This post offers some more tentative reflections on our autumn panel on ‘Disability, Technology, and Inclusive Education’. For reasons that will become clear, I shall be oscillating between the usual blog format and the lesser-spotted bleg (this one, not this one…).
My main aim in organising this panel was to bring together educators who have thought deeply about how technology can make higher education more inclusive for disabled and neurodivergent students, and who share a concern that widespread advances made during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic have been lost in the rush to ‘return to normal’.
Initially, my hope was to hear mainly from people who teach politics (understood broadly) and have published their thoughts and reflections in disciplinary SoTL. But I was unable to find much, if anything, in the usual outlets (e.g., those covered in Jeremy’s SoTL round ups) that included a focus on inclusivity gains during the early part of the pandemic and subsequent losses.
This was a surprise because, more generally, inclusivity is a strong theme in our discipline’s SoTL, as is co-production, and most of the disabled students we teach have a clear view on this: according to Disabled Students UK, 85% of disabled students report that they would benefit from the continuation of online teaching and learning options introduced during the early stages of the pandemic.
It seems to me that there are three possible explanations for my inability to find much disciplinary SoTL reflecting this perspective:
This post sets out how these ideas have influenced a piece of SoTL research that I am in the process of developing and on which I welcome feedback.
To recap, during the Q&A at our spring panel, the following question was raised: Many of the practical recommendations made by relational pedagogues are appealing, but do we need to sign up to the ‘theory’ to endorse them?
Today’s guest post is by Poppy Soilleux and Emily Gee of the University of Leeds!
Poppy Soilleux is an undergraduate student of International History and Politics. Her academic interests focus on international law, human rights law, and international relations, with a particular emphasis on accountability, global governance, and the protection of human rights. Alongside her legal interests, she has contributed to research on feminist mentorship and knowledge production in higher education. Poppy hopes to pursue a career in law, aiming to specialise in international human rights and public international law while continuing her interdisciplinary research.
Emily Gee is a final-year PhD student whose research focuses on gender, race, and security within the field of Politics and International Studies. Her doctoral research critically examines peacekeeper-perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping operations, drawing on decolonial feminist theory to challenge gendered and raced harms present in the UN’s prevention of SEA strategy. Alongside her research, Emily has been a Seminar Leader at the University of Leeds since 2023, delivering modules in International Politics, Terrorism, Comparative Politics, Global Security Challenges, Power and Conflict, and a first-year skills-based module.
Higher education (HE) increasingly emphasises widening participation, student belonging, and inclusive teaching. Yet many students continue to encounter barriers that extend far beyond the classroom. First-generation students, working-class students, neurodivergent learners, carers, and those from underrepresented backgrounds often arrive at university without access to the networks, institutional knowledge, and social capital that HE frequently assumes. This project explores how feminist mentorship can function as an active, living pedagogical practice to help students navigate these barriers while transforming the educational experience for both students and educators.
Drawing on collaborative reflections between an undergraduate student and a seminar leader at the University of Leeds, the project examines mentorship not as a formal programme or professional development tool, but as a relational practice grounded in care, access, and acknowledgment. Inspired by feminist pedagogical traditions, particularly the work of bell hooks, we argue that mentorship offers a practical framework for creating more inclusive, empowering, and participatory learning environments.
Rather than positioning knowledge as something transmitted from expert to novice, feminist mentorship treats learning as a collaborative process. Students are recognised not simply as recipients of knowledge but as contributors to its production. This shift has important implications for active learning. When students feel that their experiences, perspectives, and questions are valued, they are more likely to participate, take intellectual risks, and develop confidence in their own analytical abilities.
The project identifies three principles that can be embedded into everyday teaching practice:
As we (or some of us, at least) move into a slower period of the academic year, I wanted to offer some reflections on this year’s events.
I must begin with a confession: for each of this year’s panels, I had a hidden agenda. I refer not to the printed running order (/script/emergency questions) that I kept handily out of view of my laptop camera when chairing. I mean to admit that the themes and participants for this year’s panels were selected with two goals in mind: first, the noble goal of discussing the latest ideas from some of the most influential and innovative researcher-practitioners in HE pedagogy; second, the – let’s say ‘prudent’ – goal of helping me advance my thinking on some embryonic SoTL research ideas.
With that in mind, my reflective posts (yes, that’s right – I just turned this into a series) will offer a summary of one of our panel events, followed by a brief account of how it has influenced a piece of SoTL research that I am in the process of developing. I would welcome feedback on either aspect.
