Freedom to Achieve: addressing the attainment gap through student and staff co-creation

Abstract

Understanding and enhancing the experience of individuals and communities who have experienced marginalising structures and cultures have become an important area of research across higher education. This work forms an attempt to address injustice through a critical focus on inclusion and ideas of diversity. However, it also enables a reappraisal of ideas of student-staff partnership and co-creation, and student-as-producer. Building upon Kingston University’s value-added metric and Inclusive Curriculum Framework, De Montfort University has developed its own approach to engaging with differential attainment gaps, in part by embedding co-creation at the heart of its ‘Freedom to Achieve’ project. Co-creation enhances the University’s understanding of the experiences of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students and supports all students to become agents for change. Between January and April 2018, as a pilot for later project-wide implementation, the Freedom to Achieve team facilitated a series of co-creation events at both institution and programme level. This paper presents an evaluation of the co-creation approach alongside initial findings from the events and explains how these will inform the continuing development of the Freedom the Achieve project.