Mapping Exclusion in Undergraduate Psychology: Towards a Common Architecture of the Minority Student Experience

Abstract

This chapter addresses the issue of diversity in higher education (HE) within the context of the experiences of psychology students with ethnic and sexual minority identifications. Although recent years have seen an increased focus in the UK on equality of access and the promotion of a policy of widening participation in HE, especially with regard to Black and minority ethnic (BME) students and those from residential areas which have a higher representation of people with lower incomes (Higher Education Funding Council for England, 2000; Zinkiewicz and Trapp, 2004), we still have only a limited understanding of the learning and teaching experiences of minority students in UK universities. Here we explore the experiences of minority students with a particular focus on UK university psychology departments and make reference to two recent studies carried out by the Westminster Diversity in Education Research1 group, which explored the experiences of BME and sexual minority (male Gay and Bisexual (GB)) psychology students.2 Primarily, we seek to identify commonalities in the ways that students from these groups are positioned and framed through their teaching and learning experiences of psychology. We also aim to address the questions: Does psychology, through its teaching and learning practices, at both the individual and institutional levels, properly and meaningfully encompass the diversity of its student population?KeywordsSexual MinorityMinority StudentBlack StudentEthnic Minority StudentMinority IdentityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.