I began working on the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) in September 2022. I have been looking forward to learning about the educational implications of confronting and addressing harmful histories and legacies within institutions, as it’s linked with my wider research interests in working with ‘difficult’ topics in education (Done & Knowler 2020, 2023) – or to borrow a Star Wars reference –  the ‘dark side’ (Soan, 2006) of inclusive education (I always hear the music when I say that). 

I have worked with educators, students and their families over many years where education, within certain institutions, has been constrictive, exclusive and, at times, traumatic. I have spent many hours thinking about ways to define, identify and eliminate exclusionary mechanisms in education settings and how educators can productively remove barriers to learning. A history and legacy like eugenics is the biggest barrier I have come up against to date – for me, an imaginary wall and it casts a long shadow. I am looking up at this wall with a ladder too short and some kind passers-by to occasionally hold the bottom rungs while I remain unable to see over the top and see what is on the other side. 

It seemed very natural and logical that part of the work in developing tools and resources to confront and address this history of eugenics at UCL (University College London) would include working with and learning with others. However, this has brought with it anxieties; the scale of the task at hand, does anyone care anyway, facing challenge and defensiveness weekly and the awareness that my privileges and lived experiences can result in blind spots and obfuscation. Using the roundtable approach has been an essential tool for helping me to think about questions that had not occurred to me to date, to gain perspective on starting points for change at UCL and to think about the collaborations and alliances that are essential for any kinds of social justice work in organisations like UCL. So, in April 2023 we invited colleagues from across UCL to sign up for roundtables to talk about ‘what next? Twenty-eight colleagues from ten UCL faculties attended online and in person events, and we intentionally designed the sessions to be small (four to six attendees), not recorded and with focused areas to discuss but that dialogue directions would lead by participants. The keys areas that resonated with me while I was listening to the six conversations were linked to a ‘new’ UCL narrative about eugenics, issues of transparency and inclusion about our educational work on this problematic legacy and working out together what accountability looks like from everyone in the UCL community.  

Many of the contributors noted the complex relationship between ‘then’ and ‘now’ but that the inquiry and post inquiry work done to date had been important. People at UCL have clearly followed the developments in the post inquiry work and are interested in the ways that as a community we negotiate the discomfort we feel when we bring attention to the harm of eugenics then, now and in the future. It was important to them that the work continued and that this ‘working ourselves out’ was visible to everyone within UCL and to the outside world. This helped me to see any kind of protocol or framework as the ‘bridge’ between eugenics as historical fact (the then) and the UCL eugenics legacy of today (the now) as an ongoing educational responsibility (the future). This is also linked to the importance of the development of a new narrative for UCL around harm and reparation – up to 2014 the ‘official’ story seemed to be that we would either forget, let it go or move on. However, the Inquiry has rightly demanded that latest updates, new learning and novel approaches are taking place and thus recorded, so that in the next hundred years, UCL’s eugenics legacy is seen in the context of educators tussling with the complexities of students encounters with this legacy while they devise pedagogical strategies and curriculum encounters. There were differences in opinion around the issue of accountability – some contributors talked of the importance of leadership in showing that UCL’s eugenics legacy could not be consigned to small places within the institutions. This seems important but it does locate power to transform education space with the already privileged at the ‘top’ and I worry about the echo chamber that this approach within ELEP might create. Others talked about module leaders working on relevant responses, so that cumulatively UCL can demonstrate ‘subject appropriate’ teaching, rather than ‘bolt on’ and shallow engagements with what this legacy means to us educationally. This speaks to the bottom-up approach to UCL’s post inquiry activities that locates the works of addressing the legacy firmly in the classroom space. Itis stills to be seen whether a legacy, like eugenics, can be fore fronted as a strategic priority for any university at the current time, with other more pressing concerns. However, the hauntings (Dixon-Roman, 2017) of incongruence between the lofty aims of many higher education institutions around student belonging, student success, equity and graduate student futures and the unexamined harms of such legacies left to be examined somewhere else, still is a problematic site of contestation for educational developers and leaders if nothing else happens beyond apology.  

