Decolonising Reading Lists

A lightning talk describing the library’s role in Liberating the Curriculum at UAL and the production of a new guide on Decolonising Reading Lists for the university's Academic Enhancement Model.

The Academic Enhancement Model (AEM) is a cross-university enhancement approach that provides support to courses that fall below UAL benchmarked thresholds for student satisfaction, attainment and continuation. The overarching aim of AEM is to deliver coordinated enhancement activity that reduces and eliminates the attainment differential between students of colour and white students.* In order to support AEM’s ambitions a series of downloadable resources have been developed that draw together wide-ranging UAL expertise. These materials offer tried and tested approaches and curate aspects of research into accessible documents to help staff independently address key challenges in teaching, learning and attainment.

Library staff have collaborated with AEM colleagues on the production of a Liberating Reading Lists guide, drawing on library expertise and on the learning from a recent collaborative project on liberating reading lists (students, course leaders, librarians). The Guide is an example of the librarymoving into more mainstream and structural spaces within the university’s decolonisation work and aims to clearly articulate the role of the library in the production of decolonised reading lists. The Guide will be available to share on the day.

*UAL’s Academic Enhancement Model was described in the #Closing the Gap report, UUK, NUS, 2019