Programme 

08:20 – 08:50
Registration – grab a drink and sign-in
Room: Creative Centre Atrium

08:55 – 10:30
Session 1: Opening remarks & keynote

Opening remarks:

Dr Ruth Windscheffel, Head of Teaching & Learning Enhancement

Keynote: Who manages the managers? Transforming elite racial power in UK universities

Dr David Roberts, Senior Lecturer of International Relations, University of Loughborough

Room: Skell 037 (SK/037)

10:35 – 10:45
Morning break – bun and run
Room: Creative Centre Atrium

10:45-12:15
Session 2: LTSE 1c Panels

Panel 1: Creating and sustaining an anti-racist pedagogy and inclusive curriculum in higher education

Helen Julia Minors, Michael ODea, Manjinder Jagdev & Sue Mesa

Location: Online-only (MS Teams)

Click here to join the meeting

Panel 2: Let’s talk about inclusion: The value of an Inclusive Higher Education Framework

Mark Dransfield & Katy Bloom

Location: Creative Centre (CC/011)

12:20-12:55
Lunchtime
Room: Creative Centre Atrium

13:00-14:30
Session 3: Presentations and ‘Talk Abouts’

Location: Creative Centre

Option A: Anti-racism and social justice
Room: CC/201

  1. First build the village
    Limor Augustin & Zara Sharif

  2. transgressions
    David Richmond

  3. Squaring the circle or connecting the dots? Industrial action and social justice        Adam Stock & Sharon Jagger

Option B: Decolonisation within and across disciplines
Room: CC/101

  1. Decolonising teaching about research: Who says what things ‘are’
    Rachel Wicaksono & Divine Charura 

  2. On the im/possibility of decolonising a signature pedagogy: A ramble through geography fieldwork
    Pauline Couper

  3. Decolonising teaching the history of decolonisation 
    Robert Barnes

Option C: Inclusivity and compassion
Room: CC/011 and MS Teams (hybrid)

Click here to join the meeting

  1. Rethinking one-size-fits all: Delivering neurodiversity-affirmative pedagogy in higher education Lorna Hamilton 

  2. Creating space: Moving away from compulsory participation
    Ruth Knight

14:30 – 14:45
Afternoon break – tea and cake
Room: Creative Centre Atrium

14:50-15:50
Session 4: Workshops

Location: Creative Centre

Workshop 1: Decolonisation and climate justice 
Room: CC/201

Suitcase Stories of climate adaptation: Learning from the Global South
Cath Heinemeyer & Olalekan Adekola

Workshop 2: Inclusion and international learners 
Room: CC/011 and MS Teams (hybrid)

Click here to join the meeting

Teaching international students: A practical awareness session
Kate Dexter

16:00-17:10

Session 5: Plenary and closing remarks

Plenary: Community-led pedagogies: A decolonial feminist approach to teaching and learning

Dr Laura Loyola-Hernández, Lecturer in Human Geography and LITE Fellow, University of Leeds

Closing remarks: Professor Richard Bourne, York St John University

Room: Creative Centre Auditorium

17:10-17:50
Drinks reception
Room: Creative Centre Atrium

Abstracts

Keynote: Dr David Roberts, University of Loughborough

Title: Who manages the managers? Transforming elite racial power in UK universities

New research shows the Race Equality Charter (REC) presenting as a double-edged sword. It acts putatively to transform UK universities’ ongoing record on racial injustice. But at the same time, it is being hijacked – colonized – by elite institutional interests and folded into wider corporate strategy, at the expense of authentic institutional reforms and workplace social justice for People of Colour (PoC). 

This talk discusses the findings of 2022 data collected from 38 UK universities (out of the 68 applying for REC status). It finds much evidence of hard work being conducted in the trenches. But it also finds ample evidence of shortfalls in ex officio managerial competence and race consciousness, and a tendency to disguise such limitations in grandiose language. The data also reveals elite-led, institution-wide efforts – or collusion – to downplay, deny and cover up elite roles in producing and reproducing institutional racism. 

