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Rethinking metrics, rethinking narratives: why widening access at elite universities requires more than procedural fairness

by Kate Ayres

For many years, the fair access agenda in UK HE has emphasised more transparent and consistent admissions processes that are underpinned by clearer criteria and targeted support. As a qualified accountant and training in Lean Six Sigma, I’ve always been drawn to efficiency, clarity, and measurable improvement – principles that shaped much of my work in HE. However, as I moved into more senior roles and worked more closely with institutional decision-makers, I started to ask a different kind of question: why do some reforms, even when implemented well, seem to make little real difference?

That question sits at the centre of my doctoral research. Despite significant reforms the social composition of Durham University’s student body has felt largely unchanged. From within the institution, it was evident that fairer offer-making was not translating into meaningful shifts in the home-student entrant profile. This revealed an uncomfortable truth: so far, no amount of investment or policy reform can, by itself, reshape the social forces that determine who sees a Durham degree as desirable.

To understand why, we need to stop looking only at what universities do, and start looking at how students behave, and how the wider customer base, or audience, signals who belongs where.

Why aren’t internal reforms enough?

The limited shift in Durham’s home-student body prompts a key question: are our current metrics assuming universities can control demand, when in fact they can only affect the choices of applicants already in their pool?

My research used fourteen years of UCAS admissions data for Durham University to analyse how applicant characteristics, predicted attainment, school type, and socio-economic background intersect with admissions decisions and outcomes. Using multivariate logistic regression and Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis, I examined the impact of Durham’s 2019 move from decentralised to centralised admissions.

Results

Since the centralisation of admissions in 2019:

  • Contextual students are now 72% more likely to receive an offer, reflecting a major shift in offer-making behaviour.
  • Contextual applicants to selecting departments remain 40% less likely to get offers than those applying to recruiting ones.
  • No improvement is seen in firm-acceptance rates, suggesting culture or fit still shape applicant choices.
  • Insurance-acceptance has risen 21%, showing Durham is increasingly seen as a backup option for these students.
  • Contextual students are now 2% less likely to enrol after receiving an offer, raising concerns about deeper barriers to entry.

Trend Analysis

The findings were initially encouraging with Contextual applicants became more likely to receive an offer after centralisation. However, the increased offer rate had very limited effect on who actually enrolled. Contextual applicants were increasingly likely to accept alternative universities before Durham. Meanwhile, the proportion of entrants from higher parental SES groups increased, and independent-school students (already overrepresented) continued to make up around one-third of Durham’s home undergraduate intake in 2023.

Who is in control of demand?

While Durham has a history of taking affirmative action for contextual students, these findings illustrate that the OfS-set POLAR4 ratios will never be achievable for somewhere like Durham because these measures assume that universities themselves control demand. Drawing on Organisational Ecology, I argue that this assumption is flawed.

To understand why improved offer-making did not shift entrant composition, we need to look beyond institutional behaviour and examine the ecosystem dynamics that shape demand. Just as ecosystems rely on diversity, so does HE. No institution can appeal to every audience, nor should it. Organisations operate within ecosystems shaped by social, economic, and political forces, and crucially by their audiences, who ultimately determine demand. Therefore, it is the audience that defines an organisation’s niche. In HE, applicants gravitate toward universities that align with their social tastes, expectations, and sense of belonging. Therefore, the most powerful forces shaping demand are the social networks and information transmissions within and these influence applicants long before they apply: what they hear at school, family expectations, and what peers believe “people like us” do—and where “people like us” go.

Currently, wider systemic shifts are reinforcing and entrenching Durham’s niche, especially among white independent-school applicants:

  1.  As Oxbridge intensifies its widening participation initiatives, applicants who traditionally succeed (predominantly white students from independent schools) are increasingly less likely to secure offers.
  2. These applicants seek the closest alternative to the Oxbridge experience, with Durham emerging as a preferred option.
  3. Durham is increasingly accepted as a firm choice because of its perceived “fit” with these applicants’ identity and expectations (as seen in this research).
  4. These applicants typically achieve their predicted grades, making entry more likely.
  5. Their growing presence reinforces existing social narratives about Durham’s student profile.
  6. Consequently, the entrant composition remains socially narrow, and these dynamics may intensify.
  7. The narrative of Durham as a socially exclusive institution persists.
  8. Applicants from non-traditional backgrounds thus perceive a lack of belonging.
  9. As a result, these applicants are less likely to select Durham as their firm choice.

While these dynamics may prompt questions about whether Durham could or should shift away from its position as an “almost-Oxbridge” institution, the evidence suggests that only limited movement is structurally possible. Organisational Ecology predicts that Durham’s niche will remain relatively stable over time and there are many benefits of sticking with a niche approach. The university may be able to broaden its appeal slightly at the margins, drawing in more students from POLAR4 Q3 and Q4 backgrounds, but POLAR4 Q1 and Q2 students are likely to remain outliers. The real question is therefore not whether Durham can radically transform its appeal, but whether it can create the conditions in which those who do apply feel they can belong and thrive. This is where the OfS should take action because, rather than holding universities accountable for applicant pools (which they do not control), it should focus on the areas where institutional agency is strongest. Improving the lived experience of contextual students, strengthening narrative and cultural inclusion, and raising offer-to-acceptance conversion rates are all within Durham’s sphere of influence. Current patterns, particularly the relatively low acceptance and entry rates among contextual applicants, suggest that cultural barriers remain. Regulators should therefore attend less to the composition of the total entrant pool and more to how effectively institutions support, retain, and attract those who already see themselves as potential members of the community.

Taken together, the wider systemic effects detailed above reinforce, rather than shift, Durham’s niche. Only a proportion of applicants will ever feel an affinity with the institution, which is entirely natural in a diverse HE ecosystem where students gravitate toward environments that resonate with their identities and expectations.

