{"id":3131,"date":"2017-06-25T16:33:17","date_gmt":"2017-06-25T15:33:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/?p=3131"},"modified":"2017-07-07T16:23:39","modified_gmt":"2017-07-07T15:23:39","slug":"bameed-the-voices-of-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2017\/06\/25\/bameed-the-voices-of-the-people\/","title":{"rendered":"BAMEed: the voices of the people"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the beginning of June I attended the first BAMEed conference<\/a>. It was an unexpectedly memorable and inspiring occasion.<\/p>\n

\"BAMEed
\n<\/a>Final panel discussion at #BAMEed2017<\/em><\/p>\n

Though billed as an \u201cunconference\u201d\u00a0\u2013 a sort of self-organising gathering that fills old fogies like me with horror \u2013 the one-day meeting had in fact been meticulously planned. It was the brain-child of a newly-formed group of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic educators (hence \u2018BAMEed<\/a>\u2019) \u2013 Amjad Ali,<\/a> Allana Gay<\/a>, Abdul Chohan<\/a> and Penny Rabiger<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 all of whom are or were teachers at primary or secondary schools. The attendees were themselves mostly primary or secondary school-teachers and mostly also black, asian or minority ethnic. I had the unusual and instructive experience of being in the minority.<\/p>\n

The theme of the meeting was unconscious bias<\/a>, a topic that has been moving up the agenda in higher education thanks in part to the ascendancy of the Athena SWAN charter<\/a>. I know because I have attended a lunchtime workshop on it. But here, the subject was treated in greater depth, not least because of the breadth of lived experience that the speakers brought to it. Four weeks on I am still absorbing the many lessons from that sunny Saturday in Birmingham, but let me offer a few highlights.<\/p>\n

First up was keynote speaker\u00a0Professor Dame Elizabeth Anionwu<\/a>. She told the story of her complicated upbringing<\/a> as the unexpected child of Cambridge students, a Nigerian man and a white Catholic woman. With wit and candour she spoke of the cruelty she endured from nuns in her care home and from a drunken step-father, of discovering and getting to know her Nigerian father, and of the sheer bloodymindedness that propelled her through careers in nursing and academia.<\/p>\n

Professor Damien Page<\/a>* followed-up with a talk on unconscious bias training in schools and universities, cautioning that it has to be done thoroughly if it is not to be counter-productive. Most training communicates that biases are \u2018natural\u02bc and therefore risks providing people with excuses to discriminate: \u201ceveryone is biased, so I shouldn\u02bct be worried that I am too.\u201d It is important not\u00a0to distract people from structural and historical discrimination.<\/p>\n

For me one of the most interesting presentations was given by Professor Paul Miller<\/a>, who introduced the notion of \u201cwhite sanction\u201d, a concept he has developed in a recent paper<\/a> surveying the experience of black and minority ethnic staff in secondary and higher education.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhite sanction\u201d expresses the idea that BAME staff need white allies (or champions), or feel obliged to \u2018join the club\u02bc, to progress in their careers. Such allies can play a valuable role, at least in the transition to true equality, but Miller recognised the difficulty of the position. Some members of the audience expressed understandable resentment at the notions that allies or conformity are needed since these seem to legitimise existing power structures. In the view of many, the existence of \u201cwhite sanction\u201d is seen as a symptom that we lack a functioning meritocracy. I agree, though I\u2019ve certainly come across dissenting views in academia. Miller argued it\u02bcs better to focus on the structural problem to avoid the risk of calling out all whites as racist and putting even \u2018allies\u02bc on the defensive. His\u00a0paper<\/a> explores these ideas in more detail, where he defines four levels of institutional interaction with BME staff: engaged, experimenting, initiated, uninitiated. I wondered on Twitter<\/a> where on the spectrum Imperial College<\/a>, my own institution, might lie. Though I only got two answers, the indications are that we have work to do.<\/p>\n

In the afternoon,\u00a0Dr Christine Callender<\/a>\u00a0noted the glacial pace of change in opportunities for ethnic minorities by citing a call for action in the 1985 Swan Report on BME education, and a more recent one in a pithy article by Kara Swisher<\/a>\u00a0earlier this year that bemoaned the \u201cmirror-tocracy\u201d perpetuated by white men in the upper echelons of tech giants like Uber and Google. Real change has to come from engagement the top, insisted Callender, if institutions are to convert aspirational statements into action.<\/p>\n

The plenary sessions were interspersed with short workshops \u2013 I attended the ones on recruitment and building diverse teams, led in each case with informed passion by Patrick Ottley-O\u2019Connor<\/a> and Hannah Wilson<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 and the day was rounded off back in the main hall with a panel discussion (see photo above).<\/p>\n

As valuable as the talks were, the most memorable aspect of the meeting was the hearing the stories of teachers who have been short-changed by the status quo. None spoke intemperately, even in cases where there was just cause. Instead, there was a gritty and positive determination to tackle the problem head on, so that we all might do the right thing. Of course, none of this is new to the people involved, but it was a powerful reminder to me of the value of unfiltered testimony. The BAMEed Network<\/a> has no need of my approval, but they have it anyway.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

*Who bore an uncanny and distracting resemblance to my younger brother.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the beginning of June I attended the first BAMEed conference. It was an unexpectedly memorable and inspiring occasion. Final panel discussion at #BAMEed2017 Though billed as an \u201cunconference\u201d\u00a0\u2013 a sort of self-organising gathering that fills old fogies like me … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}