Relational Pedagogies Inside and Outside the Classroom
Our first presenter at this event was Karen Gravett (Associate Professor and Associate Head (Research) at the Surrey Institute of Education, University of Surrey). Karen is among the leading researcher-practitioners of relational pedagogy in HE. She has written widely on relational pedagogies, including a recent monograph. Her presentation centred on the novel post-humanist strand of her conception of relational pedagogy and its potential benefits for addressing pressing questions around the role of digital tools in HE. In brief, she highlighted how much work on relational pedagogy is humanist in its focus and assumptions, e.g., focusing on staff-student relationships and student-student relationships. But a relational pedagogy can also be socio-material by taking into view our relations with environment and objects. This opens the way for a post-humanist strand of relational pedagogy that decentres the human subject and considers how we are constituted through our technologies and environments.
Karen highlighted two key benefits of her post-humanist conception of relational pedagogy. First, it can ground many familiar relational pedagogical practices, such as staff-student partnerships, co-creation, authentic assessments, and reflective writing. Second, it also provides us with theoretical tools to consider how to organize digital education to promote good pedagogical relations, rather than necessarily viewing the digital as a threat to the relational.
Next up were Kate Schick (Associate Professor of International Relations at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington) and Claire Timperley (Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington) co-presenting a selection of ideas from their recently published work on relational pedagogy.
To my mind, Kate and Claire are at the forefront of implementing innovative relational practices in PIR pedagogy. Their talk began with theory and moved on to practice, with each element corresponding to a recent, or upcoming, publication.
First, they explained their notion of ‘slow pedagogy’ understood as a relational form of subversive pedagogy. It is subversive in challenging the dominant ‘knowledge-transmission’ model of education, which emphasises efficiency and speed. It aims instead to create spaces for slowness, relationality, and care. This part of their talk built on their contribution to the 2024 Journal of International Political Theory special issue on ‘subversive pedagogies’ that they edited.
Next, they moved on to practical implications. First, they focused on classroom practices that invite students into slower spaces, offering three examples: micro-communities of learning, relational scaffolding for research projects, and creative writing. Here they drew on their 2025 article in Politics on ‘spacious learning’. As attentive ALPS readers will be aware, Kate and Claire previously published their own ALPS post on this work, so I will not do them the disservice of aiming to summarise it again here.
Finally, they focused on assessments, arguing that the goals of relational pedagogy are best served by a revised interpretation of ‘authentic assessment’ that reorients students to a different conception of learning through creative assessment practices. Here, they drew on ideas from their 2025 Teaching in Higher Education article on ‘assessment as pedagogy’.
UK-based readers will be pleased to hear that Kate and Claire are visiting in October with several events planned to discuss the conceptual foundations of their current book project. Keep an eye out for further details closer to the time.
The event then moved into the Q&A. Such was the richness of the discussion that I could not possibly aim to do it justice by way of providing a comprehensive summary. Also, it was a long time ago, and – cards on the table – I can’t read all of my notes. So, I shall instead highlight three questions that stuck in my mind as being especially incisive:
(1) Much research in this area is based on classroom experiences – can and should we aim to go beyond this to more general empirical research?
(2) Relational pedagogy can focus on micro-level practices, but do we also need greater attention to how universities can support these practices via macro-level systems?
(3) Many of the practical recommendations made by relational pedagogues are appealing, but do we need to sign up to the ‘theory’ to endorse them?
If you’re reading this and getting deja vu, it is for good reason – this post was originally shared on Monday. However, due to a wordpress plugin-driven techno-mystery, the post was lost. So, round 2! (or as close an approximation as I can manage, it’s Sod’s law that this is one of the rare times I wrote directly on the site rather than first drafting on google docs…). Anyway, on with the post:
If you’re around in London (or willing to travel) on the 12th June and you fancy hearing some cutting-edge Politics SoTL then I have some very, very good news for you!
This guest post is brought to us by Rose Gann, Professor of Politics Education, and Julie Hulme, Professor of Psychology Education, both of Nottingham Trent University.
Are you interested in teaching and learning in Politics and International Relations and in using this work to develop your scholarship/academic profile? If yes, then the DARSHE framework might be of interest. My colleague (Prof Julie Hulme) and I recently undertook a project to map the ways in which academic staff within a large school of social sciences understand and practice scholarship (Gann & Hulme 2023). Through undertaking this project we realised; a) our colleagues often struggle to recognise their work as scholarship and b) they find debate around meaning and definitions of scholarship overly complex and unhelpful. Our solution was to come up with a tool – the DARSHE – Description of Activities Related to Scholarship in Higher Education (Gann & Hulme 2025) – that not only provides a simple visual guide to assist colleagues with identifying their work as scholarship but is broad enough to include diverse approaches, (and thus circumvent extensive debates about definitions of scholarship), as well as being able to help colleagues identify next steps to develop the reach and impact of their work. You can find the full text introducing the DARSHE here. Below is a quick introduction to the main ideas.
