Writing the value(s) of colonised equity practices in higher education

Abstract

The reasons promoted for investments in processes of widening participation in higher education are commonly couched in a language of equity, albeit a conceptualisation of equity imbued with notions of social mobility and/or employability. Methodological considerations of equity-oriented research and how these shape knowledges about equity, or indeed the ways in which ‘the problem’ of equity is constructed, is a matter of some ongoing debate. Less prominent across the field of equity and widening participation are discussions concerning methodologies in relation to the approaches to practice taken up in higher education to, for example, create more inclusive environments or more transformative possibilities as the case might be in different contexts.

In this article we tentatively explore how the terms and concepts higher education staff adopt to imagine and implement approaches to ‘equity practice’ in higher education are shaped by the language systems available to us. We do so by co-authoring a paper that attempts to ‘dig into’ a recent interaction between two colleagues at an Australian university; an arguably dialogic moment in which a term drawn from a language other than English available to one of the colleagues created a new articulation of approach of perceived value to both of us. This articulation of approach to practice is then juxtaposed with a social imaginary that demands forms of accountability that legitimises instrumental programs logics and tend towards policy short-termism, exalting certain types of evaluation to effectively undermine efforts that hold ethical, unstable, generative, uncertain commitments at their core.

The article is also an effort to foreground the enduring histories of colonisations and how these continually shape our contexts and our practices in higher education.