Students spot decolonisation gaps in curricula, belonging, and everyday university life
Updated Jul 17, 2026
Universities can publish decolonisation strategies long before students can feel the difference in a seminar room. That is why Kim Brown, Rachel Martin and Yasmin Abdul Aziz's Teaching in Higher Education paper, "Student experiences of decolonising and indigenising Higher Education", matters for UK teams using student voice to test whether inclusion work is visible beyond the policy layer. Based on workshops with 68 students at a university in Aotearoa Te Waipounamu, New Zealand, the paper shows that students notice decolonisation through everyday signals: whose knowledge counts, whose names are respected, and whether difficult conversations are genuinely possible.
Context and research question
Many UK universities now talk about decolonising curricula, inclusive teaching, and epistemic justice. The harder question is how students experience those ambitions in practice, especially outside the small number of modules, events, or committees where these discussions are most visible. Strategy language can sound settled long before students see meaningful change in teaching, assessment, feedback, or belonging.
Brown, Martin and Abdul Aziz set out to examine that gap through one university's partnership journey with Māori in Aotearoa Te Waipounamu, New Zealand. The research asked how students experienced decolonisation and indigenisation in their education. The study used wānaka, a Māori research methodology designed to create culturally safe discussion spaces, and involved 68 undergraduate students across three workshops. The researchers analysed spoken comments and written notes using an adapted version of Critical Tiriti Analysis, then brought preliminary findings back to students and senior leaders for discussion. For UK higher education teams, that makes this paper useful less as a sector benchmark and more as a practical guide to what students may notice first when institutional change is partial, uneven, or hard to see.
Key findings
Students judged decolonisation through visible institutional signals, not through strategy statements alone. Participants read governance through what they saw around them: building names, monuments, staffing patterns, curriculum content, and the visibility of Indigenous authority and knowledge. The paper argues that these everyday signals shaped whether students saw the university as genuinely changing or still organised around older colonial assumptions.
Students wanted more than generic diversity language. The study found that many participants valued learning about different cultures, but that broad multicultural framing could still leave Indigenous partnership and self-determination vague or underexplained. Students asked for teaching that was more direct about colonial histories, more honest about power, and more willing to treat their own identities and knowledge as part of the educational conversation.
“an accurate not purely western perspective, stop toning down colonialism”
The paper also shows how easily difficult conversations are softened, delayed, or left to chance. Some students described racism, bias, or exclusion as topics that were rarely addressed directly. Others said peers were anxious about saying the wrong thing, which reduced the quality of discussion. For UK institutions, that matters because student feedback about inclusion often stays superficial when classrooms do not feel safe enough for challenge, ambiguity, or disagreement.
Belonging depended on small acts of recognition as much as on formal policy. Students highlighted issues such as the correct pronunciation of names, whether neurodiverse learners were genuinely accommodated, and whether leaders made time to hear student perspectives directly. These are not minor details. They are the moments in which students test whether institutional commitments to equity are credible in daily university life.
Being heard had value in itself. The final workshop invited students to respond to the findings, and some described that experience as illuminating and hopeful even when the discussion surfaced harm and discrimination. That is an important reminder for student experience teams: careful listening does not solve structural problems on its own, but it can create the conditions for more honest evidence and more trusted action.
Practical implications
For UK higher education teams, the first implication is to stop auditing decolonisation only as a statement of intent and start testing it as a lived experience. Open-text prompts about curriculum relevance, representation, naming, cultural safety, and whether challenging conversations feel possible will produce more useful evidence than a single headline item on inclusion. A structured approach such as our NSS open-text analysis methodology can help teams compare those comments consistently across faculties and cohorts. The benefit is clearer prioritisation, not just more feedback.
Second, universities should separate different kinds of inclusion signal instead of bundling everything into one EDI theme. This paper points to at least four distinct areas: visibility of minoritised knowledge and staff, quality of difficult classroom dialogue, day-to-day belonging signals, and perceptions of institutional authority. If those themes are collapsed into one category, ownership becomes vague and action stalls. Separating them makes it easier for course teams, student experience leads, and senior leaders to see what is theirs to fix, and to show students where action followed, as in work on why student feedback only works when universities show what changed.
Third, institutions should treat safe feedback conditions as part of evidence quality. Students in this study spoke openly because the research design was intentional about cultural safety, relationships, reciprocity, and follow-through. If a university wants candid comments about race, exclusion, identity, religion, gender, or disability, it needs equally careful choices about prompt wording, anonymity, moderation, and response protocols. Our student comment analysis governance checklist is a practical starting point. The payoff is stronger evidence and a lower risk of asking students for candour without being ready to respond well.
Finally, universities should take operational details seriously as signals of belonging. Correctly pronouncing names, updating dated reading lists, making room for critical discussion, and improving support for neurodiverse students are not cosmetic changes. They are visible tests of whether inclusion is reshaping teaching and student life, which makes them exactly the sort of issues that good student voice work should bring to the surface. The benefit is that improvement becomes more tangible to students, not just more legible in strategy papers.
FAQ
Q: How can a UK university apply this paper without copying the New Zealand context directly?
A: Start with equivalent local questions rather than borrowed terminology. Which histories and knowledge traditions are visible in the curriculum? Which students feel like guests rather than participants? Where do names, examples, reading lists, and classroom norms tell students they are peripheral? Use course evaluations, focus groups, and representative channels to gather that evidence, then publish a visible response plan.
Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?
A: This is a qualitative study from one university, using a locally grounded Indigenous methodology and a participatory analysis process. It is not designed to estimate how common these experiences are across all higher education settings. Its value lies in showing mechanisms and lived experience, which makes it a strong lens for interpreting local student comments rather than a direct sector benchmark.
Q: What does this change about student voice work more broadly?
A: It suggests student voice should do more than measure whether students feel satisfied or heard. It should also show which kinds of knowledge an institution treats as legitimate, where students feel safe enough to speak honestly, and whether everyday teaching practices match institutional claims about inclusion. That is where open comments become especially valuable: they capture tensions and contradictions that closed scales tend to flatten.
References
[Paper Source]: Kim Brown, Rachel Martin and Yasmin Abdul Aziz "Student experiences of decolonising and indigenising Higher Education" DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2026.2695803
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