This paper will present the work of the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) at University College London (UCL) and explore the theoretical and practical tensions of reckoning with problematic legacies in higher education contexts.  In 2018, UCL's then President & Provost, Professor Michael Arthur, commissioned an inquiry to look at UCL’s historical role in and the current status of the teaching and study of the history of eugenics. On 7 January 2021, UCL issued a formal public apology for its history and legacy of eugenics and a response group of people with diverse lived experience and professional expertise examined the inquiry recommendations. This group presented their proposals for how these recommendations could be best be enacted in July 2021. The Eugenics Inquiry Response Report acknowledged the complexity of developing teaching and learning activities that might redress problematic legacies in educational settings. Preparing staff and students to work with this complex focus provides a range of challenges and barriers to educational development, as well as opportunities for innovation and the potential for meaningful cross disciplinary collaboration between departments and faculties.  Between 2022-2025 ELEP aims to: 

• Develop a set of guidelines, staff resources, and learning opportunities that embed visibility and awareness of UCL’s history of eugenics in teaching and learning activities across the organisation. 
• Support the ability of students, staff, and the wider community to engage with UCL’s eugenics legacy in educational activities. 

• Investigate sustainable and inclusive teaching and learning approaches that continues to develop capacities of the UCL community to understand and address the legacies and ongoing consequences of eugenics thinking today.   

 The project is theoretically anchored within the field of Difficult Knowledge studies. Britzman (1998) developed the concept of ‘difficult knowledge’ in education contexts to 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 this aspect of the project, the concept of ‘difficult knowledge’ offers a productive starting point for thinking together about aspects of our education work that are vital for our education community as part of UCL’s mission around disruptive and radical thinking. This theorisation of the eugenics legacy also offers space for reflection around ideas about implication and accountability, necessary for addressing the harms caused by eugenics in the past

Since the project is in its early stages a key aim is to use a flexible and generative methodological strategy so that we can be systematic about data collation while remaining flexible and open to possibilities generated in practice. We utilise Winter’s (2003) metaphor of the patchwork - and while originally intended to relate to student assessment we think the gradual building of evidence from a range of data sources is appropriate. We offer examples of key project activities that aimed to encourage engagement with core issues in justice sensitive approaches to education, such as difficult knowledge (Britzman, 1998), affective solidarity (Hemmings, 2012), counter storytelling (Bell, 1987), education and harm (Love, 2019), inclusive education (Morina, 2017), and productive pedagogies (Zembylas, 2022). We address the following questions in this paper: What tensions, dilemmas and/or discomfort do educators experience as they introduce difficult topics into their classrooms? What are the pedagogical strategies mobilised to counter the challenges of working with difficult knowledge? How successful do educators think they have been when introducing difficult knowledge into their classrooms? How do they know? Using four case study examples of project activities, we consider the relationship between reckoning and reparation (Sriprakash, 2022) for educators under the following themes: object-based learning, authentic assessment, staff/student partnership and education for socially just futures. Each case study will contain a range of data such as staff planning and evaluation, recordings of reflexive conversations about teaching, student feedback, artefacts created in the course of developing teaching methods. We will employ a Reflexive Thematic Analysis on the data patchwork within each case study. This enables us to look in depth at the opportunities and mechanisms for negotiating difficult knowledge in higher education classroom, but also to offer an overarching analysis across all four case studies.

Eugenics is undoubtedly an example of a ‘difficult knowledge’ and through the development of staff learning opportunities, student engagement and resource development this project will explore how UCL’s eugenics legacy can be positioned within educational activities in sustainable and meaningful ways. This paper will necessarily focus in on eugenics histories at UCL, but we also aim to prompt reflection on the broader implications for working with other types of problematic legacies within higher education institutions.We aim to be able to say something about the experiences of educators confronting challenging and complex legacies in the course of their work. This leads to an important consideration of the implications for professional learning and support - reckoning with legacies like eugenics is more than simply teaching historical facts. It requires a serious engagement with the affective and relation dimensions of teaching in higher education contexts. We suggest some further avenues for education research and scholarship into the role of reparative pedagogies. We argue this is vital to support wider institutional policies related to inclusion and belonging. We welcome feedback from members of our academic community as part of our continuing dialogue with educators and to share our experiences of going beyond the process of de-naming buildings.

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