Unit 2: Inclusive Practices – Intervention Proposal

Throughout this unit so far, I have found myself returning to a set of questions that sit slightly before the classroom itself. Not only who participates once students arrive, but how institutions shape the conditions for arrival in the first place. Who feels able to imagine themselves here? Who is already excluded through the ways a course is described, represented and circulated? And what kinds of bodies, languages, experiences and ways of knowing are quietly assumed within that imagining?

These questions have become increasingly present within my teaching on MA Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures (MADSISF), where recent cohorts have become predominantly international, with comparatively few Home students. While this creates a rich and diverse learning environment, I have become increasingly aware that diversity in the room does not automatically translate into diversity of encounter, or into a broad range of lived experiences being present within dialogue, pedagogy and design thinking.

I am also conscious that this pattern of participation sits within wider structural conditions. Rising postgraduate tuition fees, increasing living costs and changing patterns of recruitment continue to shape who is able to access higher education in the UK. These pressures intersect with race, class and cultural capital, particularly where communities may not have visible pathways into disciplines such as design for social innovation. If students do not recognise themselves, their communities or their lived experiences within a course, it becomes more difficult to imagine that the space was designed with them in mind.

This intervention is informed by Paulo Freire’s (1970) understanding that education is never neutral, but always shaped by relationships of power, and by bell hooks’ (1994) concept of engaged pedagogy, which positions learning as relational, dialogic and grounded in lived experience. Rather than approaching inclusion primarily through recruitment, I have become increasingly interested in how belonging can be shaped through participation and partnership with students themselves.

Intervention Approach

The intervention would take the form of a Belonging and Futures Workshop with graduating students during the final stages of the MA, designed to coincide with the programme’s revalidation process.

Rather than positioning students as participants in a feedback exercise, the workshop would invite them to become active contributors to the future development of the course. Using creative and participatory methods, students would be encouraged to reflect on their experiences of belonging and collaboratively imagine how the programme might continue to evolve for future cohorts.

The workshop would include activities such as:

Mapping Belonging

Students visually map their journey through the course, reflecting on:

• Moments where they felt a strong sense of belonging or exclusion
  experiences that shaped their learning
• How their relationship to the course developed over time

Imagining Future Cohorts

Working collectively, students respond to prompts such as:

• What should remain?
• What could change?
• Who is missing from this course?
• What would help a wider range of students feel welcome and represented?
• If you were redesigning this programme, what would you prioritise?

Collective Recommendations

The workshop concludes by identifying practical recommendations for the teaching team, enabling students’ reflections to directly inform the ongoing revalidation of the course.

Theoretical Framing

This intervention draws on Freire’s (1970) critique of education as something created through dialogue rather than transmitted from teacher to student, alongside hooks’ (1994) argument that meaningful learning values the whole person and their lived experience.

It is also informed by Crip theory, which encourages educators to question the assumptions embedded within institutional structures rather than treating access as an adjustment made after the fact (Kafer, 2013). Alongside this, decolonial thinking asks whose knowledge, language and ways of knowing are recognised within higher education, and who is invited to participate in shaping institutional culture (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018).

Together, these perspectives have shifted my thinking away from designing an intervention for students towards creating opportunities to design with them.

Potential Outcomes

Rather than presenting a fixed solution, I hope the workshop would generate a set of reflections and recommendations that could inform the ongoing revalidation of the programme, including:

• future curriculum development
• the course title and external communications
• teaching and learning approaches
• student partnership within the programme
• approaches to outreach and widening participation
• future learning environments within the new LCC building

More broadly, I hope it offers a model for embedding student partnership into the life of the course, allowing each graduating cohort to contribute to the development of the next.

Closing Intention

My initial thinking centred on how belonging is communicated before students ever apply to a course. Through developing this proposal, however, I have become increasingly interested in belonging as something that can be continually shaped through dialogue with the students who have experienced the programme themselves.

Ultimately, this intervention asks how graduating students might become active partners in the future development of the course, rather than simply reflecting on it once it has ended. I hope it creates a small but meaningful opportunity for students’ experiences, ideas and observations to contribute to the programme’s ongoing evolution, making belonging an ongoing, collaborative process rather than something designed solely by the institution.

Intervention Proposal Presentation (1 July 2026)

This presentation captures an early version of my intervention proposal, shared with peers as part of a feedback session. It became a useful opportunity to test the idea, identify gaps and reflect on its strengths and limitations. The conversations that followed played an important role in shaping the direction of the intervention and the iterations discussed throughout this blog.

References

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.

hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

Kafer, A. (2013) Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mignolo, W.D. and Walsh, C.E. (2018) On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press.