Unit 2: Inclusive Practices – Intervention Reflective Report
Introduction
Throughout this unit, I have found myself returning to questions that sit just before the classroom itself: not only who participates once they arrive, but who feels able to imagine themselves there in the first place. Who is already excluded through the ways a course is described, represented and circulated? And whose bodies, languages, lived experiences and ways of knowing are quietly assumed within that imagining?
Since joining MA Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures (MADSISF) as an Associate Lecturer in 2025, conversations with students have continually returned to questions of representation, power and belonging. They have also echoed my own experiences of studying at Central Saint Martins and later the Sandberg Instituut, where more collaborative approaches to teaching reshaped my understanding of learning.
My interest in inclusive practice is therefore grounded not only in theory, but in lived experience. As a mixed-heritage British-Jamaican woman from a working-class background, questions of access, representation and belonging have shaped my educational journey and continue to influence how I think about pedagogy. I am particularly interested in learning environments where students have genuine opportunities to shape their own education alongside those who teach it, echoing Freire’s (1970) dialogic approach to education and hooks’ (1994) concept of engaged pedagogy.
This report reflects on the development of a participatory intervention designed to centre graduating students’ experiences within the revalidation of MADSISF. Rather than presenting the intervention as a solution to systemic inequalities, it considers how the process of designing it reshaped my understanding of inclusive practice, student partnership, and the possibilities and limitations of creating institutional change through small, participatory interventions.
Context
This intervention is situated within the MA Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures (MADSISF) at London College of Communication, where I currently teach as an Associate Lecturer. The course brings together students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to explore design as a way of responding to complex social and environmental challenges. Alongside supervising students through their Final Major Projects, I have also been involved in the ongoing revalidation of the programme as it transitions from an 18-month to a 12-month MA.
The revalidation process has created an opportunity for the teaching team to reflect not only on what the course teaches, but also how it is communicated and who it appears to be for. One recurring discussion centred on whether the programme title reflects the breadth of practice encouraged within the course. Although social innovation and sustainability are central themes, staff questioned whether the title unintentionally suggests applicants need prior expertise or familiarity with particular political vocabularies, potentially narrowing who recognises their own practice within it.
Alongside these discussions, my experience of teaching on the course, and conversations with colleagues, highlighted a noticeable shift in the composition of recent cohorts. According to the 2025/26 UAL student profile dashboard, the current MA Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures cohort consists of 31 students, of whom only one is classified as a Home student (3%), with the remaining 97% classified as Overseas students (UAL, 2025). This creates a highly international learning environment while also prompting questions about who the course is reaching and who feels able to imagine themselves within it. These observations sit within a broader higher education landscape shaped by rising postgraduate tuition fees, increasing living costs and changing patterns of postgraduate recruitment. My intervention does not seek to resolve these structural inequalities. Instead, it responds to this particular moment of revalidation as an opportunity to centre students’ voices and use their experiences to help inform the future direction of the programme.
Inclusive Learning and Rationale
Throughout this unit, my understanding of inclusive practice has shifted from thinking primarily about who gains access to education towards considering how belonging is continually shaped within educational environments. Rather than viewing inclusion as something that happens once students arrive, I have become more interested in the conditions that influence whether people are able to imagine themselves as belonging in the first place, and how institutions might create more participatory ways of shaping those conditions.
Freire (1970) argues that education is never neutral, but always shaped by relationships of power and that education should be grounded in dialogue and shared inquiry rather than the transmission of knowledge, whilst hooks (1994) describes learning as emerging through the experiences and perspectives of everyone in the room. Together, these ideas motivated me to reconsider my original intervention. Instead of attempting to address widening participation through recruitment alone, I became more interested in creating a space where graduating students could actively contribute to the future development of the course. This shift also reflects student partnership approaches that position learners as collaborators in shaping educational practice, rather than simply recipients of it (Cook-Sather, Bovill and Felten, 2014).
This shift also reflects the principles of Universal Design for Learning (CAST, 2024), which encourage multiple ways of engaging, participating and expressing knowledge. Creative methods such as visual mapping, collaborative making and storytelling offer more accessible ways for students to reflect than traditional surveys or written evaluations. They also align with UAL’s wider commitment to developing more equitable and participatory learning environments (UAL, 2021), where students are valued as partners in shaping institutional culture. As Drabble and Gridneff (2025) argue, inclusion is not achieved simply through representation, but through the continual negotiation of whose experiences are valued and whose knowledge informs institutional cultures.
Rather than assuming a single student experience, this intervention is informed by an intersectional understanding that experiences of belonging are shaped through multiple, overlapping identities and structural conditions. In this sense, the workshop is not intended as a solution to systemic inequalities, but as a modest participatory intervention that creates space for diverse experiences to inform future curriculum development. This reflects Shen and Sanders’ (2023) argument that small-scale interventions can become meaningful catalysts for wider cultural and pedagogical change.
Reflection
When I first began designing this intervention, my attention was directed towards the threshold of the course itself. I was interested in how institutional language, imagery and recruitment practices influence who feels able to imagine themselves applying, and how belonging begins long before students enter the classroom. My initial proposal therefore centred on a participatory inquiry with prospective students, current students and alumni, alongside an audit of institutional communications, to better understand how the course was perceived and who might already feel excluded from it.
