Introduction
This report is about a question in teaching that keeps popping up and remains unanswered. As the make-up of our cohorts changes rapidly, how do we make sure our teaching, curriculum and assessments reflect and accommodate the new complexities and intersectionalities present?
What I want to change is how my course interprets quietness. We keep trying our hardest to promote engagement, but maybe what we read as quietness isn’t a lack of engagement at all. I have tended to understand it as Bradbury (2020) does, as an instrument problem rather than a student problem. Through this unit, though, I’ve come to think it isn’t purely a design problem either: it is a complex assemblage, in Puar’s (2012) sense, of language, platform, culture, structure and circumstance, and constant iteration with students included in radical new ways might be the only way forward.
Context
I teach on MA Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures, a project-led course whose pedagogy depends on sustained participation in discussions, workshops, crits and group work; we rely on experiential learning far more than top-down delivery. Our course is following a national trend, attracting a majority of overseas students, in our specific case our students mainly come from mainland China (95% of our current cohort). This compounded by one year masters is a real challenge for educators: non native English speaking overseas students with little time to adapt are almost thrown into a pit of participation requirements and assessments.
UAL’s EDI report shows a persistent awarding gap for international students, yet international students’ outcomes are barely disaggregated by ethnicity, and the lived experience behind the numbers is invisible. Ebel (2024) finds that Chinese students face particularly acute barriers, including a separate digital ecosystem, social clustering, and spoken-English assessment that misrepresents their competence, and reports that only around a fifth feel genuinely integrated; some conclude that UK institutions view them primarily as a source of revenue. McLean et al. (2026) show that Chinese students in London already collectively document and navigate these barriers on Xiaohongshu, mixing Chinese and English in registers institutions never see (Liu, 2023). The Students aren’t quiet, we are just not tuned in.
Inclusive Learning
I am an ecologist and a sustainable designer, and inclusivity is central to my discipline and life. Both as an overarching ecological lens of sharing a finite world with a multitude and as a designer, a way of making sure designs complicit past with extraction is at least reformed; our reading lists and activities are all about enabling lesser and minor voices to be heard. Concepts of justice, feminist theories, pluriversality, conviviality, participation and co-design all try, in one way or another, to respond to design’s historically complex past. There is a clear desire form the team and the curriculum to “include”.
Crenshaw (1989; 1991) shows that language, race, class, visa status and distance from home intersect will shape how they go through the course. And here it’s important to use the reading to check my own positionality. Carastathis (2008) and Puar (2012) warn that intersectional models can harden identity into fixed, countable categories, so I should be careful not to see students as a monolith. The social model of disability from earlier in this unit (University of the Arts London, 2020) gave me a template I have carried over: it locates disability in disabling structures rather than in bodies, and if a building can disable, so can a Moodle page.
In addition, collective mapping has its own history: collective mapping in the Latin American tradition (Risler and Ares, 2013; Dalton and Mason-Deese, 2012) grows out of Freire’s (1970) popular education. As I read through Freire again, I realised that Moodle could be seen as his “banking” model: content is deposited week by week and students are positioned as its receivers. Mapping ensures a more bottom-up approach closer to problem posing in which students name their own reality and become authors of the themes that matter to them.
Reflection
I need to be upfront about how I engaged with this unit. Due to personal circumstances I wasn’t able to attend the workshops live, so I followed the unit asynchronously: watching recordings, reading transcripts and slides, and working through the readings and my peers’ blog posts in my own time. This wasn’t easy, as I saw the missed opportunity that had passed. Creating a space in which people are able and feel comfortable to share is also close to what I want to enact on the MA DSISF.
My personal practice has involved making maps with communities, to enable tacit or unspoken knowledges embodied in space to emerge. I haven’t looked back at mapping in a critical way, examining the methods used, since my PhD over 10 years ago. So this was a welcome change.
First I thought it might be good to map the students’ journeys and positionalities and how they changed throughout the MA, but through reflection I realised this wasn’t going to help change the participation issue. If anything I was just asking them to participate again.
I was also reminded of Chloe Turner’s “Feel Tanks”, an idea that they presented to the course a few years ago, and I felt it fit nicely coupled with counter/collective cartography. Both look at changing very top-down diagnostic methods. Both Feel Tanks and counter-cartography offered an alternative where the method is designed with participants rather than for them.
UAL’s Anti-Racism Action Plan (2021) commits to placing decolonisation at the heart of all curricula; but as practice and Garrett (2024) shows how such commitments tend to die at the level of the everyday. This intervention into our teaching is an attempt to create a space in which we can create create new ways of working and reflecting about our work with our students.