These systemic forces lie largely outside Durham’s control, and changing the feedback loop requires more than procedural reform. It demands narrative change within the social networks where ideas of belonging are first formed, and a commitment to ensuring that the lived experiences of contextual students at Durham are positive and affirming. Building stronger partnerships with schools can help shift these early perceptions, while amplifying the stories and experiences of students from diverse backgrounds can offer powerful, alternative points of identification. Applicants make decisions based not just on information, but on a deep, intuitive sense of whether a place feels like it’s for “people like us”. This cannot be achieved through admissions policy, strategy, or marketing alone. Institutions can also look to examples such as the University of Bristol, which has reshaped its entrant pool through doing exactly this. Their efforts have influenced not only who feels able to apply, but who can genuinely imagine themselves thriving within the institution, resulting in a gradual shift in their niche.

Proposal for new metrics

If we evaluate universities on metrics that assume they control demand, we will misread both the problem and the solution. In the short term, universities cannot determine who chooses to apply, but they can influence who feels confident enough to accept an offer, which may, as seen with Bristol, create gradual shifts in the entrant pool over time. Universities can and should work to broaden their niches, yet Organisational Ecology reminds us that institutions rarely move far from their point of peak appeal, meaning Durham’s niche is likely to remain relatively stable and only widen at the margins. Expecting rapid transformation would be like assuming a population adapted to the Arctic could swiftly relocate to the Caribbean. That’s not saying it’s not possible, but it is not fast. Any substantial change in who feels an affinity with Durham will likewise unfold slowly, as cultural experiences and social narratives evolve. In the meantime, improving the lived experience of contextual students, and seeing this reflected in rising conversion rates, is the most realistic and meaningful early sign of movement within the niche. This stability also means that proportion-based performance measures will continue to make the University appear as though it is underperforming, even when it is behaving exactly as expected within its ecological position. Durham has added complexities in that it will always occupy a relatively small share of the HE market because the physical constraints of Durham City limit expansion. This adds presents further broadening of the niche simply because they can’t change by admitting more students.

Therefore, metrics focused solely on broad institutional demand will never fully capture the dynamics of access or institutional “progress”. However, rising conversions – from offer to firm acceptance or offer to entry – among contextual students would signal a growing sense of fit, belonging, or affinity. And even if these students never form a majority, improving conversion is a meaningful and realistic way to measure widening participation progress, because it focuses on what an institution can actually influence, the student experience.

To take these social forces seriously, and to acknowledge that a healthy HE system depends on a diversity of institutions meeting the diverse needs of students, we need metrics that reflect audience attraction and demand dynamics. Current proportion-based measures, fail to capture these realities. Instead, I propose:

  • Because Russell Group institutions occupy a similar position in the Blau Space (they attract applicants with comparable social, cultural, and educational characteristics), organisational ecology theory suggests they compete in neighbouring overlapping niches. This means that isolated widening participation initiatives at a single institution may simply redistribute socially advantaged applicants across the group rather than increase diversity overall. Coordinated widening participation strategies across the Russell Group would therefore reduce competitive displacement and support genuine, sector-wide broadening of access.
  • Introduce regulatory metrics that reward successful conversion, for example offer-to-firm-acceptance rates for underrepresented groups, rather than focusing solely on offers or entrant proportions. This would bring cultural belonging into WP evaluation by capturing the fact that where these students accept an offer and enter, there is likely be a greater sense of affinity, a place where they feel they can “fit”, belong, and succeed.
  • Measure and report the impact of cross-institution outreach among universities with similar audience profiles, recognising that widening participation is driven by sector-level dynamics rather than isolated institutional efforts.
  • Track behavioural demand patterns (such as firm-choice decisions) across groups of institutions to reveal how social signalling influences applicant preferences.

The future of access lies in changing what we measure—and what we tell ourselves

Universities often feel they are held solely accountable for widening access, yet my research demonstrates that applicant perceptions, social networks, and systemic hierarchies play an equally powerful role. The most important conclusion of this research is that access outcomes are co-produced. Universities are not solely responsible for entrant composition; applicants are active agents whose perceptions and choices shape institutional realities. To make meaningful change, we need approaches that reflect this distributed responsibility. To make real progress, we must rethink both the metrics we prioritise and the narratives we reproduce.

Fair admissions processes matter – but without addressing the social dynamics shaping applicant behaviour, procedural fairness alone will never deliver equitable outcomes. By shifting the sector’s focus to behavioural metrics and narrative change, we can begin to challenge the feedback loops that sustain exclusivity and move toward a system where access is genuinely a collaborative effort.

Durham University may never appeal to more than a small share of the applicant pool, but perhaps the real measure of success is ensuring that those who do not fit the perceived mould feel confident enough to accept and enter. Ecosystems flourish through diversity, and so does HE; no single institution can – or should – meet every need. Our responsibility is to keep access fair, to reshape the narratives that limit choice, and to support those who want to join us to feel that they truly belong. In focusing on this conversion (from offer to entrant) we move toward a more honest and sustainable understanding of what widening participation success looks like. We cannot control the applicant pool, but we can influence the student experience, the narratives that spread through their networks, and their confidence in imagining themselves belonging here.

Dr Kate Ayres is a Chartered Management Accountant (CIMA) with a DBA from Durham University, where her research explored market niches and widening participation in UK HE through organisational ecology using quantitative methods. She has worked across finance, academic, and project management roles in UK Higher Education, including positions at Durham University and the University of Oxford. Kate currently serves as an Academic Mentor on the Senior Leaders Apprenticeship at Durham University Business School. Her work brings together analytical insight, organisational experience, and a commitment to improving HE culture. She also co-manages and sings with the Durham University Staff Chamber Choir, which she founded.


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Gender governance and the global grammar of illiberal inclusion

by Ourania Filippakou

Across global higher education, the terms of justice, equality and inclusion are being rewritten. In recent years, the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the United States (Spitalniak, 2025) has unfolded alongside a global resurgence of anti-gender, ultra-nationalist, racialised and colonial politics (Brechenmacher, 2025). At the same time, the rise of authoritarian and far-right ideologies, together with deepening socioeconomic inequalities fuelled by an ascendant billionaire class (Klein and Taylor, 2025) and the growing portrayal of feminist and queer scholarship as ideological extremism (Pitts-Taylor and Wood, 2025), signal a profound shift in the rationalities shaping the politics of higher education. These developments do not reject inclusion; they refashion it. Equality becomes excess, dissent is recast as disorder, and inclusion is reconstituted as a technology of governance.