In the face of this, the keynote discusses a range of responses we might consider, drawn from 30 years of studying asymmetric conflict from Sun Tzu to the American War in Viet Nam. It begins with the idea of antiracism as inevitably a resistance of permanence. It looks at safe engagement in formal university structures – for example, in problematizing institutional approaches like diversity training and advancing more transformative methods of elite change – and expands to informal, ‘off-grid’ institutional safe spaces for strategizing and recuperating in the face of harmful managerial intrusion. It then expands into extra-institutional spaces and suggests some means to manipulate external spaces in relative safety to transform the ways university elites see the issue of institutional racism.  

Bio:

David Roberts’ research began with the Cambodian peacekeeping operation in 1991, and expanded to watching the West pushing Liberal conversion therapy onto many more former colonies. Seeing a new era of imperialism ascending steered him into postcolonial scholarship, whereupon, after a couple of decades of fieldwork in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, he unintentionally joined a Business School and adapted its research agenda to his own interests. Foucault came to him as he observed how University Senior Management executed their will through innumerable institutional nodes, like Deans, HR departments and Security Offices. Bourdieu followed with field theory, helping David interpret senior management as capturing the labour of employees of Colour, and their White allies, to repurpose antiracist agendas for corporate gain. And that, via Derrick Bell’s work on the permanence of racism, brought David to researching elite resistance to decolonization in the neoliberal university.

Read David Roberts (2023) ‘Do Equality Regimes change Inequality Regimes: A study of the implementation and impact of the Race Equality Charter in UK universities‘ Journal of Business and Social Science Review 4(4): 1-15.

Plenary: Dr Laura Loloya-Hernández, University of Leeds

Title: Community-led pedagogies: A decolonial feminist approach to teaching and learning

Over the past few years, there has been an increasing turn to “decolonise” the university and diversify the curriculum. There has been success in questioning the role the university has as a site of (re)production of power relations both within and beyond the institution. Yet, little attention has been brought to 1) the resistance staff face when they try to “decolonise” their teaching and research, and 2) the material barriers underrepresented students face within this context. This paper will explore these two points by analysing the results of two pieces of research carried out by the author: a report on obstacles and opportunities to “decolonise” the university, and a community-led response co-created with students to improve the learning and teaching conditions of staff and students within the Faculty of Environment at the University of Leeds. 

Bio:

Laura Loyola-Hernández is a feminist political geographer based at the University of Leeds. Her interests and activism lie in the interjection of decolonial praxis, antiracism and abolition politics, particularly around borders, pedagogy and politics.

Read Loyola-Hernández, L. and A. Gosal (2022) ‘Impact of decolonising initiatives and practices in the Faculty of Environment’. Report. University of Leeds.

Session 2: Parallel panels

Panel 1: Creating and sustaining an anti-racist pedagogy and inclusive curriculum in higher education
Presenters: Helen Julia Minors, Michael ODea, Manjinder Jagdev & Sue Mesa

Format: Online-only (MS Teams)

As members and co-chairs of the Anti-Racist Pedagogy and Decolonisation of the Curriculum Working Group (LTSE 1c), this panel session will first give an overview of the aims and significance of the work we are doing, in relation to university strategy. We will then each offer a 10-15 minute example of work we have done and are doing in this field, offering real-life examples of student partnerships, authentic assessments, decolonised curricula, inclusive anti-racist practice, etc. We ask, across these case study papers: what might an anti-racist curriculum look like? How can we develop an inclusive curriculum that is sustainable and at the same time genuinely embedding employability skills? How might we begin to decolonise course content, programmes and the processes that structure student learning and assessment in HE? 

Helen will present her work on ‘Taking Race Live’, a four-year, funded, award-winning project, which removed the awarding gap in the project’s associated modules through working in staff-student partnership to modify the curriculum and pedagogic process. Notably, the assessment and collaborative work facilitated more student choice and was grounded in industry practices, based on an inclusive curriculum framework.  

Mike will present his intersectional work on ‘Why do girls not study computing?’, which investigates the persistent gender imbalance within Computing/IT subjects in the UK. He will consider some of the underlying issues of why women and girls don’t even consider Computer Science as a degree option. 