Action
I have decided to plan an intervention in which students, both incoming and outgoing, will be asked to reflect about how the language and structure we use on Moodle makes them feel. “Feel” will be understood, following Chloe Turner’s work with Feel Tanks (2023), as a grounded and co-designed “invitation to fail”. The design of my intervention will combine Feel Tanks with collective mapping (Risler and Ares, 2013), in which students will map their feelings in order to create a common language and platform to discuss.
September represents a perfect joining moment on the course. We have the outgoing students graduating and the incoming students starting their journey at the same time. There are already activities planned where they will meet and exchange and interact, but there’s scope to plan this intervention as part of those activities.
So the idea is to offer this activity to students, both outgoing and incoming, and to ask them to look through Moodle. For the outgoing students, to try to remember how the year felt; and for the incoming students, to try to write down questions, anticipations and anxieties that might be coming up. This is an invitation to create something that might not be anything, but it’s an invitation to explore in an honest and radical way what we as teaching staff need to do to support the students, from the very privileged position of being able to speak to the outgoing and the incoming at the same time.
The language of “pain points” is one we notice is very prominent in the projects of prospective students from China, and it offers a starting vocabulary that comes from them rather than from us.
The language of “pain points” is one we notice is very prominent in the projects of prospective students from China, and it offers a starting vocabulary that comes from them rather than from us.
The session could be organised as:
- A sharing of feelings as they arise, students invited to draw or write on a piece of paper placed in the middle.
- An introspective journey mapping: incoming students can map their journey to UAL, outgoing can do the same.
- Pair an incoming and an outgoing student and look through Moodle together, mapping the feelings onto the Moodle page.
- A “crit” where we all evaluate the work in front of us and explain what we have mapped.
Evaluation of the Process
What I’ve learned from this process is that no matter how much we talk about being inclusive, inclusivity, ecology, pluriversality, community, this, as Freire (1970) warns, without action collapses into verbalism. Which is exactly the critique of grand institutional gestures, in the shape of reports and schemes. Something I want to change.
So evaluation of a map or a feel tank is not whether it gets made, or whether it succeeds, but whether feelings are sounded out in whatever register is possible. The goal is open irresolution, to follow Berlant: turning encounter into unlearning.
Does the course read differently in a year? Over time I’d want to see whether participation and awarding patterns shift, accepting that my evidence for uneven participation is observational and interrogating awarding data is a necessary next step.
References
Bradbury, A. (2020) ‘A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: the case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(2), pp. 241–260.
Carastathis, A. (2008) ‘The invisibility of privilege: a critique of intersectional models of identity’, Les Ateliers de l’Éthique, 3(2), pp. 23–38.
Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), pp. 139–167.
Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6), pp. 1241–1299.
Counter Cartographies Collective, Dalton, C. and Mason-Deese, L. (2012) ‘Counter (mapping) actions: mapping as militant research’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 11(3), pp. 439–466.
Drabble, N. and Gridneff, R. (2025) ‘Inclusivity and exclusivity’, in Architectures of Art and Design Education: An Exploration of UK and International Design Schools. London: RIBA Publishing, pp. 177–184.
Ebel, P. (2024) How Can UK Universities Improve Their Strategies for Tackling Integration Challenges Among Chinese Students? HEPI Report 183. Oxford: Higher Education Policy Institute and Uoffer Global.
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum.
Garrett, R. (2024) ‘Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 23(3), pp. 683–697. doi:10.1080/14767724.2024.2307886.
Liu, Z. (2023) Exploring the Bilingual Use of Chinese and English Among Chinese Students in the UK on the Chinese Social Media Platform Xiaohongshu. Cambridge Open Engage preprint, 16 November 2023. doi:10.33774/coe-2023-8spcv.
McLean, N., Purton, I., Tan, W. and Zhang, J. (2026) ‘Chinese international students’ collective navigation of their study abroad experiences: analysis of Xiaohongshu posts about UK university life’, Journal of International Students, 16(8), pp. 221–240. doi:10.32674/gen6be73.
Puar, J. (2012) ‘”I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory’, philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism, 2(1), pp. 49–66.
Risler, J. and Ares, P. (2013) Manual de mapeo colectivo: recursos cartográficos críticos para procesos territoriales de creación colaborativa. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón.
Smith, A. (2013) ‘The problem with privilege’, andrea smith’s blog, 14 August. Available at: https://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-andrea-smith/ (Accessed: [add date]).
Turner, C. and Coleman, R. (2023) ‘Genre Trouble, Feel Tanks and Memetic Flailing’, Media Theory, 7(2), pp. 329–352.
University of the Arts London (2020) The Social Model of Disability at UAL. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNdnjmcrzgw (Accessed: [03/08/26]).
University of the Arts London (2021) UAL Anti-Racism Action Plan Summary. London: UAL.
University of the Arts London (2025) Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Report. London: UAL. [CHECK: use the exact title and year of the report shared in Workshop 2B]
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