There is currently no formalised peer-to-peer (P2P) feedback mechanism for academic staff within the BA Product and Industrial Design course at Central Saint Martins. This absence is symptomatic of a wider institutional gap where structured, inclusive and dialogic feedback is often confined to hierarchical line management structures, such as Planning and Review Conversations (PRCs)[1][2]. This report outlines the theoretical grounding and design rationale for a staff-focused P2P feedback toolkit aimed at addressing these gaps through inclusive, regenerative, and participatory practices.
The toolkit aims to support staff in articulating and receiving feedback, advice or help aligned with their Personal Development Goals (PDGs). It reframes feedback not as evaluation or performance review, but as a collaborative and reciprocal learning practice. The toolkit seeks to operationalise these practices by creating synergies and informative feedback loops within existing systems, such as PRCs for staff and Personal Academic Tutorials (PATs) for students. This report examines key literature, analyses institutional precedents, and outlines a participatory design research strategy to support future development.
1.0. Problem Context: Professional Development, Recognition and Feedback Culture at UAL
Current PRCs at UAL are structured around one-per-term, one-to-one meetings with line managers, documented using standardised templates. While these tools aim to support professional growth, feedback from staff suggests they are often viewed as inconsistent, performative and insufficiently developmental.
Making Connections (Grimaldi et al., 2025, forthcoming) is a UAL-sponsored service design review of UAL’s decision-making processes and support of staff voice mechanisms in the context of EDI and climate action. A consistent finding from staff was both a felt and observed lack of recognition and support from the university, especially around social purpose work: “I think there’s almost a fear amongst staff of spending quality time on [EDI and social purpose initiatives] anymore, because they’re so worried that it will look like you’re not doing your job well enough, or that you’re spending too much time on things where we can’t see a result. Actually, there is a result – it’s just that a culture shift, an attitudinal shift, is harder to measure.” (Interview quote from a UAL Academic member of staff for the Making Connections project, 2025). In addition, a lack of recognition can leave people feeling undervalued, but small actions can have a large impact on well-being and belonging: “Just encouraging people and listening to people. It’s sometimes a very small thing that will make a difference – celebrating people. Saying thank you when somebody has contributed.” (Interview quote from a UAL Academic member of staff for the Making Connections project, 2025).
Such feedback reflects a broader culture of defensiveness, and opacity around personal development and feedback. Without mechanisms for strengths-based dialogue, many staff are left without the tools to share pedagogical insight, recognise contributions or collaboratively reflect on development. The P2P regenerative leadership toolkit seeks to address this systemic gap by creating accessible structures for relational, non-hierarchical feedback that affirms individual growth and supports a shared learning culture.
2.0. Theoretical Foundations: Regenerative Leadership, Intersectionality and Praxis
Hutchins (2019) and Mark and Vangelova (2022) articulate regenerative leadership as a practice grounded in living systems, interdependence, and ecological thinking. Rather than positioning leadership in terms of control or hierarchy, regenerative approaches foster self-awareness, trust, growth and social sustainability. This aligns closely with the goals of the P2P feedback intervention in cultivating cultures of care, co-creation, and distributed agency within and across academic teams.
Mark and Vangelova (2022) observe that regenerative leaders “create a culture of trust that allows people to speak openly and vulnerably,” helping to reduce structural barriers to wellbeing. Moreover, they note that when organisations “actively encourage people to contribute knowledge from their diverse stories,” they create the conditions for deeper collaboration and capacity building. These insights are mirrored in early design principles of the proposed P2P feedback process including staff-led reflective prompts, inclusive feedback formats, and support for vulnerability and reciprocal learning.
Hutchins (2019) similarly critiques the “illusion of separation,” advocating for leadership that is relational and reflective. By drawing attention to human interconnectedness within institutions, Hutchins reframes leadership as a form of ecological stewardship. In the context of this intervention, the ecology being analysed is the academic environment. In the context of academic practice, the P2P toolkit thus becomes a regenerative intervention, supporting the design of living, adaptive pedagogical and learning systems in which individual and collective development are mutually reinforcing.
A core inclusive aspect within the toolkit and general P2P feedback process is its recognition of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), and how complex identities have affected people’s relationships to academic learning, workplace cultures, support, feedback and critique. Experiences for many may be shaped by power, discrimination and historical marginalisation in academia and the workplace. An awareness to these potential experiences and perspectives, and how they may manifest – anxiety, fear, reluctance to speak openly, etc. – the toolkit and feedback processes aim to provide all staff with greater agency for how they engage in this kind of peer communication. For example, choosing modes (written or verbal), formats (bulleted or narrative), and delivery methods (direct or mediated). In addition, this P2P feedback process aims to promote the necessity of diverse experiences and knowledge exchange for collective growth and regeneration, by nurturing “conditions in which people can improve their competencies by learning from one another” (Mark and Vangelova, 2022).
Garrett (2024) further reinforces this imperative by illustrating how racism and racialisation in UK higher education not only shape the lived experiences but also the imagined futures of marginalised staff. As Garrett explains, “Racism is not simply an episodic experience, but a condition that continuously shapes the affective, professional, and imaginative dimensions of racialised minorities’ academic lives” (ibid). Designing feedback processes that aim to flatten systemic hierarchies, whilst centring agency, safety, recognition and reciprocity in the support of personal and professional growth can play a part in fostering belonging for all staff.
