EDI Week: Where Are We?

It’s a good question, because where we are matters.  At the beginning of this academic year, we changed our name to Lincoln Bishop University.  The argument for this was that the new name ‘reflects our location and deep connection with the historic city of Lincoln’.  Place matters.

One way of communicating place is through ‘What3Words’.  This initiative, created by school friends Chris Sheldrick, Mohan Ganesalingam and Jack Waley-Cohen in 2013, has assigned dictionary words to 3-metre square locations across the globe.  What3Words offers ‘a solution to the limitations of traditional ... systems’ (Lazarus, 2023 n.p.).  Out of curiosity, I searched for the exact geographical location, in this system, for the three words Equality.Diversity.Inclusion.  The answer is that it is near Ginir, in the Oramiya region of southeastern Ethiopia. 

The What3Words system, though, is not without its critics.  Some have identified that the algorithm for assigning addresses to grid boxes may create many pairs of confusable addresses (Arthur, 2023).  Simply changing my search criteria to Equity.Diversity.Inclusion, for example, sent the app into a spin and located me somewhere – very vaguely – in the Arctic ocean.  I’m glad I wasn’t relying on it for rescue from a lifeboat!

The change from Equality to Equity in this activity is pertinent.  Few question what the ‘E’ stands for in EDI, yet equality and equity are not synonymous.  Equality allows for all people to access the same resources and opportunities.  However, not all people need the same things in order to access equity of experience.  Equity allows for provision of different resources and experiences as are needed to achieve the same (equal) outcome for that person, even if this means treating that person differently.  Yet not all people wish the potential ‘othering’ of being treated differently…

We forefront EDI week annually as part of our Secondary PGCE course, but are we considering equality or equity as the ‘E’?  And what of the other two words that make up our triple? According to the Institute of Leadership, diversity is about empowering people by respecting and appreciating what makes them different… which presupposes that we acknowledge rather than ignore differences even, as above, when people labelled as ‘different’ may not recognise or accept this identity.   Further, what constitutes inclusion (very different from integration, especially within an education context), and how to achieve it, continues as the subject of fierce debate as it has for many years (see, for example, Leijen et al., 2021; Rapp et al., 2024; Banks, 2025).

So, there is plenty to discuss.  I asked our EDI week’s coordinator and key facilitator, Dr Lyndsay Muir, for her three words to summarise what is important in the week:
1. Time - for listening; for reading, for researching
2. Space - for individual work, inspired by others with different lived experiences, insights, knowledge and backgrounds, personal and global perspectives
3. Learning - from 1 and 2, from sharing new knowledge and understandings in dialogue with others

We hope that our student teachers enjoy the week and learn much – and learn to question much – because of it.  Interestingly, our change of name this year was not solely to identify our location.  It was, further, to ‘reflect our values’.  Understanding what those values are, critiquing them, debating them, challenging them and challenging ways to implement them are all key to our learning. 

Just out of curiosity, I put Lyndsay’s three words of time.space.learning into What3Words, only to find they have not yet been allocated.  Maybe this EDI week in 2026 is our opportunity for Lincoln Bishop University to step up and put them on the map.