To do the reparative work required to align educational issues of care, social justice and addressing the impact of harmful histories located within institutions  – that is to use our educational practices to address and repair harms of eugenics within UCL – the roundtables prompted me to recognise, and perhaps more importantly, accept that there is no end point to this work, and it is not the role of ELEP to name one.  The most powerful reflection therefore is that these roundtables have been important for starting different conversations at UCL about efforts to work productively with discomfort, fear and difficulty in our educational activities.  

References 

Dixon-Román, E. (2017). Toward a hauntology on data: On the sociopolitical forces of data assemblages. Research in Education, 98(1), 44–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/0034523717723387 

Done, E.J. & Knowler, H. (2020) Painful invisibilities: Roll management or ‘off-rolling’ and professional identity. British Education Research Journal 46(3): 516-531. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3591 

Done, E.J. & Knowler, H. (eds) (2023) How Inclusion becomes Exclusion: International perspectives on exclusionary practices in Education. Palgrave/Macmillan. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-14113-3 

Soan, S. (2006), Are the needs of children and young people with social, emotional, and behavioural needs being served within a multi-agency framework? Support for Learning, 21: 210-215. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9604.2006.00434.x 

Over the last eighteen months I have been thinking a lot about education past, present and future and what it means to be incredibly uncomfortable in a classroom. I have the privilege of working with the staff and students at UCL to think about the next steps for our communities in confronting and addressing our history and legacy of eugenics. As part of the range of post inquiry work, these activities have been filled with many examples of productive discomfort and challenging discussions about what constitutes accountability and implication and what is means to address something educationally.  Our team has been working with the concept of ‘accountable’ space drawing on Abolitionist theories of teaching and learning, which has made us think about what it means to introduce discomfort into the classroom and the responsibilities of everyone in that space when discomfort intentionally or unintentionally enters the classroom.  

Whether or not a classroom can be a ‘safe’ space is an important educational question. If by ‘safe’ we mean ‘comfortable’, then I think many educationalists would want to problematise this idea, since we tend to think of learning as something that does require levels of discomfort and stretch.  When we take seriously relational and affective theories of learning, classrooms are naturally spaces of contestation and discomfort, but this does not necessarily make them ‘unsafe’.   If we accept Gert Biesta’s (2013) invitation to think of education as a ‘beautiful risk’ then we are required to ask different questions of our relation to the curriculum, to our work as educators or research. We must think about and reflect the ways we relate to students and what they bring the classroom space. This makes me reflect on the ways we hold classroom space so that it is boundaried but accountable.  

We will need to think carefully and creatively about alignment between our intended learning outcomes, our teaching and learning approaches and assessment. Educational research is showing us that teaching difficult and/or sensitive topics requires educators to have a range of different strategies and approaches in their ‘toolkit’ – this also means thinking carefully about the ways we ask our students to engage in teaching and learning approaches that they may not be familiar with or experienced before. And here is the ‘double bind’ for educators, not only are we teaching a curriculum area that could be described as sensitive, or contentious or troubling but we are using approaches that may also prompt strong emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger.  

This means, that in my view, our exploration of the negotiation of ‘safe spaces’ must include students. If we are to avoid conflating ‘discomfort’ and ‘harm’ (Gubkin, 2015) we need to distinguish between a learning environment that does harm and a learning environment that challenges. For me, this means have active and productive conversations with students about the difference between teaching and learning approaches when including curriculum content that could generate strong emotions. It means thinking about the ways we might need to support students to understand what learning uncomfortably means. Education research in this area suggests that we need to ensure that students appreciate the advantages academic freedom as well as counter arguments. 

Although in the early stages, the work that I have been doing is generating emerging evidence that students enjoy challenge and discomfort when they understand the educational rationale for doing so. When they have confidence that the classroom space can be held ethically and carefully, by skilled educators using their world leading research, they understand that discomfort is necessary and productive. They welcome opportunities to think about accountability and their responsibilities as future leaders and citizens and even if they do not feel they need to have a conversation or be prepared, they understand the importance of doing so for others.  As Gubkin (2015) notes, strong emotions are a source of knowledge and understanding their role within a session, a module, a programme or a research study can be a productive starting point making learning productively uncomfortable. Working with students to map this to think about the effect of mental health, belonging and inclusion is proving to be a starting point for building strategies for working with discomfort.  