Lastly, Freire’s (1970) notion of praxis – the integration of reflection and action in the pursuit of transformation – provides a foundational perspective for the toolkit’s emphasis on dialogic feedback and critical pedagogy. By centring reciprocal engagement and the co-construction of knowledge, the approach aligns with Freirean aims to challenge hierarchies and empower participants as both learners and agents of change.
3.0. Framing Reflective Practice and Regenerative Feedback
The process of reflection forms the foundation for designing and engaging with the P2P feedback toolkit. Daudelin (1996) positions reflection as essential to learning from experience, particularly through stages that include articulation of a problem, examination of responses, and consideration of future actions. This model supports the idea that individuals must be given structured opportunities to reflect in order to grow meaningfully in professional settings.
Building on this, the 4-D cycle of Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider and Whitney, 2005) – Discovery, Dream, Design, Destiny – offers a generative alternative to deficit-based feedback models. These stages enable staff to reflect on what works well, envision aspirational goals, co-design next steps, and commit to sustaining progress. Although typically used in organisational development, this model offers a structure at the individual level in helping staff frame PDGs and shape their self-authored feedback questions.
Aligning with Daudelin (1996), and Cooperrider and Whitney (2005), Rolfe et al.’s (2001) reflective model structured around the questions “What? So what? Now what?”, offers a practical and widely used framework for reflective practice in educational contexts. The structure provides a scaffold for users to critically evaluate their experiences, draw meaningful insights and develop actionable next steps. Furthermore, it is important for reflective outputs emerging from this future feedback process to be actionable. Taken together, these frameworks reinforce the toolkit’s approach to support reflective self-authorship and encourage people to move from observation to insight to action.
Furthermore, the use of AI as a tool to support reflexivity offers avenues for experimentation. Yuan and Hu (2024) demonstrate how generative AI can enhance student reflection by prompting personalised questions, summarising journal entries, and adapting guidance based on learning goals. In the P2P toolkit, these affordances could support staff in drafting reflective questions, interpreting peer advice or formatting feedback in inclusive and accessible ways. AI is not a replacement for relational feedback, but rather a scaffold that can increase clarity, engagement, and cognitive flexibility.
4.0. Camden Council as a Precedent for Reflective Feedback Practice
The Camden Council Service Design team has implemented a P2P feedback system that offers useful precedents for this project. While their feedback practices emerged more organically from the cyclical peer feedback process and community of practice rather than from a deliberate and robust application of theory, their practices around feedback invite comparisons to qualities of regenerative workplace ecology, reflective learning and sustaining personal growth. Their approach includes staff writing their own development-focused questions and distributing them to colleagues they have recently worked with on projects. Responses can be written or delivered in person, and there is flexibility in how feedback is tracked (e.g., Miro, spreadsheets). Figures 1 and 2, are examples of how different Camden Council Service Design team members phrased personal feedback prompts, both choosing to collect information via a digital form.
(Figure 1: Example of Camden Council Service Design Team feedback prompts)
(Figure 2: Example of Camden Council Service Design Team feedback prompts)
Interviews with Camden team members reveal that framing questions around growth, for example, “I’m developing my workshop facilitation skills, do you have any advice?”, encourages helpful responses while reducing anxiety typically caused by the anticipation of critique. Though not formally modelled on Regenerative Leadership and Appreciative Inquiry, their approach exemplifies its core principles. Furthermore, Camden’s approach shows that informal feedback systems (e.g., personalised feedback trackers) can function well alongside existing review structures, provided staff are given choice, agency and the value of supportive tools have clear purpose and benefit.
5.0. System Integration Plan: PRCs and PATs
To ensure long-term efficacy and support, the toolkit should ideally integrate with existing institutional mechanisms at UAL. For staff, this includes the PRC cycle. Self-authored prompts centred on PDGs, developed through the toolkit, can feed directly into sections like “My Objectives and Priorities” or “How am I learning and growing?” on the PRC form. Peer feedback can serve as an informal complement to line-manager feedback, offering richer, contextual insight.
For students, especially in final-year contexts, the toolkit has future applicability within Personal Academic Tutorials (PATs). Students could develop PDG prompts and reflections related to confidence, studio skills, career planning, and receive advice from tutors and peers. This extends the principle of relational feedback to student development and supports the alignment of identity, goals and academic practice.
6.0. Design and Research Methodology: Participatory and Evidence-Driven
The P2P Feedback Toolkit for Regenerative Leadership will be developed using a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach (Reason & Bradbury, 2008), which values iterative co-design and learning. Key activities will include:
Surveys across UAL to map existing formal/informal P2P feedback practices and identify gaps.
Interviews with internal and external organisations about formal feedback processes to develop understanding and critical analysis of design precedents.
UAL staff interviews to understand attitudes, needs and anxieties around feedback, and validate the project’s current assumptions about people’s relation to feedback in workplace cultures.
Design probes and prototyping workshops involving iterative development and testing of PDG reflection templates, tools to help generate feedback prompts and P2P feedback delivery guides.
