme, as well as module; 
• Look for people who live nearby (not so easy with my postgrad students, some of whom are overseas);
• Make a group of between four and ten. If there are only two of you, and one drops out - there's no group A large number of group members means your WhatsApp is constantly pinging with messages 

A student did mention that a module-wide WhatsApp group had just been annoying because there were far too many messages to respond to. I hope that a smaller Tutor Group group will be more manageable. 

What is WhatsApp? 

WhatsApp is an internet-based messaging service. It allows you to make free phone calls and send free messages anywhere in the world. My sister-in-law and her family in India have pressured me into getting it, as it enables us to chat whether they are in Mumbai, Vienna or the depths of Devon - where my niece was at school under my guardianship last year. 

You can create a WhatsApp group, and some fellow mums and I have done this to make arrangements about sharing lifts for our kids to aerial circus skills class  (I was tempted to call the group The Bearded Ladies, but it's actually my daughter's dad who does the circus run for us, so he had to be a member and he is clean-shaven.) 

What other social media is there? 

Get thee behind me Facebook! 

There are many unofficial Open University Facebook groups for different modules or pathways of study. There are also groups for OU mums, older students and probably one for students who like sharing cat videos. 

Catflap standoff - Eowyn wants to come in, Lakhi wants to go out but neither of them will move 

However any material on Facebook belongs to Facebook. This is an issue for the Open University, so we have not been able to set up official support through Facebook. Although I enjoy Facebook, I also feel that the way posts pop up if they are a) popular, b) recent, is not that helpful in supporting study. I think the groups for mums and older students to support each other are a good idea, however students often come back from the module Facebook groups saying they have been given the most strange advice by other students on there  I know students who had great support on Facebook, but I always advise my students to check anything they hear on there carefully on the official OU forums. 

OU Forums - home sweet home 

The university itself provides two or three forums for each module of study, where students are supposed to be encouraged to 'chat'. I personally love these, and think they are a great way to post information and engage in discussion. However students can be very shy of posting opinion in them. Time and again, I hear students say they are worried about looking silly  One of my colleagues even puts up a thread called 'No such thing as a silly question' for her students. 

I ask my students whether they would be willing to look like a numpty if I gave them 10 marks for it. Is it worth asking something which you realise was a bit silly, if it leads to you understanding your assignment better and getting better marks? When I am studying on my Masters programme, I plaster the forums with posts asking all sorts of nonsense. (I was really astonished at how hard it was to understand the assignment questions when I was reading them as a student, they look so easy when I am the tutor ) 

Queen of Multi-media 

My plan is to mix 'n match. I hope the WhatsApp group will allow students to chatter, share anxieties and encourage each other in their studies. I hope it will allow them to understand that the other students are not all called Einstein, that they are not the only one who didn't quite get it about secondary referencing. Finding out that the other students are just like me is one of the great gains of face to face tutorials, but many can't make it to these - especially now we do fewer of them. Sometimes I may be able to WhatsApp a link to a forum thread, too, and suggest the discussion continues there. I hope this might engage students who don't read emails - having had a bad experience last year when I emailed several times to remind students there is no extension for their End of Module Assignment (EMA) and still got texts the day before the deadline asking for one  

I already email with links to forum threads where I load up information. I know from my own student experience that students rarely read long emails with vital information , and that's it's easier to scan over a set of short posts in a forum thread. 

I'll report back on how it goes  

Claire Kotecki has written up how a module is designed and written at the Open University. An OU module gets 'taught' by a whole team, whereas at traditional universities it's in the hands of only one lecturer. I thought I'd write about my role in the team, as an Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. I rely on many other people to support my teaching, hopefully they can write up their roles too.

I teach at Level 1 Social Sciences, and I therefore induct many students for whom not only online/distance learning - but university learning at all is a new experience. Under my guidance, they discover the precise joys of referencing (no, really! referencing can be fun ), the excitement of putting concepts and evidence together, the many frustrations at barriers to learning and how to overcome these.

At the Open University we offer blended learning. Students access a diversity of materials, organised via an online Study Calendar. Week by week, students progress through tips on reading a textbook chapter, video and audio material, study skills exercises and academic guidance. These build up to one of five Tutor Marked Assignments and a short online assessment - each of the TMAs supports the student towards the writing of the final End of Module Assessment piece of work.

This is a radically different way of teaching to lecturing, where students take notes on dictated academic knowledge and have to develop their own writing skills in order to present only one or two pieces of work. In the Open University the tutor (that's me ) provides continuous supportive guidance to build students' academic skills as well as knowledge throughout the module. Not only do the TMAs gradually introduce the opportunities to develop new skills, I individually tailor feedback to the student so as to make sure they focus on the areas they need to work on.

Long before the fashion for the 'flipped' classroom, we were providing rich contemporary materials which students could work their way through before they attended workshop-style tutorials to support their intellectual engagement. Ahead of every assignment, my students have the opportunity to come to a face to face or an online tutorial and chat with each other - and me, about their learning. I design some slides and exercises to encourage us to think through topics and study skills issues (always reminding students of the importance of referencing ).