Sue will share work undertaken on the MSc Occupational Therapy programme to decolonise the curriculum and embed anti-racism into teaching. She will also share plans to develop student ‘equity champions’ within the programme area and the wider school to further progress decolonisation in a co-constructed way.  

Finally, Manjinder will share her work on anti-racist and decolonial practice with student teachers (primary undergraduate and secondary postgraduate). This includes session materials from day conferences with student teachers, the YSJ Teacher conference on inclusion and diversity in June 2021, and more recent work on critical mathematics education. The latter has themes of social justice in relation to racial and climate justice, with students’ ideas and lesson activities for their use with children in placement schools.

Panel 2: Let’s talk about inclusion: The value of an Inclusive Higher Education Framework 
Presenters: Mark Dransfield & Katy Bloom

Format: In-person (room TBC)

Drawing upon the Inclusive Higher Education Framework, launched as part of a QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project in May 2023, this panel session will look at how responsibility for inclusion rests on five key areas of activity: Structures and Processes, Curriculum Design and Delivery, Assessment and Feedback, Community and Belonging and Pathways to Success. Questions will be raised relating to responsibility, partnerships and leadership, consistency and clarity of communication and provision of services. Attendees will be invited to audit their own practice using some of the Toolkit resources linked alongside the framework.  

A key take-away will be the development of a Padlet as a live discussion capture of contributions from participants. The audience will be invited to reflect on this and participate in the development of effective inclusive practice to enhance positive outcomes for all. We will examine how by addressing barriers that students and staff experience across the university, we can learn how to put into practice inclusive principles and establish a culture of inclusion that is meaningful and relevant to the YSJ context.

Session 3 (A): Anti-racism and social justice

Title: First build the village 
Presenters: Limor Augustin & Zara Sharif

This session is designed to offer space to consider the value of being in community with others when undertaking work in antiracism, inclusion and decolonisation. It recognises the challenges of coming to this work as a beginner, as well as the emotional cost of the work, and offers a safe space in which to explore the benefits of connecting with others to further one’s own learning and support others with theirs. Reflexive practice and accountability are key aspects of decolonial work, and reflexivity in isolation is difficult to practice and develop, especially for people who have not previously had the opportunity to engage with antiracist, decolonial practice. Without community accountability, decolonial practice can become tokenistic and lack critical engagement and, if we are only accountable to ourselves, it is easy to slip back into ways of thinking and working that sustain rather than disrupt colonial practices.   

Take-away messages of this session include: 1) Decolonial work requires an investment in time and resources, and an ongoing process of reflection as well as a practice of accountability; we cannot do this work in isolation and few of us have the time or resources to learn about antiracism and decolonial work alone. 2) By sharing our own learning journeys, we can enhance and support others with theirs and, by building community, we can find ways to share our platforms and resources in service of making decolonial progress in our learning and teaching. 3) People engaged in (intersectional) decolonial work need safe spaces in which to explore their experiences, where the resistance they experience can be acknowledged and validated and where self-care is prioritised.   

By the end of the session, delegates will understand the importance of community and accountability in decolonial and antiracist work, recognising that no one is free until everyone is free.

Title: transgressions
Presenter: David Richmond

This session will encourage colleagues to think about pedagogy, about how learning occurs and why an individual would want to learn within an ideology that would rather they didn’t learn, but merely be happy consumers of products, lies, etc. We will explore a constellation of ponderings on pedagogy by thinkers such as Ivan Illich, bell hooks, Thich Nhat Hanh and Paolo Freire, as well as analysis in the manner of Hardt & Negri, braiding these positions together into a coherent whole using words like liberation, freedom, transgression, transformation. To be a university truly dedicated to social justice, through doing social justice and being social justice, we must ensure our pedagogy in and of itself is social justice.

Title: Squaring the circle or connecting the dots? Industrial action and social justice
Presenters: Adam Stock & Sharon Jagger

Since November 2022, UCU has been undertaking industrial action including strikes and Action Short of a Strike (ASOS), such as ongoing working to contract and, since 20 April, a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB). UCU’s campaign organises around social justice issues, which are common to the lived experiences of many students, like casualisation and workloads. These issues disproportionately affect minoritised academics and academic-related services staff, including women, academics and administrators of colour, those who identify as LGBTQ+ and those with disabilities. We must therefore ‘connect the dots’ between issues staff and students face. 