Over time, the project may incorporate digital tools like Miro and AI-supported tools to scaffold reflection, feedback, or track development. Applying AI as a reflexive and reflective tool, Yuan and Hu (2024) demonstrate how generative AI can enhance student reflection by prompting personalised questions, summarising journal entries, and adapting guidance based on learning goals. In the P2P toolkit, these affordances could support staff in examining pedagogical and other professional or practice-based experiences, drafting reflective questions, interpreting peer advice or formatting feedback in inclusive and accessible ways. AI is not a replacement for relational feedback, but rather a dialogic tool that can increase clarity, engagement and cognitive flexibility.
7.0. Intended Outcomes and Evaluation
The intended outcomes of this intervention are to improve staff experiences of feedback by fostering a greater sense of recognition, autonomy and development through peer-led dialogue. Second, to support conditions where reciprocal mentoring and diverse pedagogical contributions are embedded into the everyday practice of academic teams. Third, to generate a replicable framework that can inform future work on staff development and student-facing formative feedback processes. Evaluation will be conducted through qualitative follow-up interviews and short-form surveys, examining whether participants experienced greater acknowledgement, support, and advancement of their professional learning and development in light of their personal goals. The project will also assess how the toolkit influences their engagement with formal mechanisms like PRCs, and whether it contributes to stronger collegial trust and conviviality.
8.0. Identifying Risks and Limitations
This intervention acknowledges a set of practical risks. Time constraints, conflicting priorities, and emotional labour may affect staff willingness to participate in peer feedback activities. Others may feel cautious or ambivalent due to prior negative experiences of institutional feedback cultures. Embedding the toolkit in formal systems like PRCs may also face resistance if not institutionally endorsed. These limitations will inform the design research phase, particularly in how the toolkit scaffolds accessibility, emotional safety, and opt-in participation.
While generative AI can be used as dialogic tool for reflection, it also presents ethical and methodological concerns. Over-reliance on AI may inadvertently displace some benefits of peer interaction. From an environmental perspective, the training and deployment of large language models carries a high energy cost, contributing to carbon emissions (Scientific American, 2025). These concerns underscore the need to treat AI as an optional and critically mediated tool, not a replacement for relational practice but a supplementary aid embedded within regenerative and inclusive leadership values.
Conclusion and Forward Strategy
Theoretical frameworks from Regenerative Leadership to Appreciative Inquiry and Freire’s praxis provide a foundation for designing inclusive, peer-led feedback systems. The next phase will involve co-design, prototyping and broader institutional engagement. By fostering recognition and reflection as everyday leadership practices, the project aims to regenerate academic culture from within. Grounded by principles of regeneration, the goal is to diffuse leadership and mentorship amongst all staff or team members so that individual and collective development are mutually reinforcing.
Cooperrider, D.L. and Whitney, D., 2005. Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
Crenshaw, K., 1991. Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), pp.1241-1299.
Daudelin, M.W., 1996. Learning from experience through reflection. Organizational Dynamics, 24(3), pp.36–48.
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
Garrett, R., 2024. Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, pp.1–15.
Grimaldi, S., Lai, V., Doruff, J. and Mao, L. (2025, forthcoming) Making Connections: Enhancing Staff Voice and Engagement through Service Design Interventions. University of the Arts London.
Hutchins, G., 2019. Regenerative Leadership: The DNA of Life-Affirming 21st Century Organisations. Wordzworth Publishing.
Mark, V. & Vangelova, N., 2022. Contributions of Regenerative Leadership to Team Collaboration and Social Sustainability. Master’s thesis. Blekinge Institute of Technology.
Reason, P. and Bradbury, H. (eds.) (2008) The SAGE Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. 2nd edn. London: SAGE Publications.
Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D. and Jasper, M., 2001. Critical reflection in nursing and the helping professions: a user’s guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Scientific American (2025). AI Needs to be More Energy Efficient. Scientific American, April. Available at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-needs-to-be-more-energy-efficient/ [Accessed 20 May. 2025].
Yuan, B. and Hu, J. (2024) ‘Generative AI as a tool for enhancing reflective learning in students’, Journal of Learning Technologies and Education, 12(1), pp. 54–72.
This intervention proposes a peer-to-peer (P2P) feedback toolkit for academic staff, designed to promote inclusive professional learning cultures within the BA Product and Industrial Design course. The toolkit will support colleagues in articulating and receiving feedback aligned with their personal development goals (PDGs), framed through inclusive and affirming dialogue rather than formal appraisal. It will also support collaborative leadership of the course by finding ways to operationalise this process in terms of systems management and to respond constructively to staff feedback.
The intervention addresses a recognised gap: the absence of structured mechanisms for collegial feedback outside line management processes, which are often perceived as performative and ineffective.
The project is grounded in Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005), which reframes feedback as a collaborative, strengths-based process, and in Regenerative Leadership (Hutchins, 2019), which emphasises distributed agency, trust-building, and the cultivation of learning ecosystems. This theoretical perspective reinforces the project’s emphasis on relational feedback practices that align inner reflection with collective development. Once the toolkit is developed, its action plan will be embedded in system change initiatives linked to PRCs, course monitoring, and annual addresses to staff and students.