References 

Bentley, M. (2017). Trigger warnings and the student experience. Politics, 37(4), 470-485. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395716684526 

Biesta, G.J.J. (2013). Beautiful Risk of Education (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315635866 

Gubkin, L. (2015) From empathetic understanding to engaged witnessing: Encountering trauma in the holocaust classroom. Teaching Theology and Religion 18(2): 103–120. 

Britzman’s (1998) concept of ‘difficult knowledge’ in education contexts challenges educators investigate the ways that experiences of education and learning can be problematic, traumatic, uncomfortable, and even harmful when encountering controversial or complex curriculum areas. While there is more thinking to be done around the concept of ‘difficult knowledge’ in relation to problematic legacies, this way of framing the introductions of the histories and legacies of eugenics across UCL will offer a productive starting point for academics, educators, researchers and students to think about aspects of education work that are vital to include in teaching and learning activities to enable repair and healing within institutions. This theorisation of UCL’s eugenics legacy as an educational practice also offers space for reflection around contemporary ideas about implication and accountability, necessary for addressing the harms caused by eugenics in the past.  

Eugenics is the ideology and practice of controlling who reproduces, how they reproduce, and what they reproduce in the interest of shaping the composition of a particular population group. The aim of eugenics is to rid society of the human characteristics that we consider to be disabilities in the broadest sense and, often by extension, of people with disabilities. (Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2015) Human Biodiversity Conservation: A Consensual Ethical Principle, The American Journal of Bioethics, 15:6, 13-15, DOI: 10.1080/15265161.2015.1028663) 

Confronting and addressing a complex and difficult history such as UCL’s historic links to eugenics is a complex and difficult task.  Following an inquiry in 2018, the de-naming of buildings across the UCL estate and the publication of an apology for ‘the development, propagation and legitimation of eugenics’ (UCL, 2021) UCL set up post inquiry projects to continue the work of addressing the historical links to eugenics.  It seems sensible to assume that in taking the strategic decision to fund these post inquiry projects, the inquiry teams recognised and acknowledged that addressing difficult histories such as eugenics, located within institutions such as UCL, requires on going and long-term engagement beyond immediate post inquiry activities.   

To work educationally to address UCL’s historical links to eugenics means taking seriously the idea that present and future education activities can be a crucial mechanism for: 

• Acknowledging historic harm caused by past activities, like eugenics, and ensuring that this history remains visible within the institution’s current and future educational activities.  
• Demonstrating institutional accountability by ensuring that UCL’s community continues to think about and reflect on decisions made about curriculum content, teaching and learning approaches and assessment activities.  
• Taking tangible educational actions to demonstrate the continuing relationship between harmful histories, present educational activities and educational futures. 

A project like ELEP presents several important opportunities to think about the relationship between the teaching of difficult knowledge such as UCL’s history of eugenics and the impact on student success and experience. The incongruence between strategic claims of inclusivity and student belonging and unexplored histories within institutions has been demonstrated in movements such as #Rhodesmustfall. #Whyismycurriculumwhite and the Harvard Law School official crest protest (BBC, 2016). Therefore, strategies for making visible such problematic histories to align institutional aspirations supporting socially just education futures require further consideration and examination. This aspect is central to Sriprakash’s (2022) work on the reparative function of education and ELEP will work with colleagues to explore who reparative strategies support inclusion and belonging in the light of serious historic harm.   Working within an area of difficult knowledge, such as eugenics, affords an opportunity explore the affective and relational dimensions of teaching (Zembylas, 2017) which is arguably crucial to investigate the ways that addressing historic harms generates a range of emotions and relational mechanisms that have not traditionally formed part of professional development for higher education teachers.  

References

Sriprakash, A. (2022). Reparations: theorising just futures of education, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2022.2144141  

Zembylas, M. (2017). Practicing an Ethic of Discomfort as an Ethic of Care in Higher Education Teaching. Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 5 (1): 1–17