This conjuncture, what Stuart Hall (Hall in Hall and Massey, 2010, p57) would call the alignment of economic, political and cultural forces, requires a vocabulary capable of capturing continuity and rupture. It also reflects the deepening crisis of neoliberalism, whose governing logics become more coercive as their legitimacy wanes (Beckert, 2025; Menand, 2023). As Hall reminds us, ‘a conjuncture is a period when different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions… or as Althusser said ‘fuse in a ruptural unity’’ (Hall in Hall and Massey, 2012, p57). A conjuncture, in this sense, does not resolve crisis but produces new configurations of ideological coherence and institutional control. In my recent article, ‘Managed Inclusion and the Politics of Erasure: Gender Governance in Higher Education under Neoliberal Authoritarianism’ (Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 2025), I theorise these developments as a global grammar of illiberal inclusion: a political rationality that appropriates the language of equity while disabling its redistributive, democratic and epistemic force. The article develops a typology of symbolic, technocratic and transformative inclusion to examine how feminist, anti-caste and critical vocabularies are increasingly absorbed into systems of civility, visibility and procedural control. Transformative inclusion, the configuration most aligned with redistribution, dissent and epistemic plurality, is the one most forcefully neutralised.

Across geopolitical contexts, from postcolonial states to liberal democracies, gender inclusion is increasingly appropriated not as a demand for justice but as a mechanism of control. The techniques of co-option vary, yet they consolidate into a shared political rationality in which equity is stripped of redistributive force and redeployed to affirm institutional legitimacy, nationalist virtue and market competitiveness. This is not a rupture with neoliberal governance but its intensification through more disciplinary and exclusionary forms. For example, in India, the National Education Policy 2020 invokes empowerment while enacting epistemic erasure, systematically marginalising the knowledges of women from subordinated caste, class and religious communities (Peerzada et al, 2024; Patil, 2023; Singh, 2023). At the same time, state-led campaigns such as Beti Bachao elevate women’s visibility only within ideals of modesty and nationalist virtue (Chhachhi, 2020). In Hungary, the 2018 ban on gender studies aligned higher education with labour-market imperatives and nationalist agendas (Barát, 2022; Zsubori, 2018). In Turkey, reforms under Erdoğan consolidate patriarchal norms while constraining feminist organising (Zihnioğlu and Kourou, 2025). Here, gender inclusion is tolerated only when it reinforces state agendas and restricts dissent.

Elsewhere, inclusion is recast as ideological deviance. In the United States, the Trump-era rollback of DEI initiatives and reproductive rights has weaponised inclusion as a spectre of radicalism, disproportionately targeting racialised and LGBTQ+ communities (Amnesty International, 2024; Chao-Fong, 2025). In Argentina, Milei abolished the Ministry of Women, describing feminism as fiscally irresponsible (James, 2024). In Italy, Meloni’s government invokes ‘traditional values’ to erode anti-discrimination frameworks (De Giorgi et al, 2023, p.v11i1.6042). In these cases, inclusion is not merely neutralised but actively vilified, its political charge reframed as cultural threat.

Even when inclusion is celebrated, it is tethered to respectability and moral legibility. In France, femonationalist discourses instrumentalise gender equality to legitimise anti-Muslim policy (Farris, 2012; Möser, 2022). In Greece, conservative statecraft reframes inclusion through familialist narratives while dismantling equality infrastructures (Bempeza, 2025). These patterns reflect a longer political repertoire in which authoritarian and ultra-nationalist projects mobilise idealised domestic femininity to naturalise social hierarchies. As historian Diana Garvin (Garvin quoted in Matei, 2025) notes, ‘what fascisms old and new have in common is they tend to look to women to fill in the gaps that the state misses’, with contemporary ‘womanosphere’ influencers in the US reviving fantasies of domestic bliss that obscure intensified gendered precarity (Matei, 2025).

Such gendered constructions coexist with escalating violence. More than 50.000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or family members in 2024, which means one woman or girl was killed every ten minutes, or 137 every day, according to the latest UNODC and UN Women femicide report (UNODC/UN Women, 2025). This sits within a wider continuum of harm: 83.000 women and girls were intentionally killed last year, and the report finds no sign of real progress. It also highlights a steep rise in digital violence, including harassment, stalking, gendered disinformation and deepfakes, which increasingly spills into offline contexts and contributes to more lethal forms of harm. These global patterns intersect with regional crises. For example, more than 7.000 women were killed in India in gender-related violence in 2022 (NCRB, 2023); eleven women are murdered daily in femicides across Latin America (NU CEPAL, 2024). At the same time, masculinist influencers such as Andrew Tate cultivate transnational publics organised around misogyny (Adams, 2025; Wescott et al, 2024). As UN Secretary-General António Guterres (2025) warns: ‘Instead of mainstreaming equal rights, we are seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny’.

These global pressures reverberate across institutions that have historically positioned themselves as democratic spaces, including universities, which increasingly recast gender equity as a reputational risk or cultural flashpoint rather than a democratic obligation (D’Angelo et al, 2024; McEwen and Narayanaswamy, 2023). Equity becomes an emblem of modernity to be audited, displayed and curated, rather than a demand for justice. Ahmed’s (2012) theorisation of non-performativity is essential here: institutions declare commitments to equality precisely to contain the transformations such commitments would require. In this context, symbolic and technocratic inclusion flourish, while the structural conditions for transformative inclusion continue to narrow.

These shifts reflect broader political and economic formations. Brown (2015) shows how neoliberal reason converts justice claims into performance demands, hollowing out democratic vocabularies. Fraser’s (2017) account of ‘progressive neoliberalism’ illuminates the terrain in which market liberalism coupled with selective diversity politics absorbs emancipatory discourse while preserving inequality. Patnaik (2021) argues that the rise of neofascism is a political necessity for neoliberalism in crisis, as rights are redefined as privileges and inclusion is repurposed to stabilise inequality. In this conjuncture, these tendencies intensify into what Giroux (2018, 2021, 2022a) names ‘neoliberal fascism’, a formation structured by three interlocking fundamentalisms: a market fundamentalism that commodifies all aspects of life, a religious fundamentalism that moralises inequality; and a regime of manufactured ignorance and militarised illiteracy that discredits critical thought and erases historical memory (Giroux 2022b, p48-54).

