Empowering students: Addressing the Ethnic Minority Awarding Gap through Reverse Mentoring

In this contribution, we will discuss a three-year project led by (SELCS/CMII) educators on the BAME-BIPOC Awarding Gap (2022–2025), with special emphasis on the second-year phase of the project that focused on reverse mentoring. Our project aims to foster equality, diversity and inclusion values in Higher Education practices with a particular focus on teacher training. Advance HE has previously warned UK universities about the awarding gap experienced by ethnic minority students.  Scholars like Tate and Page (2018) claim that teachers ought to acknowledge and tackle white supremacy in the university. Against this backdrop, our studies set out to dispel racist myths and raise awareness of the BIPOC awarding gap that affects our students.

We will present how both our collaborative projects are contending such awarding gap from four main angles: 1) student-teacher collaboration based on a reverse mentoring programme; 2) teacher training; 3) redevelopment and decolonisation of practical translation syllabi; and 4) the establishment of a support network aimed at sharing challenges, lessons learnt and examples of best practices. We will focus on the methodological framework of our reverse mentoring study, discussing stages, data collection tools, selection of participants and the main findings we obtained.