Capture, evaluate, and improve: co-creating a cycle of empowerment for marginalised students in engineering (Ca-pow).

Ca-pow is a transdisciplinary 18-month project that combines the expertise of researchers in Education, Psychological Science, and Engineering to deliver a co-created cycle of empowerment for undergraduate students engineering students at Bristol who have multiple minority markers. Minority markers are defined as aspects of an individual’s identity and/or background that could result in barriers in their educational experience; this includes protected characteristics and widening participation (WP) markers. Our project focuses on students with multiple minority markers to acknowledge the compounding challenge(s) that these students face during their educational journeys.
The project is divided into three workstreams (WS); this talk will focus on WS1 and WS2. WS1-Capture involves the collection of data on the experience of intersectional engineering students, including full ethics approval, to enable co-section of appropriate improvement indicators that can be incorporated into student inclusion practices centrally and within engineering. WS2-Evaluate involves evaluation of widening participation and outreach initiatives in engineering, to understand their impact in providing information and encouragement to pre-university students from the local Bristol community. In this talk, we will present the work of four undergraduate summer interns, who have delivered a set of survey questions that will now undergo ethics approval (WS1), and co-ordinated focus groups with Y10/12 work experience students (WS2).