As a starting point for the project’s participatory action research, a peer-to-peer feedback activity will be conducted. It is informed by peer-to-peer feedback practices observed within Camden Council’s Service Design team. In summary, participants will be encouraged to write their own reflective prompts based on PDGs, such as: “I’m working to improve [a skill or practice], do you have any strategies or perspectives that might help?” This shifts feedback from critique to shared growth, enabling colleagues to draw on diverse pedagogical approaches and lived experiences. By inviting contributions across role hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries, the toolkit aims to reduce power asymmetries, foster reciprocal mentoring, and establish feedback systems that can be operationalised as collaborative and regenerative leadership practices.
Intersectionality informs the design of the toolkit. Acknowledging how identity and positionality shape people’s experiences of giving and receiving feedback is central to creating safer, more inclusive environments. The intervention will offer staff agency in how they engage (e.g. choosing the mode and tone of feedback) and aims to support those who may have experienced marginalisation or defensiveness within institutional feedback cultures.
Although designed initially for staff, the intervention anticipates a future application to student peer feedback and Personal Academic Tutorials (PATs), especially in final-year studio projects where student learning goals intersect with identity and career trajectories. Questions of accessibility and neurodiverse preferences—such as how feedback is structured to be genuinely useful for individuals with ADHD, autism, or other needs—will be considered as part of the toolkit’s inclusive design. The toolkit will eventually include guidance, example questions, and suggestions for asynchronous or in-person exchanges.
Furthermore, there may be scope to explore how AI tools can scaffold teacher reflection, particularly in framing development questions and feedback. Based on Yuan and Hu (2024), AI can act as a reflective scaffold by prompting personalised questions, helping articulate professional development goals, and structuring feedback interactions. Its potential lies in supporting both self-reflection and dialogic processes, especially by enhancing accessibility and tailoring communication to individual needs.
By foregrounding reflection, inclusion and regeneration as key principles, this intervention challenges the normative boundaries of academic development practices – at least in the context of the BAPID course. It invites staff not only to engage with feedback differently, but to co-create the systems that shape their learning, recognition and collaborative leadership. As such, the toolkit is not simply a mechanism for giving or receiving feedback. It is a catalyst for cultivating a more relational, open and socially sustainable academic culture.
Bibliography
Carless, D. and Boud, D. (2018) ‘The development of student feedback literacy: Enabling uptake of feedback’, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(8), pp. 1315–1325.
Cooperrider, D.L. and Whitney, D. (2005) Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
Hutchins, G. (2019) Regenerative Leadership: The DNA of Life-Affirming 21st Century Organisations. Wordzworth Publishing.
Nicol, D. and Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2006) ‘Formative assessment and self-regulated learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice’, Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), pp. 199–218.
Taminiaux, K., Ek, A. and Vestin, E. (2022) Contributions of Regenerative Leadership to Team Collaboration and Social Sustainability. Master’s thesis. Linnaeus University.
Yuan, B. and Hu, J. (2024) ‘Generative AI as a Tool for Enhancing Reflective Learning in Students’, Journal of Learning Technologies and Education, 12(1), pp. 54–72.
“Diversity is different” (Sadiq, 2023), at both micro and macro levels. Yet, reductive approaches, particularly those seen in diversity training, undermine the richness and complexity of individual experiences. When diversity training classifies and lumps people into broad categories, it paradoxically becomes less diverse, failing to meet its own objectives. Sadiq’s critique touches on familiar tensions. One of the most salient is the way diversity work often undermines itself by homogenising experience and identity. He recalls being asked to speak on behalf of “Muslim views,” pointing out the impossibility of representing a global faith community through a single voice.
The point is broader. Institutional equity frameworks often flatten difference into categories such as “BAME,” “LGBTQ+,” “Muslim,” or “neurodiverse.” While these may help quantify representation, they risk perpetuating intersectional blind spots (Crenshaw, 1991). The danger lies in a bureaucratised inclusion that erases the very diversity it seeks to celebrate. This recalls Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (2014) provocation that “religion does not exist,” at least not in any essentialised sense, since one’s relationship to religion is shaped by intersecting internal and external forces across micro, meso, and macro contexts. In this light, diversity training should aim to teach vulnerability and cultivate psychological safety, enabling people to have difficult, nuanced conversations without fear of saying the “wrong” thing. It should also build cognitive empathy, recognising that broad identity categories obscure the richness of each person’s lived experience.
As a Stage Leader and Lecturer, I have seen how such flattening plays out. ISA provisions, for example, offer essential support such as extended deadlines or adjusted assessments. However, they often rely on generalised templates. These are rarely based on students’ actual experiences, but instead on standardised assumptions about neurodiverse needs. As Sadiq (2023) notes when describing his son’s ADHD diagnosis, what helps is not the label but a responsive, localised pedagogy that adjusts the mode and pace of learning. In practice (and in my case), delivering bespoke education to a large fraction of the 100 final-year students presents a logistical challenge. So, although we aim for inclusivity, the structures we rely on, including the ISA process, often reinforce standardised models of access.
