Focus themes
During the first phase of the DIS project, it emerged that there is a need for more information about certain themes related to diversity and inclusion. Meetings were organized during the second phase of DIS where various themes were discussed. One of the themes is role models, during this meeting the importance, advantages and disadvantages that role models can have are highlighted. Curious about all meetings? You will find the summaries of these meetings
On this page you can read information about the themes of these meetings. If you have any questions about these meetings or want to know more? Contact us at dis@uu.nl
Themed meetings
Role models in medical education
Isabella Spaans
This presentation is about the role-model experiences of underrepresented medical students. Having professional role models impacts students’ professional identity formation, their sense of belonging and their ability to permeate the hidden curriculum. However, the literature emphasizes the importance of the perceived similarity between a student and their role model. This raises questions about how minority students identify role models in a learning environment that does not reflect their cultural diversity.
The findings presented here provide us with opportunities to reimagine role models in medical education as culturally embedded, subjective and ever-changing. The participants engaged in selective imitation, where they did not have one archetypical clinical role model, but rather approached role models as a cognitive construct made up of elements from different persons. Role models also carry a behavioural value and a symbolical value, the latter of which is particularly important for underrepresented students but appears highly dependent on social comparison. Finally, the perception of role models proves to be culturally embedded, due to which role models need to be considered within a medical school’s cultural context.
Pre-Academic Transition Programme K.I.C.K. Start: a Good Start Gets You Halfway There
Cecily Stotle
Cause & Goal
At UMC Utrecht, we think it is important that every student, regardless of background or prior knowledge, knows what is going on at the university and is well-informed on the possibilities regarding support and (personal) development before enrolling. Despite the struggles many students experience during the transition phase from secondary school to university, there was no programme to provide additional support to these students yet. That is why in 2021, the Platform Diversity and Inclusion of UMC Utrecht took the initiative to develop the K.I.C.K. Start pre-academic transition programme.
The programme aims to give future students a preview at UMC Utrecht, and to make them feel welcome and connected to each other and the faculty, even before their degree programmes have actually started. With this programme, we provide future students a good (mental) preparation on student life, which will possibly make the transitional phase from secondary school (or University of Applied Sciences ) to higher education easier for them. This way, they can have as good of a start to their degree programmes as possible.
Who is this for?
K.I.C.K. Start is a programme for all first-year students at the Faculty of Medicine (students of Biomedical Sciences and Medicine) who need some additional information and supervision at the start of their degree programmes, with special attention for students who do not receive the required support from their direct environments (think along the lines of first-generation students) or feel just a little bit different than most of their peers.
Programme
For 2 days, students can participate in a number of workshops, panel discussions and lectures. They are split up into small groups of approximately six students and supervised by a student buddy. The buddy is a previously trained, personal supervisor and the first point of contact for future students. They are there for students if they want to ask something, need support or just want to chat.
At the workshops and lectures, themes such as ‘your motivation’, ‘diversity and inclusion’ or ‘learning to learn’ take centre stage. The workshops are taught by people such as Study Advisors, coaches or members of the Platform Diversity and Inclusion.
Other
Research is currently being done into the results of the pre-academic transition programme. The article will be submitted for publication. For questions on the programme or the research, you can send an email to C.Stolte-2@umcutrecht.nl or m.m.j.gijzel@umcutrecht.nl.
Policy & EDI: The importance of data
Anne Roos Verbree, MSc
In the past years, there is more and more attention for EDI, ‘equality, diversity & inclusion’, in the media, and in both policy and research. This is also visible within Utrecht University. Whereas data plays a big role in research, this is a much smaller factor in drafting and executing policy. Some of the reasons for this are lack of time and knowledge, uncertainties regarding privacy regulations and the lack of data use in pre-existing work processes.
But data is also important to policy, because some of the things it can do are providing more insight into the current state of affairs in the field of EDI, changes over time and change as a result of new policy.
If it is about the use of data in EDI, people often think of ethnic background and gender. It is important to realise that diversity is much broader than that and is also about political beliefs, language skills, age, handicaps, sexual orientation and more.
In order to gain insight into such forms of diversity and in equality and inclusion, multiple data sources can be used. Some examples of data sources are mi.uu.nl and information from the NSE (see the example below). There are also projects that process data such as Belonging@UU. Furthermore, you can collect data yourself, like by using a Wooclap during an event, adding a question to course evaluations, having interviews or focus groups (data can also be qualitative!) or releasing a questionnaire. For this, it is required to only collect data for a specific goal. In other words, a focus is required.
An example: At the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, we reviewed questions from the NSE about the students' sense of safety, how much they feel at home at the degree programmes and the atmospheres at the degree programmes, and analysed differences between students with and without needs for support, between first and later-year students, between Bachelor’s and Master's students, and between different Bachelor’s programmes. This showed that students with dyslexia, students with ADHD/ADD/concentration problems and students with psychological conditions felt less safe being themselves at UU than students who do not have these conditions.