I prepare the slides and tutorial exercises differently each year, based on generic feedback I want to provide out of the group of assignments I just marked and the study skills needed for the upcoming assignment. My job also involves pulling the tables into a better formation, encouraging small group discussion, tidying up at the end - and I usually bake a cake for us

This year I've started strongly encouraging students to come to face to face tutorials, as year after year I see the students who do come do better. Meeting fellow students helps them realise that everyone is learning, they are just as smart as the others. Chatting about their studies embeds the knowledge. Last year I only had one student for this tutorial. We did enjoy our chats about social sciences! however it's better this year, with seven or eight for the same tutorial event; they can get good group discussion going with each other.

(Student permission to take and publicly use photos given.)

We experience high rates of attrition at the Open University. I personally provide pro-active care to increase my levels of retention. Students can be diffident about getting in touch after a poor experience of education and/or the benefits system, so if it looks like someone might be falling behind I start emailing and phoning them. I might refer them to Student Support advisors who have specialist knowledge about grants and loans, or about what support is available for specific additional learning needs.

Students almost never drop out because they can't cope intellectually with the module materials but their lives are very full, and it's no surprise that many have to defer studies to a less hectic time. I always tell them they have taken the most important step: they have started studying, and the Open University will support them in their studies now for the rest of their learning journey - however long that takes.

One myth being circulated is that the generation of middle aged students for whom the Open University offered a second chance at a degree are being educated out - the expansion of university provision post-1992 means the OU doesn't have a constituency for our kind of distance learning. We should expand into Coursera style digital provision of MOOCs for students from less developed countries.

We increased our recruitment over the last couple of years. My own students come from a range of backgrounds but they all need a more flexible education provider than bricks-and-mortar lecture halls can offer and a more supportive education than MOOCs provide. They need blended learning with a human tutor to guide and advise them. 

While on holiday in Scotland recently, I explained to a young mum how she could still do the degree she wants to study for, with us.

• Her child is too young for school? She can study from home as and when she can make time.
• When her child is unwell? She can still study - she doesn't have to continuously attend lectures or tutorials.
• She left school without any other qualifications? We don't ask for prior qualifications, just willingness to learn.
• She is on a low income. Grants, loans and a range of financial support (eg to buy a new computer if needed) are widely available. (Phone your local Open University and ask about this - financial support differs in England, N. Ireland, Scotland and Wales but is available in all four nations.)

(Gratuitous holiday pictures)

It isn't something we officially record, however I estimate about half my students have young children to care for. This weighs more heavily on women students who are expected to put more time into childcare than on men students. People (including themselves) expect men students to put time into improving their career for their family as well as themselves. (NB Both DD103 and DD102 look at issues of gender and family politics.)

I mediate between the demands of the Study Calendar and the demands of a young family, offering extensions for assignments, advising on catchup strategies and telling women how important their studies are - for their children as well as themselves. When children see their mum or dad getting out their laptop and books to study, they put their own heads down to study harder at school - it's a win/win on social mobility. Mum and Dad get a degree, children achieve in school and can go on to traditional university.

The most important work I do with students is to give them self-confidence. They can sometimes even get a question disastrously wrong because they have become so convinced they are not intelligent. They think if they are finding it easy to answer the question, they must have misunderstood it, so they cleverly give the 'wrong' answer instead of the answer that first comes to their mind. I assure students that they are capable, bright people who have many skills already (if you can figure out whether a 25% off offer in a supermarket is worth it, you can already do statistics - although we do gently teach statistics to make sure you 'get' them).

8/10 cats prefer frisky whiskery biscuits - two cats like steak. (One likes his steak well done, but we should not make any assumptions about him being a lapcat from a gilded background of privilege just because he is a Persian, there is no information about class status in the table ) 

I have taught at Russell Group and post-1992 universities and I was educated myself at King's College, Cambridge so I know the breadth of higher education provision in the UK. Hand on heart, the kind of learning I can offer at the Open University is the best available. Indeed, there is some speculation that frameworks to review and compare teaching were suppressed becauses universities with a more prestigious reputation weren't scoring as well as upstarts like the OU. Yet I sometimes encourage my students to take the 60 credits my courses offer and use those to go to traditional university. It's not just about the fun of the campus lifestyle. An opportunity to be part of a university community offers invaluable resources to young people starting out in life.

Nevertheless, online and distance provision have a key role to play in higher education in the UK. Students don't usually realise what high quality tuition they are getting with the Open University. Some come because they can earn and learn with us. Others need additional support to make learning accessible. 20% of my students are officially registered with additional learning needs. Since I teach new students, more are likely to realise as we progress that they would benefit from an assessment and the considerable support to adjust materials for them which will follow a diagnosis of dyslexia or dyspraxia or other learning needs. Some of my students suffer intense anxiety, others physical mobility issues, some are on the autism spectrum. At the Open University we are constantly working to stay ahead of the curve in supporting their studies. Personalised study support means those who have experienced domestic abuse or who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder can be alerted to materials which may trigger anxiety and block their ability to engage with the learning; I can also talk through with them strategies to make sure they still benefit from skills development which that block of study is designed to support.

As the gap between the richest 1% and the rest of us widens, the Open University provides a vital ladder out of poverty. The widening of participation in Higher Education means more people realise they can and should get the opportunity to learn which they hunger for. If there are additional barriers in the way of them getting to a traditional campus university, we at the Open University offer vibrant engaging materials and friendly human guidance to ensure they also get their chance to hone critical thinking for the knowledge economy, and for a richer cultural and social life.