Practice vs Policy: Learning Development’s role in supporting, developing, and challenging Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Higher Education sector.

From highlighting power relations (Sinfield, Holley and Burns, 2006) to embracing pedagogies of discomfort (Dhillon, 2018), Learning Developers have interpreted and responded to key challenges around inclusion with practical solutions. The Learning Development community, with its roots in initiatives such as the widening participation agenda (Samuels, 2013), has often had to find practical ways to work against the ‘deficit premises’ inherent in its inception (Johnson, 2018). In contrast to this, equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policy across the HE as a whole has been criticised for gestural approaches and for focusing on policy statements rather than engaging with challenges faced by a diverse student body (Tate and Bagguley, 2017). Learning developers are acutely aware of the tensions between the managerialist impulses of neoliberal HE and ALDinHE’s strongly held community values of social justice and “emancipatory practice” (ALDinHE, n.d.).
This chapter explores how learning developers understand and work with the challenge of EDI through a focus on LD voices. It considers the actions Learning Developers can take to support equitable practice within their institutions.