Bradbury’s (2020) work on Critical Race Theory and education policy offers a sobering lens here. She outlines how policy discourse, even when intended as supportive, can reproduce deficit thinking. The language of “urban disadvantage” or “bilingual challenge,” for example, positions students as problems to be managed rather than complex learners to be understood. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of “regimes of truth,” Bradbury shows how identities and “deficits” become normalised through the data demands of institutional systems. I wrestle with this tension. In order to support students equitably, we need data to track disparities and justify resource allocation. But in doing so, we risk reinforcing the very marginalisations we seek to dismantle.
This issue is not theoretical. It shapes how we scaffold learning and how students imagine their futures. Garrett’s (2024) work on racialised minority PhDs shows how “imaginations are affected by whiteness in institutions,” influencing not just students’ experience of academia, but their sense of belonging within it. Participants in Garrett’s study describe lacking role models, experiencing hypervisibility, and being tokenised as symbols of diversity. These findings echo Sadiq’s (2023) reflection. If students cannot see themselves represented in leadership, curriculum, or institutional culture, how can they imagine themselves thriving?
Finally, the critique offered by Orr (2022) in The Telegraph frames the diversity work of Advance HE as ideological overreach. His concern – that inclusive and CRT agendas compromise free speech – presents these efforts as a threat to neutrality. Yet this framing is revealing of his positionality and biases as an academic member of Cambridge. He, perhaps in recalcitrant defence of his professional environment, assumes that institutional norms are neutral until disrupted by equity initiatives. In fact, as Critical Race Theory and anti-racist scholars argue, those norms are already racialised and classed. As Kendi (2019) asserts, the goal of anti-racism is not to declare “I’m not racist,” but to ask whether our actions, policies, and pedagogies support or challenge racial inequality. “Not being racist” is a passive stance. Anti-racism, by contrast, demands active, ongoing engagement, including the discomfort of unlearning.
The risk, ultimately, is box-ticking. Sadiq warns that without critical reflection on how and why we intervene, we create bureaucracy rather than transformation. Anti-racism in education must go beyond slogans, data dashboards, and tokenistic representation. It requires a deeper reckoning with how our own practices, policies, and imaginaries are shaped by racialised assumptions, and how we might begin to unlearn them.
Bibliography
Appiah, K. A. (2014) Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question). Youtube [Online]. 16 JuneAvailable at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06ptlxw (Accessed: 11 July 2025).
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. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2019.1679753
Crenshaw, K. (1991) ‘Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, Stanford Law Review, 43(6), pp. 1241–1299.
Garrett, R. (2024) ‘Racism shapes careers: Career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, pp. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2024.2336589
Kendi, I.X. (2019) How to Be an Antiracist. London: The Bodley Head.
Sadiq, A. (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion: Learning how to get it right. TEDx, YouTube, 2 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw (Accessed: 11 July 2025).
Reflecting on Rekis’ (2023) paper, the dominant religion of a society often sets the standard for acceptable behaviour—implicitly shaping what is normal, credible, and institutionally valid. This is problematic in educational institutions when there is a degree of ambivalence to religious or cultural needs. Even with inclusive aims, the default setting of systems often assume that students must adapt to the system (which is influenced by biased structures) not the other way around. Accommodating every religious or cultural observance equitably is difficult within an institution systemically embedded within Christian-majority norms. Academic calendars, for example, rarely account for non-Christian religious holidays.
This plays out in my own teaching context. The Lunar New Year can coincide around summative assessment period in the final year. Once assessment dates are set, we sometimes see an uptick in students—mainly from East Asian backgrounds—notifying us of illness, family emergencies, or urgent travel. While this is anecdotal and unverified, I suspect many of these students are going home to celebrate Lunar New Year with their families. Regardless, we accommodate for the students, but the system itself is not designed to flex. Final-year units are 60-credits or 15-weeks. Staff, like myself, are under added stress to arrange alternative assessments, and students often carry the stress of feeling unable to be transparent about their reasons, presumably. This creates a friction point—culturally and administratively––and likely affects one’s sense of belonging.
In the broader context, these challenges raise questions about how secular institutions navigate faith. In the U.S., the separation of church and state tends to mean “keep the state out of my religion”—with a bias and caveat for Christian religions. In France, under laïcité, it’s more about “keep religion out of my state.” Both models struggle with pluralism in practice. Universities must support freedom of religion while maintaining secular governance, but this is not a simple balancing act as the religious, the cultural and the social are deeply interconnected beyond academia. Both interpretations can be harnessed for either equitable or oppressive purposes. As Buchanan (1992) describes, this is a “wicked problem”—one with no clear solution and multiple, conflicting demands.
Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (2014) talk argues that “religion” is not a singular, definable thing. The very idea of religion as a category was constructed through Euro-centric efforts to compare other cultures to Christianity. The result is a list of “world religions” that may not reflect how people actually live or practise. Beliefs and customs vary by geography, community and individual experience. Religion is not fixed—it is lived, negotiated, and intersectional. Appiah’s conclusion that “there is no such thing as religion” speaks to this point: using the label of “religion” uncritically flattens the complex ways people relate to faith, ethics, and community as part of their identity.
Adding to this, Jawad (2022) challenges the assumption that religious expression such as wearing the hijab is inherently oppressive and instead reveals how Muslim women actively assert agency within constraining institutional frameworks. Religious identity is not just belief, but also embodied practice, and something easily marginalised by secular systems that claim to be neutral.
