Joel, Tilly and I had chosen a doubtful approach to UAL’s social and climate justice principles during the ‘Values and Ethics in Teaching’ session and considered tangible ways of implementing change. There are enormous limitations to creating meaningful progress in a neo-liberal and monetised institution, so we asked ourselves if it is possible to disrupt the system from within. We came up with 3 points of action:

Access: How can we position ourselves as champions of social and climate justice when the knowledge we exchange is only accessible by the most elite and privileged? Making all course content and syllabus open source would widen the scope of the change we want to make. More transparency and sharing of successful strategies between courses would also help save time in terms of planning.

Assessment: Grades are one of the biggest drawbacks to students producing creative and innovative work (Currant, 2022). It creates a culture of grade chasing that makes difficult the radical thinking necessary to develop solutions to the climate + social injustice. Transitioning to a pass/fail model seems essential.

Scale: The university as an entity has just as much responsibility in enacting change as student and teachers have. For instance: is moving to a new building that occupies a space that has been stolen from its community social just? What about this obsession for growth? Is that sustainable? We are all part of an ecosystem.

Critique: Rather than thinking about how we can bend the principles to fit the current system, maybe what needs to be done is to create a completely new system: a cooperative model for university that would break-down all the hierarchies that make radical thinking impossible.

This post is a shortened version of this earlier post