The United States now offers a further manifestation of this global pattern, illustrating how attacks on DEI can function as a broader assault on higher education. As recent analyses of US politics show, the first and particularly the second Trump administration is actively modelling itself on Viktor Orbán’s illiberal statecraft, centralising executive power, purging public institutions and mobilising ‘family values’ and anti-‘woke’ politics to reshape education and media governance (Giroux, 2017; Smith, 2025; Kauffmann, 2025). The dismantling of DEI under the Trump administration, framed as a defence of merit, free speech and fiscal responsibility (The White House, 2025), marks the beginning of a wider attempt to consolidate political influence over higher education. Executive orders targeting DEI have been followed by lawsuits, funding withdrawals and intensified federal scrutiny, prompting universities such as Michigan, Columbia and Chicago to scale back equality infrastructures, cut programmes and reduce humanities provision (cf Bleiler, 2025; Pickering, Cosgrove and Massel, 2025; Quinn, 2025). These developments do not simply eliminate DEI; they position anti-gender politics as a mechanism of disciplining universities, narrowing intellectual autonomy and extending political control over academic life. They exemplify wider global tendencies in which inclusion becomes a field through which illiberal projects consolidate authority. The assault on DEI is thus not a uniquely American phenomenon but part of a broader authoritarian turn in which inclusion is recoded to stabilise, rather than challenge, existing power.

Understanding gender governance in higher education through this conjunctural lens reveals not merely the erosion of equity but the emergence of a political formation that reconfigures inclusion into an apparatus of civility, visibility and administrative control. These tendencies are not aberrations but expressions of a larger global grammar that binds emancipatory rhetoric to authoritarian-neoliberal governance. The result is not the dilution of equality but its rearrangement as a practice of containment.

The implications for the sector are profound. If inclusion is increasingly reorganised through metrics, decorum and procedural compliance, then reclaiming its democratic potential requires an epistemic and institutional shift. Inclusion needs to be understood not as a reputational asset but as a commitment to justice, redistribution and collective struggle. This means recovering equality as political and pedagogical labour: the work of confronting injustice, protecting dissent and renewing the public imagination. Academic freedom and equality are inseparable: without equality, freedom becomes privilege; without freedom, equality becomes performance.

As Angela Davis (Davis quoted in Gerges, 2023) reminds us: ‘Diversity without structural transformation simply brings those who were previously excluded into a system as racist and misogynist as it was before… There can be no diversity and inclusion without transformation and justice.’ And as Henry Giroux (2025) argues, democracy depends on how societies fight over language, memory and possibility. That struggle now runs through the university itself, shaping its governance, its epistemic life and the courage to imagine more just and democratic possibilities.

Ourania Filippakou is a Professor of Education at Brunel University of London. Her research interrogates the politics of higher education, examining universities as contested spaces where power, inequality, and resistance intersect. Rooted in critical traditions, she explores how higher education can foster social justice, equity, and transformative change.


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Going against the grain? Arts Based Research and the EdD: Resistance, activism and identity

by Tim Clark and Tom Dobson

There has been growing interest in the potential of arts-based research (ABR) methods to enrich educational inquiry (Everley, 2021). However, minimal attention has been given to how accessible or relevant ABR is for practice-based researchers (including lecturers and teachers), who undertake the professional doctorate in education (EdD) pathway. We believe that this lack of attention is significant, partly because institutional frameworks for doctoral programmes are often informed by traditional models of PhD research, which may constrain the creative possibilities of practice-based study (Vaughan, 2021), and partly due to the nature and ‘uniqueness’ of the EdD as a research degree (Dennis, Chandler & Punthil, 2023).

We have previously argued that ABR potentially holds particular promise for EdD research due to its alignment with the programme’s highly relational and contextual nature and its engagement with diverse audiences. In our 2024 paper, which was part of a special issue of Teaching in Higher Education, we mapped the theoretical similarities in understandings of ABR and the EdD, exploring this alignment across aspects including practice, audience and reflexivity (Dobson & Clark, 2024). Our paper called for colleagues to ‘embrace hybridity’ and provide permission for creativity in EdD research and we attempted to illustrate this within the paper itself, entangling examples of creative nonfiction writing with a traditional scoping review to embody our theorisation. However, we also concluded with a realisation that maximising the potential of ABR requires careful attention to how design, practice and regulations support students’ identity development and agency (Savva & Nygaard, 2021).

To build on this, throughout 2024 we have been working with a group of nine EdD students studying at our respective institutions, who are all exploring the potential of ABR for their work. These students span professional roles from early childhood through to higher education, and disciplines including the arts, business and science. Following initial narrative interviews with each student, we developed an online cross-institution action learning set (Revans, 1982) to facilitate dialogue and learning relating to some of the key problems and opportunities students were experiencing in relation to their engagement with ABR. As a group we met 6 times, each time agreeing an area of focus, and providing opportunities for individuals to present and group members to ask clarifying and open-ended coaching style questions. This process culminated in creative analysis, where we collaboratively analysed and reflected on the learning that had taken place, and each student presented a creative interpretation of their learning to the group. We are currently working with a group of these EdD students to co-author a paper which captures and illustrates this learning and shares these creative outputs.

Alongside this, the second paper from our project (Clark & Dobson, forthcoming) explores some of the key learning arising from the initial interview phase – in particular the idea of ABR as a form of ‘resistance’ involving potentially either a deliberate, or more hesitant, decision to ‘go against the grain’. Using Glăveanu’s 5A’s theory (actors, actions, artifacts, audiences and affordances) to understand creativity as embedded in social relations, we developed the interview transcripts into vignettes for each student and identified three key strands of the students’ perceptions of their experiences – many of which continued to be key areas of focus as we worked through the action learning set process. The process highlighted the students’ understanding of how methodological expectations were reflected through key audiences and structures, how methodological choices aligned with their sense of self and identity and the role of ABR in promoting action and agency. The vignettes offered a nuanced illustration of the tensions in these areas, which we feel offers wider value due to the fact that, unlike any previous work we had identified in this area, the understandings related to students both with and without previous artist identities, backgrounds or experiences.

