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It was good to see CAF Director Edward Skidelsky quoted in today’s Telegraph on attempts to provide “decolonised” alternatives to essays and exams – like zines and other creative formats – ostensibly as a way to challenge “Eurocentric” and “classed” norms and help close awarding gaps.
Instead of writing an essay, undergraduates at some universities are being asked to produce zines – hand-made mini magazines, generally A5 in size or smaller, combining text, images and illustrations. The Telegraph notes that these DIY leaflets have their roots in the protest pamphlets of the 1960s, cheaply made and distributed by activists campaigning against the various injustices of “The Man”.
The rationale is that colonial powers imposed their educational models, languages and values on colonised societies at the expense of ‘indigenous knowledge systems’. From this perspective, methods of assessment within the western academy are presented as part of that legacy: congealed ‘Eurocentric standards’ that, the argument goes, privilege white, male and Western knowledge and seek to mould diverse students to conform.
“Decolonised” methods are said to challenge these legacies by moving beyond essay-based assessment to include “authentic” and “student-centred” approaches that value creativity, culture and “lived experiences”. As one Bristol University lecturer puts it, traditional essays and exams “often test certain classed and Eurocentric ways of knowing and ways of writing”, whereas zines can be part of a “truly decolonised curriculum”. Another academic at Edinburgh describes the pamphlets as a medium for people to “express themselves freely and creatively, celebrate the quirks of everyday life and build subcultures”.
The stated aim is to close the “attainment gap”; that is, the proportion of first and 2:1 degrees awarded to white, middle-class students compared with undergraduates from ethnic minority and disadvantaged backgrounds, and those with mental health problems, “neurodiversity” or disabilities.
In pursuit of this aim – and with the sector regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), apparently agnostic on methods, which in practice leaves decisions to internal EDI and quality assurance frameworks – universities across the country are replacing unseen, in-person exams with open-book, take-home and online formats, while also introducing other “innovative” forms of assignment, such as presentations, videos, group work, and academic diary writing, and, increasingly, zines.
Bristol, for instance, is requiring academics to offer “different varieties, choices and topics of assessment” to enable students to “play to their strengths and minimise disadvantage”. Meanwhile, across faculties at King’s College London, a major programme will diversify teaching and assessment to give students a clear sense of “fairness”, and to strengthen “student voice and agency”.
Sheffield is undertaking a university-wide review to “remove barriers that can be experienced disproportionately by students from under-represented groups”. Its plan says that in the long term, inclusive assessment practices will be the norm across all programmes, “improving attainment across black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, and students from poorer backgrounds and those eligible for free school meals”.
Oxford too will “use a more diverse and inclusive range of assessments” to help “improve the likelihood” of students from “lower socio-economic backgrounds” achieving better grades. Cambridge, meanwhile, is concerned that “assessment practices” may be to blame for “awarding gaps”, and it hopes to “improve outcomes” for Black-British and British-Bangladeshi students using alternative methods.
Innovation in teaching is great – indeed, it’s often the product of genuine academic freedom: lecturers trying new ways to teach, test, and stretch students. But according to some working in higher education, academic excellence risks being sacrificed on the altar of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). Rather than raising all students up to reach the expected standard, the standard is lowered, while at the same time, the very idea of having a standard is attacked as a colonial conceit.
There is, for instance, a difference between widening the toolkit and smuggling in a new orthodoxy about what counts as knowledge. Once essay-writing is framed as a culturally loaded filter that privileges some students over others, the dispute stops being a neutral argument about assessment formats and becomes a political theory of scholarship, with dissenters implicitly positioned as morally compromised. As CAF’s Edward Skidelsky points out to the Telegraph, one counter-argument is to foreground “the insulting assumption underlying these efforts to ‘close the attainment gap’ is that poor and minority students can’t think or write.”
But in a context where, as CAF’s recent work has documented, multiple universities are seeking to “decolonise” curricula in toto – such as, for instance, Leeds and Greenwich – the risk is that too few academics will feel able to push back in this way.
For CAF, the academic-freedom question is simple: can academics insist on rigorous, argument-based assessment without attracting suspicion – or quiet professional penalties – for doing so?
Read the full story in the Telegraph here.
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