My own perspective is shaped by a Catholic upbringing. I attended Catholic schools through my early education, and then Jesuit high school and university. I consider myself fortunate to have been educated in a liberal religious environment that encouraged study of religion and cultures and open inquiry. I no longer identify as Catholic, but I still go to mass with family around holidays as tradition and culture––Catholic culture is part of my identity but I don’t identify as Catholic. Furthermore, that education taught me to read religious texts as human documents—rooted in history, struggle and hope; records of people trying to make sense of human experience, suffering and morality.
“It Matters Mood-boards” to Embed Positionality and Decolonise Design Research
Context and Rationale
Mood-boards are widely used in design education as visual research tools, but they often serve a superficial function—collating aesthetic references based on trends or convenience, rather than critical inquiry. In many cases, students build mood-boards using disconnected images from Google searches, without contextual analysis or reflection on their own subjectivity.
This proposal aims to reposition the mood-board as a reflective and discursive tool for embedding student positionality within generative research. Drawing on Floraine Misslin’s reflections on “scrambled temporality” (2022), mood-boarding is reimagined not as aesthetic benchmarking, but as a method for mapping personal, cultural, and historical references—acknowledging, rather than appropriating, influence. Rather than distancing themselves from their material, students will be asked to enter the conversation and reckon with their positionality.
Aims and Objectives
Support more inclusive, diverse, reflective and critical design practices from the outset of a project.
Students to critically engage with their own positionality as a resource for generative research.
Promote decolonisation approaches by interrogating dominant canons and expanding the range of references. Enable students to surface assumptions, identify gaps in research scope, and diversify the sources that shape their research contexts.
Reframe mood-boards as tools for critical reflection, not just aesthetic curation.
Intervention Plan
The proposal involves developing a workshop or toolkit that guides students through a reframed “It Matters Mood-boards” process (it’s a working title). The toolkit will offer multiple entry points–a personal experience, a contextual prompt or a thematic concern–to support accessibility and autonomy in how students explore their design research contexts.
The intervention will be piloted in the BAPID course during the early stages of students’ final-year self-initiated projects. It could also support second-year students beginning to explore their design context for the final year project. While BAPID’s Contextual Studies module already supports developing students’ critical analysis through the Reflective Paper, this workshop or toolkit would be a precursor and offer a complementary visual mode of inquiry—supporting students to recognise how their own experiences, histories, and cultural standpoints shape design choices.
Evaluation
A review of relevant literature pertaining to mood boards and critical pedagogy (see References) will be undertaken prior to prototyping the workshop or toolkit. It will be introduced to students in the first week of the Autumn Term, with qualitative feedback gathered through reflection. Long-term impact could be tracked through its integration into project development processes and subsequent reflective writing.
References
Ahmed, S. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020) Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Law, J. (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge.
Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality shows how peoples intersecting social and political identities like race, gender, sexual orientation and disability can perpetuate systems of oppression, privilege and marginalisation. Hopefully, without overgeneralising too much, these intersections can create modes of discrimination against the some of the most marginalised groups, and establish “blindspots” (for lack of a better term) and as people who inhabit multiple intersecting identities are not seen or foregrounded in an isolated review and discourse of individual identities. For example, black women being excluded from anti-racism discourse focusing on Black men and feminist discourse focusing on white women (Crenshaw, 1991). The stories and experiences of Ade Adepitan, Chay Brown, and Christine Sun Kim offers a view into how intersecting forms of oppression can reinforce exclusion when only one part of a person’s identity is seen, and how visibility of these marginalised experiences can help push back against sticky systemic discrimination.
Ade Adepitan (2020) is at the intersection of Black identity and physical disability. As a wheelchair user and a person of Nigerian heritage, he experiences exclusion both in the context of race and of disability. Drawing on the social model of disability – which holds that individuals are disabled not by their impairments but by societal barriers to access and inclusion (Oliver, 1990) – Ade argues that exclusion is not an inevitable outcome of impairment, but the product of systemic design. For him, the Paralympics show how disabled people can thrive when structural barriers are removed and access is equitably and inclusively designed. Yet he points out that similar progress is lacking of race, where systemic racism continues to limit opportunity and fairness for Black people.
Chay Brown (2023) identifies as a white, gay, trans man with invisible disabilities and mental health challenges. He benefits from being cis-passing and white in many LGBTQ+ spaces, yet experiences exclusion due to neurodivergence and disability. He describes struggling with unspoken social codes and the sensory overload of LGBTQ+ events, which often assume or default to able-bodied, neurotypical participants. Here, his marginalisation does not come from visibility, but from being overlooked. He is not always seen as disabled, and thus his access needs are often ignored. The intersection of trans identity with disability can lead to blindspots in both discourses and broader recognition of identity––trans experiences may overlook disabled (trans) bodies, while disability experiences (e.g., wheelchair users) may not fully include queer and trans lives.
