Introduction
Following the completion of my MA in Performance: Design and Practice at Central Saint Martins in September 2022, I began working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) for the course. Since 2024, I have continued in a dual role as Visiting Practitioner and Academic Support Tutor, while also serving as Project Coordinator within the Performance programme. My teaching is embedded in the very postgraduate course I once studied, offering a uniquely situated pedagogical perspective shaped by both lived experience and practice-based knowledge (hooks, 1994; Singh, 2018).
As a Visiting Practitioner, I lead the Live Art Practice seminar, a five-week series delivered during Unit 2, bridging the end of Year 1 and the beginning of Year 2. Grounded in my artistic research and professional experience, the seminar explores themes in live art, performance, and critical theory. It marks my first formal academic teaching responsibility, and over the past year, I have actively reflected on ways to strengthen its inclusivity and alignment with decolonial pedagogical practices (Advance HE, 2021; Thomas and May, 2010).
This report focuses on inclusive learning, with particular attention to decolonising the curriculum within the context of MA Performance: Design and Practice and my Live Art Practice seminar. Alongside identifying current challenges, I draw upon my personal experience as both a former international student and an early-career academic. This reflective approach follows Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle (Gibbs, 1988), which supports critical analysis of experience, feelings, evaluation, and planning for change.
The intervention proposed here aims to better align the seminar with UAL’s institutional strategies for inclusive and decolonial teaching (UAL, 2023). As a Japanese, Asian woman, artist, former international student, and sociologically trained practitioner, I bring a complex positionality to my teaching. This perspective enables me to engage deeply with questions of representation, cultural bias, and misrecognition in UK higher education. Drawing from these experiences, I am well positioned to contribute to the development of a more inclusive and decolonial curriculum.
Literature
Thomas and May (2010, p.5) argue that inclusive practice is central to achieving educational equity, enabling “all students to engage fully with their HE learning experience and maximise their personal, economic and social outcomes as graduates.” This shifts the focus from targeted support for “underrepresented” groups to embedding equity into the core functions of the institution (May and Bridger, 2010, p.6).
An inclusive curriculum must be relevant, accessible, and engaging to all learners, regardless of background or identity (Thomas and May, 2010, p.7). This view is supported by UAL (2025), which positions equality and inclusion as both a legal obligation and a core institutional value.
My intervention draws on the four dimensions of inclusive higher education teaching outlined by Hockings (2010): curriculum design, curriculum delivery, assessment, and institutional commitment. I focus primarily on the first two.
Drawing on Bengtsen and Barnett’s (2017) notion of the intercultural curriculum, I propose that teaching should actively draw value from diverse learner experiences while challenging dominant Western frameworks. The intercultural curriculum is not a checklist of global references but a dynamic space shaped by the teacher’s positionality. My own identity offers a critical lens through which to co-create knowledge with students. This is particularly relevant in performance education, where identity and cultural context are integral to practice.
Decolonising the Curriculum
Singh (2018) argues that decolonisation must confront not only the material violence of empire but also its symbolic and epistemic legacies. In higher education, this means questioning how knowledge is produced and legitimised—and resisting the assumption of Western superiority in theory and practice.
Reflecting on my own teaching, I’ve come to recognise how core reading lists and artist references remain dominated by Western perspectives. I once believed this canon was essential for international students to learn, but student feedback and reflection have shown that engagement increases when practices from their own cultural contexts are acknowledged and valued.
Decolonial discourse in UK higher education has, understandably, centred Afro-Caribbean and African diasporic experience. However, this focus often sidelines Asian perspectives. Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) challenges both Eurocentric and Sinocentric paradigms, proposing a de-imperial framework that foregrounds the specificities of Asian postcolonial experience. His work informs my approach to teaching, offering a plural and inter-referential way of making knowledge that resists imperial hierarchies and fosters deeper cultural exchange.
Current Challenges
Since the 2021–22 academic year, the student demographics in MA Performance: Design and Practice have shifted significantly, largely due to changes in tuition fee status for EU students. This has led to a sharp rise in international enrolments, who now make up the majority in the classroom. In 2023, the cohort was nearly evenly split between Home and International students, but projections for the class of 2026 show a marked domination in international representation.
*Demography of students MA Performance: Design and Practice
This shift has significantly altered the classroom dynamic, affecting both students and staff. Performance-making is inherently process-based and culturally embedded, involving language, collaboration, and gesture. In recent years, I’ve noticed more performances developed entirely in non-English languages, particularly Mandarin. These shifts have made it harder for academic and technical staff to follow creative processes and provide informed feedback.
I have also observed instances where critique is reduced to vague cultural labels—such as describing work as “sounding Asian” or “feeling Chinese/Japanese.” These oversimplifications dismiss the complexity of students’ practices and reflect a limited understanding of cultural nuance in a global learning environment.
UAL’s (2025) equality, diversity, and inclusion statements focus largely on meeting legal duties for Home students. While important, this emphasis often overlooks the realities of an increasingly international student body. Many international students, often also students of colour, find themselves navigating a curriculum and institutional culture that fails to reflect their lived experiences.
