Education Resources

The education resources highlighted here showcase a series of outputs from various ongoing scholarship research projects within SEMS that focus on addressing prominent EDI issues as part of the Queen Mary Principles of Inclusive Curriculum. These can also be accessed internally by QMUL staff through the newly created SEMS EDI Committee QMPlus course page (login required).

1. Making Diversity 'Count': Inclusivity in STEM Curricula

The profiles of past and present diverse individuals provided below form part of an ongoing scholarship research initiative to diversify STEM curricula being undertaken by Dr Rehan Shah (supported by undergraduate student researcher, Ava Dahlia Belafonte) in SEMS in collaboration with Prof Claudia Garetto from the School of Mathematical Sciences at QMUL. These are designed to increase students’ awareness of diverse representation and provide positive role models through exposure to mathematicians, scientists, and engineers from under-represented backgrounds (such as female, disabled or LGBTQ+) and non-traditional pathways in academia and industry.

The STEM Champions Diversification Booklet (PDF) for academic educators contains short biographies of around 90 STEM Champions who are often overlooked when discussing the history of mathematics, science or engineering or who are more representative of what many professionals in these areas look like today.

Poster presentations for this project have also been disseminated at the QMUL Festival of Education (PDF)(won Best Innovation award), CAISE Inclusive Scholarship Workshop (PDF) and as QMUL's entry for the Posters in Parliament (PDF) event.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve these resources or if you would like to suggest other possible additions following implementation, please contact Dr Shah on rehan.shah@qmul.ac.uk

2. Embedding Ethics and Sustainability in Mathematics Modules

The mathematical toolkit provided below for academic educators is designed to raise ethical and sustainability awareness and imbibe transferable skills among undergraduate students in STEM disciplines as part of an ongoing scholarship research initiative undertaken by Dr Rehan Shah from QMUL with external collaborators from the University of Cambridge's Ethics in Mathematics project. Some of the mathematical content in the exercises below was inspired by actual tutorial sheet questions from the Mathematical Tripos course taught at the University of Cambridge.

In addition to traditional mathematical content, the exercise questions in this toolkit also contain an ethical/sustainability component to each problem, and in order to solve the problem fully, students need to take into account these aspects and consider it as part of their solution. “Solutions” to as many of these exercises as possible have been provided in the toolkit for academic educators. These include both a full exposition of the mathematical component of the question, as well as a discussion and incorporation of these wider societal issues that are embedded in the question, which can serve as useful points for further discussion in the classroom.

This toolkit resource comprises:

If you have any suggestions on how to improve these resources or if you would like to suggest other possible additions following implementation, please contact Dr Shah on rehan.shah@qmul.ac.uk