Christine Sun Kim (2024), a Deaf artist, has intersecting identities of disability, womanhood, parenthood, and racial identity as an East Asian American. Her work is rooted in the need to be seen and understood in a world that routinely silences her. She has been denied access to education and art spaces due to the absence of interpreters and inclusive teaching. Her use of large-scale visual work is a deliberate strategy to “caption the city”—a form of public resistance that reclaims space and visibility for the deaf community. Christine notes that being misunderstood can have material consequences when communication failure affects access to services, education, and safety. Her experience demonstrates how systemic silencing, shaped by language and ableist assumptions, intersects with gender and race to further restrict agency and expression. She also implies how her experience raising a child in Berlin is enabling by state structures providing free daycare. In contrast, the exorbitant costs of raising a child in the US and lack of support, might be considered as disabling, especially when certain identities or experiences combine to exacerbate the ability to support or even start of family, which can impact wellbeing.
Across these accounts, recurring patterns emerge worth discussing: (1) how inclusion built around singular identities—disability without race, queerness without access—the result is partial recognition and systemic neglect. In addition, (2) visibility and platforming of these marginalised identities is a mechanism to push back against bias and systemic discrimination. The social model of disability reminds us that barriers are often built into the world around us, not the individual (Oliver, 1990). But unless these intersectional barriers are understood as layered and overlapping, inclusion of siloed identities can become another form of erasure.
In my own teaching at UAL, I work with students whose identities and responsibilities shape how they access and engage in learning. Several students over the years, who happen to be Black British women and sometimes primary carers for disabled family, commute long distances while managing their studies. They are not necessarily recognised “disabled” (some are neurodiverse) yet their life is constrained by similar barriers—limited access to space, time and rest.
My own positionality—as a white/mixed middle-class American male, now living in the UK—means I’ve had to learn to see class-based discrimination and dynamics that play a non-insignificant part in social dynamics on the course. Also, UK social and political dynamics, particularly around my own experiences of immigration, have shaped my ability to access to work and stability in ways that intersect, with broader systems of exclusion. Due to my relative privilege of where, when and how I grew up and my white identity, I hesitantly talk about my immigration struggles and frustrations, but I do find the restrictions of my status disabling (systemically) to my well-being, growth and livelihood. But this is for another conversation.
References
Adepitan, A. and Webborn, N. (2020). Nick Webborn interviews Ade Adepitan. ParalympicsGB Legends [Online]. Youtube. 27 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnRjdol_j0c
Brown, C. (2023) Interview with ParaPride. Intersectionality in Focus: Empowering Voices during UK Disability History Month [Online]. Youtube. 13 December. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yID8_s5tjc
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
Oliver, M. (1990). The Politics of Disablement. London: Macmillan Education UK.
Sun, C. (2024). Christine Sun Kim in ‘Friends & Strangers’ – Season 11 | Art21. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/2NpRaEDlLsI
Currently, the unit learning outcomes (LOs) exist primarily as an artefact in the handbook, rather than a practical tool that is equally utilised and understood by both students and tutors. Additionally, the formative assessment process in BA Product and Industrial Design is essentially a standard design forum or tutorial under a different name. There is no explicit requirement for students to evaluate and their learning outcome progression at this stage.
A more structured approach, ensuring constructive alignment between learning outcomes, curriculum delivery, and planned learning activities, may allow formative assessment to become a meaningful milestone for student learning. It could serve as a formalised opportunity for students to present their enquiry, knowledge, and process in relation to the learning outcomes, rather than an informal progress check.
Evaluation
There are three key issues that need addressing:
The lack of explicit intention in how learning outcomes are embedded in unit learning activities.
A lack of transparency and clarity for students and tutors regarding how LOs connect to learning activities.
The gradual trivialisation of formative assessment, which reduces its impact as a learning opportunity.
The first issue will require an analysis of current activities, including lectures, Design Forums, and assessments, to see how they map to the learning outcomes. To improve transparency and clarity between students and tutors, the integration of learning outcomes into the unit must be iterative—meaning they are revisited regularly throughout the unit rather than being mentioned once in the unit briefing and again at submission. Finally, the formative assessment process should be restructured. Instead of mirroring a Design Forum or tutorial, it should be reframed as a curated presentation, requiring students to demonstrate their learning in direct relation to the unit’s LOs. This differentiation would encourage reflection and help students see formative assessment as a distinct, structured milestone, rather than just another tutorial.
Moving Forwards
Constructive Alignment. Biggs (2003) describes constructive alignment as a model where, “students construct meaning through relevant learning activities” and teachers “set up a learning environment that supports the learning activities appropriate to achieving the desired learning outcomes.” At present, our learning activities are loosely aligned with learning outcomes but tend to be structured more around the stages of the design process. This raises the question: Are we truly aligning learning outcomes with student development?
Our goal is to help students develop “functional knowledge”, which is the ability to “…reflect, hypothesise… and generate new alternatives” rather than simply describe or identify.” (Biggs 2003). This is particularly relevant to design forums and tutorials, where students often default to describing what they are doing and presenting unsynthesised information. While understanding the ‘what’ of their process is important, formative and summative assessments should require deeper reflection, showing how students interpret their learning and how it informs their critical decision-making.
To establish this shift, formative assessments should be structured as a reflective and evaluative learning opportunity, distinct from the lower-stakes, informal nature of tutorials. This could help students better gauge their own progression in relation to the learning outcomes.
Visualising Assessment Patterns. Mark Russell (2010) introduces a way of diagramming assessments across multiple modules, categorising them as low-stakes, medium-stakes, and high-stakes assessments. While BAPID does not currently operate with overlapping modules in the same way as Russell’s models, we do have concurrent design research and development activities, which could benefit from similar structuring.
