The Department of Education is delighted to welcome to its Public Seminar Series Dr Lauren Stentiford (Lecturer in Education) and Dr George Koutsouris (Senior Lecturer in Education) from the Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter.

‘Inclusive pedagogies’ have been recommended as an approach for addressing increased student diversity in the university classroom. Such an instructional approach might be seen as grounded in wider concerns about facilitating social justice and bringing about equity in an educational sphere traditionally seen as hierarchical and elitist.

In this seminar, we discuss the findings of a recent systematic scoping review we conducted to locate and synthesise published research on the topic of inclusive pedagogies in HE.

Our findings suggest that HE researchers do not share a common understanding of inclusive pedagogies and employ different conceptual and theoretical frameworks when investigating this approach. We suggest that inconsistency and fragmentation in perceptions of inclusive pedagogies is the result of inclusion itself being a philosophically contested matter; and that this needs to be reflected in the way that inclusive pedagogies are discussed in HE – even if this goes against current performative and market-driven trends that emphasise quick fixes over acknowledging the complexity of pedagogic issues.