As Duna Sabri (2024) notes in Decolonising the Arts Curriculum, international students often come to the UK to explore how their cultural identities intersect with global artistic practices—not to assimilate into Euro-American norms. Most graduates will go on to work internationally, yet some staff still assume students are here primarily to learn about British culture. This disconnect between institutional assumptions and student aspirations reflects Sabri’s findings and resonates with my own experience as both a former international student and current educator.
This also highlights the racial imbalance within the Performance department, where the majority of permanent staff and all management roles are dominated by white individuals. This is not unique to this department as this reflects a wider trend in UK higher education, where professors remain predominantly white (Advance HE, 2022).
As a former student
I also experienced discomfort when my work was interpreted through reductive cultural assumptions—such as when the quiet or subtle nature of my performance was attributed to me being Japanese. Similar assumptions were made about other Asian students. These experiences revealed how monocultural pedagogical approaches can unintentionally marginalise students.
Through the PgCert, I recognised how inclusive practice can address such dynamics by supporting all students and staff to engage fully without structural or cultural barriers (May and Bridger, 2010). It also reaffirmed the importance of challenging dominant norms and expanding the scope of knowledge in the curriculum.
Peer Feedback
Peers responded positively to my intervention focused on decolonising the Live Art Practice seminar. They encouraged me to go beyond students’ personal heritage and incorporate live art from multiple cultural and theoretical perspectives to avoid essentialism. While including industry-standard references is important, offering diverse examples was seen as essential for supporting students to develop their critical voice. As Thomas and May (2010) argue, inclusive teaching fosters equitable learning by addressing barriers to engagement.
A key challenge is avoiding tokenism and not singling out specific groups. The aim is to expand access and perspectives by recognising diverse ways of thinking and making.
Action Plan and Evaluation
My proposed intervention is a collaborative rewriting of RoseLee Goldberg’s foundational text on performance art, to be carried out with students in the Live Art Practice seminar. This intervention invites students to critically examine dominant narratives and challenge the Western-centric canon of performance history.
Building on previous seminar sessions that explore fundamental questions, this session will be introduced as part of the existing learning stream. The seminar series runs over four weeks during the autumn term, and I plan to dedicate one of these sessions to this intervention while maintaining alignment with the core content of Live Art.
In practice, I will provide students with printed excerpts from Goldberg’s text. Students will be asked to read the text with a critical eye and respond as if they were part of an editorial board revising it for greater inclusivity. They will consider not only what is written and who is represented, but also how the narrative might be reframed to acknowledge other histories, practices, and geographies. The session encourages them to deconstruct Western-centred assumptions while also analysing their own positionality as artists and cultural practitioners.
As part of this intervention, I also plan to revise the seminar description to more explicitly reflect its inclusive and decolonial pedagogical aims. The original description is as follows:
Live Art Practice Seminar provides students with the opportunity to explore Live Art through its history, key terms, concepts, and key artists. Students will enhance their critical skills by interrogating the works of significant artists as well as their own creations.
I propose adding the following line:
Students will critically evaluate the context and positionality of their work and identity as artist through engagement with the histories and current structures of the creative arts landscape.
This intervention depends on active student engagement. My role is to curate the materials, facilitate the discussion, and respond dynamically to the ideas that emerge. To support this, I will maintain a shared Padlet page for the seminar, where I can update references, share student insights, and collaboratively build a more inclusive resource list.
It encourages me to shift from a content-delivery model to a co-learning approach that values student identity as well as challenges them to rethink dominant narratives. This will also help me to challenge and strategise my own practice in education and art practice. The outcome might not be visible immediately. I hope this practice contributes to a gradual transformation of the programme culture.
References
Advance HE (2021) Intercultural Curriculum. Available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/scotland/thematic-series/intercultural-curriculum (Accessed: 15 July 2025).
Advance HE (2022) Equality in Higher Education: Statistical Report 2022 – Staff. Available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/equality-higher-education-statistical-report-2022 (Accessed: 15 July 2025).
Bengtsen, S. and Barnett, R. (2017) ‘The Thinking University: A Philosophical Examination of Thought and Higher Education’, in Higher Education Research & Development, 36(1), pp. 1–13. DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2017.1286361.
Chen, K.-H. (2010) Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham: Duke University Press.
Gibbs, G. (1988) Learning by Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods. Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic.
Hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Hockings, C. (2010) ‘Inclusive learning and teaching in higher education: a synthesis of research’, EvidenceNet, pp. 1–72. Available at: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/inclusive-learning-and-teaching-higher-education (Accessed: 15 July 2025).
May, H. and Bridger, K. (2010) Developing and Embedding Inclusive Policy and Practice in Higher Education. York: Higher Education Academy.
Singh, J. (2018) Decolonising the Curriculum: What’s All the Fuss About? London: Arts Students’ Union, University of the Arts London.
Thomas, L. and May, H. (2010) Inclusive Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. York: Higher Education Academy.
University of the Arts London (UAL) (2023) Anti-Racism and Decolonisation Strategy 2022–2025. Available at: https://www.arts.ac.uk/about-ual/strategy/anti-racism-and-decolonisation (Accessed: 15 July 2025).