Teaching peace: supporting students’ agency in the curriculum with place-making pedagogy

Improving students’ condition of life and contributing to economic and social development are key aspects HE should include in its priorities during and after a pandemic.

Student agency refers to the quality of engagement of students with their environment. This involves concepts of power and will, and of course “possibilities” and “aims”. Embedding mechanisms to support students’ agency constitutes a win-win opportunity. The benefits of supporting students’ agency touch areas of great interest for HE in the UK: engagement, attainment, wellbeing, graduate outcomes, employability and inclusivity.

The areas students engage the most at university have a common denominator: improving themselves and their condition of life. Through their agency, they can also contribute to the development of others and more broadly also economic and social development (Klemencic, 2015). As students are likely to seek to deploy some influence on their educational trajectories, their future lives and their immediate and larger social surroundings, it would be very valuable considering a more collaborative approach to model the learning environments through students’ support. With this specific aim in mind, during the pandemic, we have adopted a communication framework called Non-Violent Communication (Marshall, 2015) at the BSc Creative Computing, which led to a student-led flipped class pedagogy model adapted to their needs. We measured the improvement of the quality of learning/teaching environment, engagement and wellbeing for both tutors and students.