Between Framework and Practice: Student Experiences of Justice-Based Learning in Creative Higher Education

Integration of climate, social and racial justice (CSRJ) into higher education curricula is increasingly recognised as essential for addressing intersecting environmental and social crises. While creative, interdisciplinary approaches show promise for engaging students with these issues, how students actually experience this learning in creative, practice-based disciplines remains under-researched. In 2022, our university implemented a principle-based framework to embed CSRJ across all courses, drawing on the Scales of Transformation (Williams and Toth-Fejel, 2017).

This study examines how students experience learning designed around these principles. Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with students across two curriculum-based creative projects, inductive thematic analysis reveals a complex, non-linear journey that productively complicates the implicit assumptions of progression embedded in transformational learning theories.

Our findings highlight critical pedagogical considerations: the importance of designing for divergent entry points; the need to scaffold threshold crossing across a programme rather than a single unit; and the role of structural conditions preconditions for identity-level transformation rather than optional enhancements. By foregrounding student voices, this research offers empirical insights into how institutional frameworks are interpreted and translated into curricula, and what meaning students make of the principles they encounter.