The focus on audience and structures highlighted the numerous audiences which exist for students’ EdD research, often spanning academic, professional and community spaces and how these can create tensions in terms of expectations of what research ‘should’ look like. Some students talked of an ongoing battle to justify and ensure their ABR projects were taken seriously, whilst others positioned their decision to use ABR as an active decision to resist academic or managerial structures they perceived had been unhelpfully imposed on them. This also highlighted that whilst valuing creativity in research within the micro context of an EdD programme itself (through teaching and supervision) was significant and built confidence, students also needed support to consider how to frame their work in wider contexts, including through institutional processes (such as those for ethics approval) and professional and academic communities. One student, for example, highlighted feeling ‘junior’ and ‘a bit insecure’ about engaging in wider university processes designed for what they felt was understood as more ‘serious research’.

In relation to identities and self, we explored a complex and nuanced understanding of students’ perceptions of the need for ongoing negotiation of the entanglement between professional, researcher, and in some cases, artist identities. Where students identified pre-existing artist identities, for some this created an obvious alignment with their research, but for others they identified tensions, including feeling ‘nervous’ about bringing this identity into their research and apprehensive of their relevance to an academic audience. Where students had no prior expertise or experience in the arts, they often expressed hesitance regarding using ABR, but strong feelings about its potential to align with aspects of their professional identity and values. For example, they appreciated ABR’s affordances in ensuring research was accessible to wider communities and supporting children’s voices to be heard.

This also connected with the final strand, action and agency, where ABR was positioned by the students as having the potential to facilitate an emancipatory process in education, promote agency and in some cases play a role in research as a form of activism. This was often associated with ideas of social justice, with one student, for example, talking of ABR as providing agency for him to ‘push back against’ an education system that marginalises certain groups. Alongside this, another highlighted ABR as having stronger potential to be participatory and action based, maximising the benefits of the research process itself on her participants who were also her students.   

As we continue our work on this project, the learning it has generated allows us to begin to reflect on its implications: implications that are both within individual EdD programs, where teaching and supervision have strong potential to offer spaces to explore, and reflect on, the potential value of ABR within EdD research, and at an institutional level, where regulations need to continue to respond to growing focus on the social and professional relevance of doctoral research and the range of models, and methodologies, they encompass. A key part of the action learning sets has also been their role in highlighting the value of facilitating methodological dialogue and creating a community of doctoral researchers exploring ABR. As one of the students reflected, this has helped with their sense of ‘validation’ for their work and provided a space to navigate some of the key tensions.

Dr Timothy Clark is Director of Research and Enterprise for the School of Education at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His research focuses on aspects of doctoral pedagogy and researcher development, particularly in relation to academic writing and methodological decision making on the professional Doctorate in Education (EdD). https://www.linkedin.com/in/drtimothyclark/

Dr Tom Dobson is Professor of Education at York St John University, where he leads the Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) programme. His research explores creative writing in education as well as the use of arts-based research by EdD students. https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-dobson-84860388/


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Looking for Love in 2024

by Kai Syng Tan

It’s nearly Valentine’s, and I’m looking for love.

Don’t be silly, you scoff. Love doesn’t exist.

Silly Lovers  

Silly, then, for one Paulo Freire (1921-1997) to claim education as an act of love. Evoking the four-letter word no fewer than fifty times in the English translation of his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) the Brazilian educator and philosopher links love with solidarity, humanisation and liberation, to clarify education’s mission as building a world where it is easier to love, and where educators must risk acts of love.

Laughable, too, that his contemporary James Baldwin (1924-1987) analysed love in its full range of possibilities, including erotic, platonic and familial, as well as relating to racial justice and the arts. The queer black author-activist is popularly understood to have compared the role of the artist to ‘exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see’.

One generation on, bell hooks (1952-2021) took things further. For the poet-professor, love is a ‘practice of freedom’ to ‘move against domination, against oppression’. More than an act of resistance, hooks is asking for a re-positioning of our very being, which demands a shift that is both ontological (how we are), as well as epistemological (how we think). ‘The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways to liberate ourselves and others’ (1994). Critically, diversity is key – not contrary – to this love. The same way opposites can attract, a ‘beloved’ community is formed ‘not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world’ (1995).  

Laughable Academics 

Sure, love might exist, but these are marginalised lovers, movers and shakers from the last century. So woolly and passé, you scoff. Serious academics today do not talk about love. Nor do they laugh (much), you kindly warn. If you want to be taken seriously, grow up. Act professional.

Cheers, but I’m not just an(y) academic.

I’m an artist. It’s my job to be dotty. That’s why when the pandemic hit, I discussed how the queen of dots Yayoi Kusama gives form and direction to unknowns, and called for the governments to embed artists to strategise bold exit strategies and to curate new visions. I called this ‘artful leadership’, where artists catalyse change beyond the remit of art and design.  

I’m also flagrantly hyperactive and dyslexic. I connect dots in novel ways. I love mixing and mis-matching things, to see what happens. Like running with the arts and humanities, which has helped catalysed a movement (pun fully intended) of creative ‘running studies’ and running artists as change-makers. 

Although neurodivergence is over-represented in art and design, what makes my approach a-typical within HE and HE art and design includes my background as a working-class migrant. Others may laugh or mock, but my autism and thick-skin make me as impervious as the most wrinkled elephants. I laugh back, by calling upon the octopus to confront the elephants in the ivory tower with ‘tentacular pedagogy’. Driven by the art school ethos of creativity, courage, curiosity and change-making, but with its hearts in neurodiversity, decolonisation and intersectionality, this teaching and (un-)learning framework rallies art and design to play a pro-active leadership role to remove barriers in HE, update art and design’s mission to serve ‘society, the economy and the environment’, and fulfil UNESCO’s vision for HE to prioritise care, solidarity and social justice by 2050 (easy-peasy).

Out of Love

Easy now, dear, you say. We’re all grown up and sophisticated. Like the woolly mammoth, slavery, sexism and the lot are extinct. Move on, I hear you say. Why does your kind like dwelling about the past?    