As I developed the proposal, however, conversations with peers and tutors encouraged me to reconsider both its scope and its purpose. During our peer presentations, Victoria suggested that the end of the academic year would be a more meaningful moment to invite students into reflection, drawing on examples of evaluative practices that take place once students have experienced the programme in its entirety. This prompted me to think more carefully about timing and to recognise that students are often best placed to reflect on belonging once they have completed the journey themselves.
Alice encouraged me to shift my focus from recruitment towards curriculum co-design by asking what students themselves would include if they were designing the course. This resonated with my experience at the Sandberg Instituut and helped me realise that the intervention was no longer about recruitment, but about creating opportunities for graduating students to influence the institution they had experienced.
Tutorial discussions also challenged my assumptions about participation itself. We questioned the limitations of traditional surveys, prompting me to explore creative, visual and dialogic methods that felt more inclusive and collaborative. Rather than collecting feedback, I wanted the workshop to become a collective process of reflection and imagining otherwise.
Alongside these conceptual shifts, I became more aware of the practical and institutional limitations of the proposal. Inviting students to participate during the early stages of Unit 5 raised questions about capacity and wellbeing, while my position as an Associate Lecturer inevitably shaped the dynamics of participation. I also recognised that the intervention could not address the wider structural inequalities that had motivated it, including rising tuition fees, financial precarity and unequal access to postgraduate education. A single workshop cannot resolve these conditions.
Recognising these limitations ultimately strengthened the intervention rather than weakening it. It encouraged me to reconsider what was realistically within my sphere of influence as an Associate Lecturer. Instead of attempting to solve widening participation, I began to see greater value in creating a smaller, more achievable intervention that draws on students’ lived experiences at a key moment in the course’s revalidation. The project shifted from trying to provide answers towards creating the conditions for better questions to emerge – questions that can inform the future development of the curriculum, communication and learning environment while recognising that meaningful institutional change is necessarily collective, iterative and ongoing.
Action
The final intervention idea takes the form of a participatory Belonging and Futures Workshop with graduating students, taking place towards the end of the programme. For the current cohort, this would be scheduled during the final term of the existing 18-month course, before completion of their studies and alongside the ongoing revalidation process.
Rather than positioning students as participants in a feedback exercise, the workshop invites them to become co-designers of the programme they have experienced. Through activities including mapping belonging, reflecting on significant moments and collectively imagining future iterations of the MA, students are invited to identify what should remain, what could change and what is currently absent, while also reflecting on their own journeys into and through the programme.
The workshop is intended to generate rich qualitative insights that could inform decisions already taking place through revalidation. These may include recommendations relating to the course website and communications, the programme title, approaches to outreach, curriculum structure, teaching and learning methods, student-led programming and public engagement. It could also contribute to discussions around the design of learning environments within the new LCC building, considering how adaptable spaces, furniture and room layouts might better support participation, accessibility and different ways of learning.
Beyond a single intervention, I hope this workshop could become an ongoing part of the programme, enabling each graduating cohort to contribute to the development of the next. Rather than treating belonging as something designed for students, it becomes something that is continually shaped with them.
Evaluation
As this intervention has not yet been implemented, my evaluation focuses on how I would understand its success in practice. Rather than measuring participation through numbers alone, I would be interested in whether students felt genuinely listened to and whether the workshop generated meaningful insights that informed discussions during revalidation. Success would also be reflected in the extent to which students’ recommendations influenced future decisions or the workshop became embedded as a recurring part of the programme, demonstrating a stronger culture of student partnership.
I also recognise the limitations of the intervention. A single workshop cannot address the structural inequalities that shape access to higher education. However, I believe it has the potential to initiate longer-term conversations by creating a space where institutional assumptions can be questioned and where students’ lived experiences become an active part of shaping future educational practice.
Conclusion
Designing this intervention has shifted my understanding of inclusive practice. At the beginning of this process, I was primarily concerned with who was able to access the course and how institutions communicate belonging before students arrive. While these questions remain important to me, I have come to recognise that meaningful change can often begin by creating opportunities for those already within an institution to influence its future.
This process has encouraged me to see inclusion as something continually shaped with students rather than designed for them. It reminds me that the educator’s role is to remain open to having the learning environment reshaped by the people who inhabit it.
Reflecting on this intervention reminds me of the Seven Generations Principle, an Indigenous philosophy that encourages decisions to be made with future generations in mind. While this intervention is modest in scale, I hope it offers the beginnings of an ongoing process in which each graduating cohort leaves something behind for those who follow. Rather than seeing belonging as something students either have or do not have, I can now understand it as something that each cohort helps to shape for the nex
References
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CAST (2024) Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0. Available at: https://udlguidelines.cast.org/ (Accessed: 15 July 2026).
Cook-Sather, A., Bovill, C. and Felten, P. (2014) Engaging Students as Partners in Learning and Teaching: A Guide for Faculty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Drabble, L. and Gridneff, I. (2025) ‘Inclusivity and exclusivity’, in Architectures of Art and Design Education. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 177–184.
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.
Shen, Y. and Sanders, E.B.-N. (2023) ‘Identity discovery: Small learning interventions as catalysts for change in design education’, Journal of Design, Business & Society, 9(1), pp. 127–144. https://doi.org/10.1386/dbs_00049_1.
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University of the Arts London (2025) Student Profiles – Summary Grids: MA Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures, 2025/26. Internal dashboard. Accessed: 10 July 2026.