The intention of any industrial action is to disrupt, and a consequence of UCU action is disruption to education. A common line of attack against UCU is that we must ‘square the circle’ between short-term impact on students and the interests of lecturers. Such thinking implicitly treats students as passive consumers. Against this, we argue that industrial struggle is materially connected to issues of social justice in teaching and learning contexts. To do so, we discuss our experience of teaching compulsory second-year employability modules. Our modules, which were heavily disrupted by industrial action, ask students to think about key neoliberal concepts such as ‘employability’ and the ‘student as consumer’ model in relation to their learning and university experience.

To locate our work and this conference within discussions on decolonisation, inclusion and diversity, we must ask questions about YSJ’s Janus-faced approach, aptly summarised in Sara Ahmed’s (2012) words: ‘the business model and the social justice model can be used together, or there is a switching between them, which depends on a judgment about which works when and for whom’ (75). The real circle to be squared then is that social justice is not a business case.

Session 3 (B): Decolonisation within and across disciplines

Title: Decolonising teaching about research: Who says what things ‘are’
Presenters: Rachel Wicaksono & Divine Charura

In this Talk About session, we present some dilemmas we have faced in interpreting data collected with participants who had experienced migration. Using our perspectives from counselling and psychotherapy, and from applied linguistics, and incorporating aspects of our life histories and the various events that occurred during our study, we took a duo-ethnographic approach to our project. We show how we reflected on our desire to understand the meanings of our data, our life histories and events, and how the achievement and presentation of understandings can be (or always is?) an ontologically colonising move. In the discussion part of our session, we offer some points of reflection for use with students on ‘research methods’ modules, especially where the students are working with participants whose meanings are generally less likely to be heard. We hope to be able to briefly raise, from a post-humanist perspective, the issue of what it means to have our ‘own truth’, and how this idea might help, and hinder, our teaching about research.  

Charura, D. and Wicaksono, R. (in print). ‘Doing arts-based decolonising research’, in S. BagerCharleson and A. McBeath (eds) Supporting research in counselling and psychotherapy. London: Palgrave, Macmillan

Title: On the im/possibility of decolonising a signature pedagogy: A ramble through geography fieldwork

Presenter: Pauline Couper

“Discipline is empire”, writes Katherine McKittrick (2021, 36), tracing clear connection between academic disciplines and coloniality. If this is so, what hope is there of ‘decolonising’ our work within academic disciplines? And even more, in the signature pedagogies (Schulman, 2005) of those disciplines; the pedagogies that really characterise our disciplinary teaching, and are the means by which students are ‘disciplined’ into disciplinary cultures and practices? This presentation reflects on such questions, focusing particularly on geography fieldwork as an illustrative case study. Drawing on both my research and a recent fieldtrip experience with students, I identify both possibilities and impossibilities for ‘decolonising’ my own practice. I conclude with some suggestions that I hope will be helpful for others trying to figure out what decolonisation might mean in their own contexts, whatever the discipline.

Title: Decolonising teaching the history of decolonisation

Presenter: Robert Barnes

The history of the process of decolonisation that rapidly gathered pace after the Second World War has until recently been written largely from the perspectives of the colonial powers. In fact, the term decolonisation itself was coined by colonial governments to indicate their control over the complex processes that were unfolding as their empires disintegrated. While this period of history has been often ignored in both secondary school and university curricula, when it has been taught it has reflected this tendency to focus on decolonisation as a top-down process. In many ways, this is understandable since a much wider range of primary and secondary sources have been more readily available. Yet, in my own teaching on the decolonisation of the British Empire, I attempt to find the right balance between the roles played by the colonisers and the colonised through examining a wide range of case studies on the topic. I do this by having the students engage with both a broad array of representative secondary sources but, more importantly, with various types of primary materials from different nationalist movements that fought for independence. Moreover, in terms of the assessments on the module, students negotiate their own research projects with me, and they are required to engage with published and online materials covering decolonisation from both the perspectives of the colonial powers and those they ruled over. This session, therefore, will highlight how difficult topics directly relating to race and colonialism can be taught effectively by utilising decolonial practices. 