Well, no more than those who like to reminisce of the mythical ‘good old days’, I shrug. Also, like the crafty Covid virus, far from being wiped out, the worst of us is alive and kicking, and have mutated to multiple guises.

Look around us. We are out of love. Pledges of EDI or DEI during BLM 2020 that have now all but DIED. Persecution of Black ‘supertokens’. Apologists insisting that such ‘policing serves democracy, not white western supremacy’, interesting given UK’s ‘democratic backsliding’. Systems that have ‘love only for the rich’, and where ‘only the rich dare fall in love’. Creating a false dichotomy between STEM and STEAM subjects by prioritising certain subjects, and letting others face ‘bonfires’. Funding bloodbaths, bullying bosses and toxic cultures in the arts, just like its counterpart in HE which remains elitist, racist and ableist. Poverty of imagination. Research and global bodies waxing lyrical about neurodiversity and creativity, but ignoring practitioners and those with lived experience. The double-edged sword of the declaration by the new freedom of speech tzar on how universities will be fined for curbing the rights to expression, because the insistence of neutrality applies to the powerful with trans-exclusionary views, too.

All amid the small matters of an ongoing double pandemic, (support for) killings, and (culture) wars.

Love Sick

If this makes you feel sick, stick with me.

I’d love to work together, not divide us further.  

After all, Baldwin had grasped that love is hard work. Love ‘does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does’, and is instead ‘a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up’ (1960), of individuals, of societies.

Building a beloved community, and building a community that gets the value of a beloved community, is hard work. You’d agree that to get there, to catalyse any form of meaningful change, education is key. It’s just as well that, like love, hooks considers education a practice of freedom, in her tantalisingly-titled book Teaching to Transgress (1994).

This brings us back to Freire, who states that, to foster change, love, as well as dialogue, are ‘indispensable’ (1970). Dialogue ‘cannot exist’ in the ‘absence of a profound love for the world and its people’. Founded upon ‘love, humility, and faith’, ‘dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is a logical consequence’.

Love Letters to the Future

That’s why myself and many others involved in social justice and decolonial work in art and design have been opening up spaces for dialogue and action within and outside of HE centred on love.

I’ve been theorising a love-centred form of leadership. Rather than a trait or talent hinged on individuals, hierarchy, organisations, positions, genes or luck, I re-imagine leadership as a diversified, beyond-colonial, neuro-queered and (co-)creative practice, outlining ‘neuro-futurism’ as a multi-faceted toolkit within this. Care, compassion, kindness, joy, thriving and empathy are key in this (ignore the boffins who claim that autistic people don’t get empathy).  

But armchair pontifications are too cosy. Which is why my book draws on my own trial and (many) errors. They include my ongoing attempts to embody and test out modes of change- and future-making, as well as to foster such possibilities for others.

That was why I created a performance and installation last November, where I ran speed-dates with people from all walks, who also share their wishes for the future in the form of red tags that they tie to a staircase, which a visitor has termed ‘love letters to the future’ (Figure 1):  

Figure 1: ‘Peace and Love’ for 2050 (Tan 2023)

That was also why, as a jury member for the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in Japan last October, we awarded the top prize to an anonymous filmmaker who had been imprisoned by the Myanmar military junta. We get how life- and career-changing such a prestigious award can be for the filmmaker, and what a powerful message of solidarity for other creative makers equally imprisoned – actual and otherwise – such a move sends.  

That is also why, despite extensive challenges, I have remained thick-skinned as trustee board member of an arts and social justice charity, and helped to steer radical transformation in its governance, by embedding co-creation and anti-oppression policies and practices, leading to the appointment of its first, black neurodivergent female Artistic Director.

Love Seek

For the new year, I’m doubling down on my insistence on love. I’ll do so through a new project, entitled FAB PALS.

In the pilot, I will travel to different parts of my new adopted home of Hampshire, to look for artful leaders amongst hard to reach easy to ignore. This includes the Nepalese community who had made immeasurable sacrifices during the ‘good old days’ of the British Empire, but whose courage and creativity are now all but forgotten. I will volunteer at each site, to learn about their efforts on social and climate change, and how they survive and thrive within structures not built for and often designed to harm them. We will co-create stories set in the future, to visualise alternative, better realities that they aspire towards. These stories will irritate the dominant narratives of Hampshire as a twee stomping-ground of the elite, consistently ranked UK’s most desirable place to live in, and/or the best place to escape from a zombie apocalypse. Festivals are fab, so we will showcase this in a festival called Futures Artful Biennale (‘FAB’).

This can then be scaled-up and extended, to create a model of allyship and solidarity between HE and the community, in and beyond Hampshire. The spotlight will be on how the ‘undercommons’ within HE can find and team up with the under-dogs outside, and collaborate as artful leaders. Networks go beyond performative allyship and foster meaningful friendships, so we’ll do so through a network called ‘Partnering Artful Leaders’ (‘PALS’).

FAB PALS flips the narrative HE art and design as under-valued, as outlined in a report led by CHEAD. It does so by using EDI as a positive force and creative solution — not an appendix or problem. It will enable others, including ‘naysayers’, to learn about and from participants as consultants and collaborators. In the longer run, FAB PALS will co-develop a visual access rider with local communities about equitable ways of working with HE. FAB PALS critiques the common narrative of HE helicoptering into communities to colonise efforts, and/or confuse and harm with bureaucratic processes, contracts and forms demanded by research ethics offices thick with legalese to minimise risk for HE, then leaves, just as suddenly, once the ‘public engagement’, ‘impact’ and ‘diversity monitoring’ boxes are ticked. 

Out of Love  

Any discussion of the future must include the next generation, as well as education. My generation – myself included – have been responsible for much of the lovelessness and harm that we see now and for a while. Which is also why we must help to clean up after ourselves, to learn from beloved communities to push back on the push-backs. In particular, the bold interventions of queer, neurodivergent, multi-disciplinary Gen-Z artists such as Jacob V Joyce bring to live Freire’s explanation of love as an ‘act of courage, not of fear’ (1970).

In a new masters programme on arts and cultural leadership, I’ve also been calling upon hooks, Joyce and others, to not just decolonise, but love-bomb the curriculum. Rather than those offered by run-of-the-mill arts management degrees, the modules I lead on seek to dismantle the master’s story of leadership, and to build one out of love. This morning, I was more than proud to receive a 5000-word assignment entitled ‘love’ submitted by a student, which explores the role of oxytocin and power-sharing in leadership.  

