Decolonising, Deconstructing Decentering & Disrupting Narratives​

Paper 1: JEDI, Firsts, and the Squid Games: What is the Awarding Gap

Like many Universities, London College of Fashion is challenged with a persistent awarding gap. This is racialised (and often class-based), meaning that students from these backgrounds are less likely to be awarded an upper-class degree in comparison to their white counterparts. Our guiding principles for the coming decade aim “to give students the education they need to flourish in a changing world”, which highlights the need to change how we operate, in order to meet shifting demands. However, what does it mean to flourish? Who flourishes, who does not, and how can we ensure that all students, of all backgrounds, have the best outcomes and experience? These questions are central to social purpose and decolonial practices of delivering a curriculum fit for 21st Century. If, as our guiding principles convey, everyone has the right to excellent teaching and an excellent learning environment1, how do we account for the inequalities of this most persistent of awarding gaps?

JEDI, Firsts, and the Squid Games: What is the awarding gap and why it exists is a collaborative response to this issue and employs an equity lens for staff and students to understand, identify, and eliminate the awarding gap. This is a collaborative project that brings together expertise from four areas of LCF; Academic Enhancement, Cultural & Historic Studies, Academic Support and Social Purpose. This intervention draws upon contemporary motifs and popular culture offering recognisable entry points into a complex issue. Framed as an initiative to ‘decentre fashion’, JEDI, Firsts, and the Squid Games, (and its sibling workshop #WeAreTheGap) centre problem-based practice and encourage design thinking to ‘design out’ the problems of awarding differentials and use principles of empathy, fairness, and justice to unpack anti-colonial thinking and practices.

Paper 2: #WeAreTheGap

#WeAreTheGap is staff facing intervention challenging the behaviour and thinking that perpetuates the awarding gap at London College of Fashion. It acknowledges that regardless of the varying talents of the student cohorts both pre and post-pandemic, the awarding gap between Black and White students remains stubbornly consistent. #WeAreTheGap takes the awarding gap as a starting point to embedding decolonising practices that make visible and dismantle the barriers students face. This intervention acknowledges that colleagues will need be made aware of the barriers invisibly embedded within the custom and practice of the university and offer creative tools everyone across all job families to use to bridge the chasm.

#WeAreTheGap takes a posthuman approach to creating interventions to support students that fosters co-creation of knowledge, emotional resilience, communication, agility, and the agency needed to negotiate the invisible barriers that restrict access to first class degrees. It moves away from the deficit focused model and challenges staff to use new perspectives and tools to actively eliminate the gap even where it is imperceptible in daily practice but is reflected in the awarding data. This intervention contributes to new pedagogical practices that focus on growth through the admission of unknowingness. The cross-curricular working-groups bring with it opportunities to adopt an unfolding ontological practice and imaginative design-led thinking to design out the awarding gap. The premise is if the custom and practice of the university and its staff unwittingly perpetuate and maintain the awarding gap, then by actively working together to exaggerate the interventions needed to eliminate the gap. we can achieve equity. #WeAreTheGap offers ways of working that intrinsically decentre, decolonises and deconstruct barriers by empowering people – activating people away from former fears and paralysis of tackling race equity by providing an active framework for active anti-racism and parity of awarding degrees.