Although data can be very useful in the formation and execution of policy, there are some challenges that come with it. For instance, there is often a lack of time to work with data, it is not always clear which possibilities there are to use data within privacy laws, groups are sometimes too small to use data, not all desired information is available, and questionnaire fatigue among students and staff does not always make it the best way to obtain data. On top of that, the abundance of data can be overwhelming and it can be important to choose a focus in this.
Despite these challenges, it is valuable to use data. Data can serve as a foundation to making substantive choices, and contribute to the improvement of equality, diversity & inclusion within our university in the process.
Diversity in inflow Master's programmes ‐ Pre-Master's programmes
Anton van den Hoeven
Indirect routes: equal opportunities for under-represented groups
Indirect routes can contribute to equal opportunities for underrepresented groups, such as youngsters from the lower social classes and youngsters with non-Western migration backgrounds. They receive vwo recommendations for secondary schools less often. As a result, they obtain fewer vwo degrees which would have given them direct access to higher education. This is why the progression routes from hbo to academic education turn out to be important.
Two routes from hbo to academic education: inflow into Bachelor's programmes or Master's programmes
There are two routes from hbo to academic education:
- inflow into Bachelor's programmes via hbo‐p to Bachelor's level (at UU in 2021-2022: 15 % of the inflow)
- inflow into Master's programmes via hbo‐p to Master's level (at UU in 2021-2022: 12 % of the inflow)
The progression from hbo to academic education follows a downward line (ResearchNed 2020). This has consequences for the youngsters to whom these routes matter. It indicates a possible reduction of accessibility in higher education.
How to improve progression – UU policy
The UU policy is to allocate resources to the development of embedded 30-credit ‘pre-Master's minors’, meaning minors hbo students can enrol in as a part of their hbo education. This is beneficial to the hbo students:
- they can experience whether or not an academic education is befitting of their ambitions and talents;
- If this turn out to not be the case, they will not have learning deficits if they complete the minors;
- they can already start preparing for an academic Master's programme without delays and additional costs, and complete parts of their pre-Master's programmes. After graduating from hbo, they can then complete the rest of their pre-Master's minors.
It is also beneficial to UU:
- it provides a (partial) solution to the financial problems that come about because pre-Master's minors are not funded if the pre-Master's minors are provided via Kies Op Maat.
Kies Op Maat (KOM)
Via Kies Op Maat, degree programmes can provide embedded 30-EC pre-Master's minors to students who study at institutions which have joined KOM (= virtually all of the hbo sector). The student chooses a minor on the website https://www.kiesopmaat.nl/ (if the applicant meets the entry requirements), enters into a learning agreement after approval by the examination board of their own institution and signs up free of charge.
For this, UU receives 75 euros per actually obtained credit by the student's ‘home institution’. So for a pre-Master's minor worth 30 ECs, this is 2,250 euros. This does require the provider of the pre-Master's programme to split up the pre-Master's programme worth 60 ECs and to design a related minor worth 30 ECs that provides in ‘matching’.
Collaboration with supplying education
So far, embedded pre-Master's programmes have not really gotten taken off at UU. A factor in this is that hbo teachers are not inclined to advise outside their own domains. HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht also has no interest in referring students to university when it comes to fields in which HU provides its own professional-level Master's programmes.
Still, collaboration between providing and buying education institutions is indispensable for the improvement of transfer rates, even though constructive collaboration turns out to be very difficult to organise. It is up to us to discover which factors play (decisive) roles in inflow and transfer rates, and which effective solutions and good practices we can develop.
Menno Kramer
From an international student recruitment perspective, increasing the diversity of inflow in UU master’s programmes consists of two main questions: how is diversity defined/constructed and how is diversity measured? A traditional definition is a student’s geographical location, often referred to as ‘home country’ or (even less precisely) as ‘where a student is from’. Another definition is language or cultural background, or first-generation student. The (hypothetical) example is a student who lives and studies in Sao Paulo, holds an Italian passport, has both Italian and Korean cultural heritage, and whose parents have not attended university.
Next, an exercise is made to operationalise these diversity concepts; how do we measure diversity of our incoming students? DCM currently uses an (imprecise) measuring Method, which includes a student’s passport nationality and (in some cases) their country of previous diplomas. In the aforementioned example, the (hypothetical) student would be registered as Italian and/or Brazilian.
Up until 2020, DCM defined so called ‘focus countries’ towards which recruitment efforts were aimed. These were sub-divided into three tiers to help guide resource allocation. Implicitly, this meant recruitment was very much geographically focused (traditional definition). Since corona, efforts are underway to try and include new concepts of diversity into the recruitment process (as mentioned above) and to visualize these in BMI dashboards. Through these dashboards, marketeers and policy makers can track the diversity of enrolment and compare data across academic years.