Sure, the academy ‘is not paradise’, reminds hooks (1995). Nonetheless, education remains a ‘location of possibility’, and learning remains ‘a place where paradise can be created’. Freire adds that if ‘education alone cannot transform society, without it society cannot change either’ (2004).

The road ahead is quite definitely not paradise. Still, I’ve observed that many in the business of teaching — and especially teaching art and design — do what we do, despite set-backs, because we believe that art and design, HE and HE art and design, can be a force for good. That’s why we work with students, who will lead the following generations to ask better questions. We continue to risk acts of love, knowing that change, like love, takes time, and that we can build a world where it is easier to love. As artist-lovers, we want to make others conscious of the things they don’t see, and to replace harmful structures, cultures and mindsets with oxytocin, justice, solidarity, humanisation, liberation and joy, and move towards freedom.

If you don’t get this, it’s because only serious, artful academics get – and want to beget – love.

I’ve outlined my seriously silly efforts to beget love. It’s only been 25 years since my first full-time HE teaching role – I moisturise, cheers, love – and I’ll keep trying.

Do tell me about your efforts, so that we can join hands. 

Acknowledgements: The author is grateful to the many radical artist-lovers who have inspired her to look into love. The photograph is a detail of ‘Have a Speed-Date With Kai – Let’s Re-Imagine Our (Collective) Future Together’ by Kai Syng Tan (2023), as part of Ordinary Things, which was an exhibition curated by Professor Louise Siddons, The Winchester Gallery. The photograph was taken by Amy Hamilton.

Kai Syng Tan PhD PFHEA is a trans-disciplinary artist-curator, advisor and Associate Professor in Arts and Cultural Leadership, University of Southampton. Her book Re-Imagining Leadership with Neuro-Futurism: An A-Z Towards Collective Liberation (Palgrave Macmillan 2024) will be out in Spring. These are her personal views. @kaisyngtan


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The path towards a socially just learning design

by Keith Heggart , Camille Dickson-Deane, and Kae Novak

Introduction

Ensuring that our education practice is socially just is a challenging prospect at any time; when confronted with the current challenges of unprecedented bushfires and a global pandemic, it can seem an almost impossible consideration – yet perhaps it has never been more important to design learning to be socially just in the midst of these challenges. Before discussing how to design in a ‘socially just’ way, it would be pertinent to provide a definition: social justice is a concept which describes the relationships between an individual and society.  It proposes that these relationships be fair and just behaviours as measured by choice, distribution, opportunities, privileges, indeed, any form of activity (Boyles, Carusi and Attick, 2009).  When addressing these behaviours from a learning design perspective, this suggests we need to consider how we design our learning and teaching strategies. By designing these interventions carefully we can narrow educational inequalities and thus ensure a socially just education for all.

What is socially just learning design?

The first, and most important point, is that any approach to learning design that claims to be socially just needs to be inclusionary more than exclusionary. Too often, conversations about ensuring learning and teaching is socially just become too narrow, focusing on the needs of one particular group over another. While meeting the needs of marginalised learners is important, specifically focusing on one group in such a narrow way ignores the compounding challenges presented by the intersectional nature of disadvantages (Crenshaw, 2017), as well as risking marginalizing other groups. This approach is in keeping with definitions like that proposed by Clare Hocking, who argues that a truly socially just education is one that ‘embraces a wide range of differences and explores their effects on individual learning’ (Hocking, 2010: p2) – basically a positive acknowledgement of individual differences (Cronbach and Snow, 1969; Jonassen and Grabowski, 1993).

Instead of focusing on a particular group within a class as the site for improving learning outcomes, it is possible instead to focus on the learning experience as a whole, and in doing so make it an accessible and fulfilling experience for all learners. This is the kind of approach advocated in Universal Design for Learning or UDL (Meyer, Rose and Gordon, 2014). UDL is drawn from the broader ideas in architecture which calls for a shift from focusing on the deficits of individuals, and instead arguing that the deficit lies within society, and that is where we should focus our efforts. In the education context, this means that, regardless of a learner’s characteristics, once they are registered to pursue a course or program, the learning content should have relevance to the learner’s disposition within society.  Not considering how the learner will integrate any learnings into their own experience world is counterproductive.

There are additional benefits to such an approach to learning: by designing learning experience with this level of inclusivity, we meet the needs of all learners, but also allow a greater degree of flexibility and choice within learning – and that leads to greater learner engagement with the material. For example, one of the principles of UDL calls for providing multiple means of representation. In terms of video content, this might include providing captions, and an audio only version, and also a transcript as well as the  video content. While the audio only content might be of value to visually impaired learners, it might also be of value to learners who want to listen to the material while driving, or exercising. Equally, the captions might be of value to hearing impaired learners, but also to those where English language is not their first language.

Interactivity … what it means to me (the learner)

Another key principle behind UDL relates to providing multiple means of engagement for all learners. One way of doing this is by providing opportunities for students to demonstrate their interpretation through interactions. While this can be seen as a relatively straightforward pedagogical activity (although one that must still be carefully planned), instructors can be myopic in fully comprehending how this can be actioned. Most instructors adhere to their own somewhat accidentally developed pedagogical practice and are apprehensive about change. Adjusting a pedagogical approach to one where all learners are acknowledged and given the opportunity to respond can be difficult especially when looking at different modes of delivery.

We are still developing an understanding of interactivity in the online space – especially in terms of new secondary school learners and their engagement with different learning materials. This group, in particular, has grown up with digital and mobile technologies, and hence has different expectations about interactivity from previous cohorts. In trying to engender interactivity which demonstrates active learning,  institutions often allow users to do relatively simple things: liking a post, for example, or commenting on an article. These are both examples of so-called ‘interactive’ elements that are often utilised by instructors within learning management systems. While they have a place, these are often not what learners today consider to be ‘interactive’ and perhaps do little to boost engagement with learning materials.

