Dave Webster

At the University of Gloucestershire Festival of Learning, I was delighted to be invited to deliver a keynote lecture and spoke on the theme of Against the Comfortable Curriculum: Inclusion, Decolonisation, Justice, and the Trouble with “Good Practice”.

I did not set out to argue that  good practice is bad. Nor did I suggest that colleagues working hard to make curricula more inclusive, accessible and thoughtful are somehow missing the point. Quite the opposite. Much of this work is generous, careful and often done under challenging institutional conditions. My concern is with what happens when ‘good practice’ becomes too reassuring: a checklist, a toolkit, a set of keywords in the right order, a way of making difficult problems administratively manageable without really disturbing the structures that underlie and perpetuate them.

A ‘comfortable curriculum’ can be inclusive in tone while leaving deeper hierarchies intact. It can “value diversity” without asking who gets to do the valuing and define its limits. It can “support students” without asking why some students need supporting more than others and are required to survive systems that were not built with them in mind. It can claim to “decolonise” by adding readings; while leaving untouched the question of whose knowledge is treated as foundational and whose is treated as case study, context or supplement.

So the question is not simply: have we added diverse content? It is: who is allowed to be universal? Who is made local? What counts as theory, and what is treated as culture? What forms of thought do our courses promote, value and nurture: and what is seen as an optional extra? This is why I suggested that curriculum design is not primarily a technical task. It is ethical and epistemic. It asks what knowledge matters, who gets access to it, what kinds of judgement are rewarded, and what kinds of person our educational practices are helping to form.

This of course matters sharply in relation to generative AI. Too much of the institutional conversation still asks how we can bolt AI onto existing academic integrity systems, as if the main task is to detect, regulate or contain. It is a truism that AI has exposed something older and more uncomfortable: assessment practices that have often rewarded polish, performance and compliant production more than thinking, judgement and revision. The HE assessment system was a long way from perfect before AI muscled onto the scene!

“Show me the thinking” sounds simple, but it is not a cheap fix. Good assessment that values process, judgement, risk and revision may require more staff time, more trust, more dialogue and less fantasy about technical solutions and scalable plug-ins. This is a difficult message in a sector under financial and cultural pressure – but it may also be true.

Students see the truth of our values in assessment, less than in our wordy (and often dreary) pedagogic statements, or strategy documents. They see what we actually reward in marking (grading for any Americans). If we reward only slick o bland outputs, we get that sort of outputs. If we value intellectual risk, uncertainty, disagreement, revision and judgement, then our curricula and assessments have to stop treating those things as optional extras and start giving those qualities the prizes/marks. This is also where the pervasive language of comfort, or non-friction, matters. If we are really serious about judgement, revision and intellectual risk, then we cannot simply promise students a smoother, more scaffolded (constructively aligned?) passage through the same old systems. The point here is not to make education easier. Equity is not the removal of all difficulty. It is the removal of unjust difficulty, and the creation of meaningful challenge. Some forms of discomfort are exclusionary and corrosive. Others are necessary to learning, to justice, and to becoming capable of thought.

This is where Gert Biesta’s language of subjectification is helpful. Education is not only about qualification, nor only about socialisation into existing practices. It is also about helping students become subjects of their own lives: capable of judgement and the subsequent practice of freedom and taking of responsibility. That purpose is easily lost when “good practice” becomes a neutral-seeming set of procedures – it all becomes about learning to navigate the system.

But there is no neutral educational process. Compliance with accepted models of good practice can blind us to foundational questions; or worse, it can allow us to feel that the ethical work has already been done. So perhaps the task is not to abandon good practice, but to make it less comfortable. To ask harder questions of it and notice when it domesticates trouble. To refuse the slide from justice into support needs, from decolonisation into content review, from inclusion into access to the same old boat, despite the changing waters.

Universities should not merely prepare students for what we guess the future will be like. They should help students develop the tools, courage and judgement to invent the future they need.

That will not always be easy. It will not always be comfortable. For staff or students; and it shouldn’t be!