One persistent issue is that students struggle to connect their Reflective Paper to their self-initiated project research. Each year, many students focus solely on the Reflective Paper, pausing hands-on design research and concept development instead of conducting these activities in parallel with the paper.
Reframing the Reflective Paper as one strand of a concurrent learning process—rather than a standalone task—could help students integrate it more effectively into their overall design practice. If we were to visualise the Reflective Paper as a module with distinct low or medium-stakes assessments running in parallel with hands-on design research, students might better understand how the two areas inform one another.
At present, our assessment model is linear, depicting a start-and-stop progression between design research and design development activities. By shifting to a concurrent model, we could create clearer connections between contextual research and practical design work, making assessment more meaningful and integrated into the learning process.
References
Biggs, J.B. (2003). Teaching for quality learning at university. Buckingham: Open University Press/Society for Research into Higher Education. (Second edition)
Russell, M. (2010) University of Hertfordshire Assessment Patterns: A Review of the Possible Consequences. Available at: https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/aflkings/files/2019/08/ESCAPE-AssessmentPatterns-ProgrammeView.pdf (Accessed: 14 March 2025)
Students value one-to-one tutorials, but in terms of policy and course management, this format does not optimise student learning time (SLT). While student experience improves with one-to-one tutorials (based on NSS results and anecdotal feedback), many students do not utilise these sessions. The challenge in course approval and planning is to modify the delivery of tutorials to maximise SLT while ensuring that all students benefit equitably.
A logical solution is to introduce mandatory small-group tutorials, which raises key considerations:
What learning outcomes (LOs) can be intentionally supported through mandatory group tutorials?
How can we differentiate mandatory small-group tutorials from other similar learning activities, such as Design Forums?
With an average of 110 students in their final year on BAPID, delivering longer-format mandatory small-group tutorials will need to be spread over several weeks, even months.
A practical concern is that students will be at different stages in their projects, and some may prefer to meet with tutors at specific points—for example, during design development rather than early-stage research.
Evaluation
A key strategy in addressing these challenges is to analyse learning activities in relation to the intended LOs. This includes assessing the distinct roles and overlaps of supervised studio group work (at various project stages), Design Forums and small-group tutorials.
By mapping these activities against learning outcomes, we can clarify how they contribute to student learning and where they build on one another.
Another goal is to foster a more cohesive learning environment that encourages students to engage critically. A common issue is that students often remain passive in group activities. While we must be sensitive to student anxieties and experiences that may affect participation, a multi-modal approach to small-group tutorials could offer alternative ways for students to engage comfortably.
Moving Forwards
Peer Learning Opportunities: In Peer Learning, “students take responsibility for their educational experience, rather than being dependent on, and subordinate to, the teacher (Rubin & Herbert 2010)” (Coorey 2016). Small-group settings have the potential to catalyse peer learning, but do not guarantee participation. Developing strategies to ensure active engagement is critical, as peer learning supports both student thinking and professional development. Coorey (2016) highlights that peer learning is a critical skill, as it enables students to take turns as both teacher and learner, strengthening communication and collaboration skills. Research indicates that students working in small groups “tend to outperform their peers in key areas, including knowledge development, critical thinking and social skills, and overall course satisfaction” (2016).
In addition, peer teaching fosters confidence and self-esteem (Coorey, 2016). However, individual characteristics such as introversion, anxiety, intelligence, and sociability can impact participation in peer learning situations. It is the tutor’s role to facilitate cooperation and tactfully address barriers to engagement. Five essential elements must be utilised for peer learning to reach its full potential: positive inter-dependence, individual and group accountability, face-to-face interaction, appropriate use of social skills and group processing (Johnson & Johnson 2008). We will explore how these elements might be achieved in a hypothetical example:
Structured Crits and Small Group Tutorials. The challenge of providing 1:1 tutorials equitably with large class sizes (100+), means small group tutorials are an opportunity to better support specific learning outcomes and augment student experience. In BAPID Unit 9, LOs 1, 3 and 5 (as they are currently written) can be developed through structured small group tutorials. Assuming an example of small groups of 3-4 students and 1 tutor, students can be asked to prepare a short agenda for the group in advance for what they would like to review with their time (i.e., individual and group accountability). In addition, questions prompts for eliciting and receiving feedback can be provided by the tutor in advance to students, supporting those who might be anxious or unsure how to constructively engage (i.e., appropriate use of social skills and group processing). Furthermore, advanced agenda-setting and allowing students to define what they would like to get out of the peer learning session (i.e., positive inter-dependence), can hopefully help students think critically about their work and develop invaluable group communication skills, whilst helping them understand communication styles that are personally useful.
References
Coorey, J. (2016) ‘Active Learning Methods and Technology: Strategies for Design Education’, International Journal of Art & Design Education, 35(3), pp. 337–347. doi:10.1111/jade.12112.
Johnson, D.W. and Johnson, R.T. (2008) ‘Cooperation and the use of technology’, in Spencer, D. (ed.) Handbook of Research on Educational Communications and Technology. 3rd edn. New York: Taylor & Francis, pp. 401–418.
