Supporting Students From Different Universities And Backgrounds To Improve Their Academic And Social Outcomes: Euniwell MASOEE Project Workshop

The workshop provided a stimulating exercise for engineering educators to consider disadvantaged students by characterising them in an empathy map. This schema allows us to explore how disadvantage might impact skills acquisition, and also how students' aspirations might be a useful driver in designing pedagogies to narrow attainment gaps and foster social mobility. A key insight we had while running the workshop was that by considering disadvantage as unfulfilled aspirations, and the aspirations themselves as negated fears, as engineering educators we might be more inclined to address different forms of disadvantage through common means, potentially benefitting those students whose disadvantages receive less attention than others'.