Session 3 (C): Inclusivity and compassion

Title: Rethinking one-size-fits all: Delivering neurodiversity-affirmative pedagogy in higher education
Presenter: Lorna Hamilton

The number of neurodivergent students participating in higher education has increased rapidly in the UK and internationally over recent years. Systematic data on outcomes for this population are not currently available; however existing research suggests that, while academic attainment is comparable to that of neurotypical peers, neurodivergent students are less likely to complete their studies, and experience poorer wellbeing at university, in comparison with neurotypical peers. Meanwhile, the benefits of cognitive diversity in solving complex problems are increasingly recognised by employers, yet rates of employment among autistic and other neurodivergent adults are strikingly low. There is a clear role for universities in improving academic and employment outcomes for neurodivergent students.  

In this talk, I will consider how neurodivergent students’ experiences at school might inform their concept of “self-in-education” when they enter university, drawing on longitudinal research with autistic secondary school pupils and their families. Second, the ways in which higher education systems and processes can entrench a deficit-focused conceptualisation of neurodiversity will be examined. Finally, I will draw on a case study from a Level 6 module in Psychology to consider pedagogical approaches that hold promise for supporting neurodivergent flourishing at university, including universal design for learning (UDL), compassionate pedagogy, and strength-based approaches.

Title: Creating space: Moving away from compulsory participation

Presenter: Ruth Knight

Most individuals who have taught in a university know the feeling of being stood at the front of a group of students, listening to the silence that comes in response to asking a question of the room. You might remember the way time seems to slow down as you work out how long to wait for a response, seeing if you can catch the eye of a willing student, or whether you should pick on somebody at random (Elliott & Chong, 2005). The pressure of this does no kindness to tutors or students, and it moves us further away from compassion-centred and trauma-informed approaches (Harper & Neubauer, 2021; Harrison, Burke & Clarke, 2023). In a recent third year Psychology module, I introduced a non-compulsory presentation or participation approach (the only compulsory aspects of the module were two written assessments). I will outline the approach I took and discuss the various effects it had on the course, on students, and on me as a tutor. The results were overwhelmingly positive, aside from a few lengthy silences in the first few sessions. Students generated an accepting and welcoming community and contributed thoughtfully to class discussions. Students were able to name what was needed to make presentations accessible for them, resulting in engaging and informative class presentations. We will consider the ways in which this approach might be trauma-informed and improve accessibility and inclusion for a range of students and tutors (Kumar & Wideman, 2014). 

Session 4: Parallel workshops

Workshop 1: Suitcase Stories of climate adaptation: Learning from the Global South
Facilitators: Cath Heinemeyer & Olalekan Adekola

Suitcase Stories is a drama-led, but scientifically informed, approach to climate education that uses storytelling to explore climate adaptation. Climate change can be an emotionally overwhelming topic; the Suitcase Stories approach brings to it a spirit of curiosity and open-ended questioning, and allows young people to steer the process. It encourages young people to make personal connections to the issue of climate change and builds on stories of community resilience and innovation to help them explore solutions relevant to their own communities. This workshop draws on teaching resources arising from the project pilot in a school and community in West Yorkshire, allowing delegates to experience activities as participants and consider how they might apply them to their own work with students or young people.

Workshop 2: Teaching international students: A practical awareness session
Facilitator: Kate Dexter

International students are our global clients and colleagues of the future and valued members of our university community. At the same time, Ryan and Carroll (2005) describe the ‘deficit view’ that can arise from a misperception of their capacities and contributions. How does this impact on our expectations of, and approach to, these learners? This practical workshop will focus on the good basics of working more efficiently with international students in areas such as lectures and seminars, as well as raising awareness of where language and communication may lack inclusivity. Ryan and Carroll (2005, p.9) describe international students as analogous to the ‘canaries in the coalmine.’ Come along and find out why. 

Previous years’ programmes

If you would like to see previous years’ programmes and resources, please choose from the list below:

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