Instead, learners are more likely to consider interactivity as something that affords them an element of control over the resources at hand. A good framework to understand this level of control is David Wiley’s 5Rs of Open Education Infrastructure. Wiley (2014) suggests that there are five key elements in how technology can be used in this way. Students can

  1. Retain material: make, own, and control a copy of the resource (eg, download and keep your own copy)
  2. Revise material: edit, adapt, and modify your copy of the resource (e.g., translate into another language)
  3. Remix material: combine an original or revised copy of the resource with other existing material to create something new (eg, make a mashup)
  4. Reuse material: use your original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource publicly (eg, on a website, in a presentation, in a class)
  5. Redistribute material: share copies of your original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource with others (eg, post a copy online or give one to a friend)

While these might not all be possible within the proprietary constraints of an institutions learning management systems, some of them should be – for example, students are more than capable of sharing work they’ve created more widely than within the class, and they are also capable of contributing to co-created resources, or being actively included as prosumers rather than only consuming pre-created materials (de Alvarez and  Dickson-Deane, 2018).

Bringing it all together

What does this mean for socially just learning design? Perhaps not surprisingly, Wiley’s ideas about open educational resources bear some similarity to Nancy Fraser’s (2007) three dimensional theory of social justice education. In even more ‘R’s, Fraser suggests that socially just education can be enacted through redistribution (increasing access to education for all), recognition (by reconsidering what is taught) and representation (developing authentic partnerships between students and teachers in decision-making processes). Combining these ideas with the principles of UDL, it is possible to develop a framework for socially just learning design (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Framework for socially just learning design activities

The examples below explain how such a framework might be operationalised.

1. Creating relevance by adding context to an existing OER

It’s common practice for students to be assigned a particular textbook as part of any course. Related to or based upon their reading of this textbook (and other activities as part of the course) students complete some form of summative assessment, often in the form of a written essay or report. However, using the framework above, it’s possible to make this activity both more engaging and more socially just. For example, by allowing the students to contribute or create an open source textbook on the topic, the task is automatically more authentic (as it’s a real world problem) and the future course materials are more representative towards the specific needs of the learner, their cohort and their immediate interaction within their societal base.

2. Adjusting rubrics to accommodate for any media-delivery

Another way of ensuring more socially-just approaches of learning design is by assessing student responses based on the communication of the assessment content and not on the foundational base of medium in which assessed content is delivered.  Whilst this can be difficult for some course content, if we restrict students to only provide responses to learning objectives within one medium this actively creates hurdles for students. If understanding of the content is what matters, then allow them to communicate it in the best way they know how. We can develop the above example about contributing to a textbook further: by allowing students to submit a different form of assessment (a short video, a webpage, an interactive learning object), it is also possible to allow students to make use of multiple means of expression. In this way, we have allowed greater representation, more means of expression, and made use of the revise and redistribute principles from Wiley (2014).

3. Giving learners choices in assessments

Learners have to manage their times differently.  Either redesigning assessments that can provide the opportunity to students to be selective in submission (phased submission in parts or delivery all at once) or a choice of three out of five assessments to complete allows learners to regain control of their own learning and customise it to themselves whilst still adhering to course intended outcomes.  Focusing the assessment to all students to fully access the disciplinary knowledge within their own context allows for redistribution of relevant and vital knowledge (Fraser, 2007).

Conclusion

In short, socially just learning design has significant potential to improve outcomes – not just for students in marginalised groups, but for all students. By combining Fraser’s 3D social justice model with aspects of UDL and the 5 R’s for Open Education into a cohesive framework, it is possible to design learning in such a way that all students have the opportunity and resources required to succeed.

Dr Camille Dickson-Deane is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education Learning Design, Faculty of Science, University of Technology, Sydney (E: Camille.dickson-deane@uts.edu.au). Dr Keith Heggart is a Lecturer in the School of International Studies and Education, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney (E: keith.heggart@uts.edu.au). Kae Novak ABD is a doctoral student in the School of Education and Human Development, University of Colorado-Denver (E: novak.kae@gmail.com).

References

Boyles, D, Carusi, T, and Attick, D (2009) ‘Historical and critical interpretations of social justice’ Handbook of social justice in education  New York, NY: Routledge pp30-42

Crenshaw, KW (2017) On intersectionality: Essential writings New York: The New Press

Cronbach, LJ, and Snow, RE (1969) Individual Differences in Learning Ability as a Function of Instructional Variables Final Report Stanford, CA: School of Education, Stanford

Fraser, N (2003) ‘Social justice in the age of identity politics: redistribution, recognition and participation’ in Fraser, N and Honneth A (eds) (2003) Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange London: Verso pp7-109

Fraser, N. (2007). Reframing justice in a globalizing world. Global inequality: Patterns and explanations, 252-272

Hocking, C. (2010). Inclusive Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: a Synthesis of Research. York: Higher Education Academy.

Jonassen, DH and Grabowski, B (1993) Individual differences and instruction New York: Allen and Bacon

Meyer, A, Rose, DH, and Gordon, DT (2014) Universal design for learning: Theory and practice Wakefield, MA: CAST Professional Publishing

de Alvarez, MS and Dickson-Deane, C (2018) ‘Avoiding educational technology pitfalls for inclusion and equity’ TechTrends 62(4): 345-353

Wiley, D (2014) ‘The Access Compromise and the 5th R.’ in An Open Education Reader https://openedreader.org/chapter/the-access-compromise-and-the-5th-r/


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The Digital University, Social Justice and the ‘public good’

By Helen Crump

The event organised by the SRHE Digital University Network in Belfast on 16 February focused on the theme of social justice and the ‘public good’ and how the ‘digital’ plays out when these concepts are (re)framed within the context of digital citizenship, digital literacy and open learning. The three speakers reflected critically on the concrete challenges and material struggles that digitisation entails and provided a space for developing dialogue.

In relation to digital literacy, Professor Mark Brown of Dublin City University highlighted the proliferation of models and frameworks that exist across Europe, the UK and the USA that aim to capture the nature of digital literacy and offer suitable ways to intervene and thereby produce the skills and competencies deemed necessary to live, learn and work successfully in the knowledge economy. He problematised these in relation to the tension between public and private good. Furthermore, he also noted that Continue reading →