Tag: Expertise

Advance HE must deepen our expertise in supporting transformation and change

The challenges for higher education and research institutions – both in the UK and in many countries across the world – are acute and immediate.

A combination of funding pressures, changing student demands, the rapid development of AI, international conflict and restrictive visa regimes are necessitating significant change and transformation.

These tough challenges require all those working in higher education to think differently about how we lead, teach, support students and operate. Yet within these challenges lie opportunities for innovation and positive change.

I am three months into the role as chief executive of Advance HE. My recent conversations with many of our members have reinforced the need for us to focus on how we can enhance our support for transformation and change.

Time for a change

I believe that to be successful, higher education institutions need good leadership; effective governance; they should promote excellence in teaching and learning; and embed equality, promote diversity and inclusion. These are the four key pillars of Advance HE’s work and will continue to be so. However, we cannot stand still. Supporting higher education institutions in this difficult and changing context means that Advance HE needs to change and modernise. Our portfolio, programmes and products need regular review, refreshing and revamping, to remain relevant, to be high value and high impact.

There has been excellent work led by Universities UK’s transformation and efficiency taskforce, which set out a number of recommendations and challenges for the sector. Advance HE can play an important role in supporting transformation and change both at a sector level and an institutional level. In the context of financial pressures, changing student needs, international uncertainty and digital developments – we need to be an enhancement agency – a trusted partner for higher education and research institutions.

Supporting enhancement, change and transformation will now be at the heart of what Advance HE does – embedded across our member benefits, our programmes and our consultancy. To help institutions through these challenging times we will apply our expertise, experience and resources to best support enhancement and service improvement, where it is needed.

Collaborating with partner organisations that are supporting transformation and change will be central to our approach. Blending our expertise in leadership development, educational excellence, equality and inclusion, governance effectiveness with the experience of partners that have different but complementary skills and capabilities.

Overall, our focus is primarily on people. We can play a role to enhance capabilities at all levels to lead and manage transformation and change – academics, professionals services, governing bodies.

What we will do

There are three practical steps I am taking now to strengthen our support for transformation and change:

Firstly, we have made supporting transformation and change a core part of our membership offer. We are drawing on the areas where we have deep expertise – leadership development, educational excellence, governance effectiveness – to apply our expertise directly to the most pressing issues facing our members.

For example, the new Educational Excellence Change Academy, a structured virtual six-month programme designed to help higher education staff to lead systemic educational transformation. The programme provides practical support to redesign curriculum to align with workforce needs, reimagine pedagogy to be inclusive, digital, and engaging; and enhancing student support models to strengthen wellbeing and retention.

Additionally, we have launched the Merger Insights and Roadmap, a new resource for navigating institutional collaboration, partnerships and mergers. Drawing on recent case-studies from successful transformations, it considers early option-testing and due diligence through to culture integration and regulatory engagement.

Secondly, later this autumn I will announce a new strategic advisory group who will work with our in-house expert to further enhance our support for transformation and change. We will further evolve our membership offer; review our portfolio of products and services; lead new research to share insights; and bring knowledge and learning from other sectors that have delivered significant transformation. We will also recruit new associates with deep and relevant transformation experience to work with our in-house experts.

Thirdly, we will do more to realise the benefits of Advance HE being a global organisation with an international membership. Our 470 members are from 34 countries – with almost a third of our members outside the UK – in Australia, Ireland, in the Gulf, across Europe, in South-East Asia and beyond. The challenges facing higher education institutions in one part of the world are often mirrored in another. The solutions, approaches and innovations being developed in different contexts can offer fresh perspectives and practical ideas that translate across borders. We will do more to draw on the fact that we have a diverse, global membership to share insights, solutions, and good practice across our membership.

At a time of significant challenge for higher education and research, institutions are increasingly needing to deliver transformational change in the way they operate. Advance HE is committed to supporting people working in higher education to do this successfully.

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October 30, 2025
The Nature of Expertise in the Age of AI

For several years, I’ve been providing content and student support for the University of Kentucky’s Changemakers program, designed and managed by the Center for Next Generation Leadership. It’s an online one year continuing education option where Kentucky educators can get a rank change for successful completion. I appreciate that Next Gen believes in “parallel pedagogy”; while it provides valuable resources and materials to be read, viewed, and reflected on, it also requires the program’s students to complete meaningful transfer tasks, pursue an action research project, and participate in a final defense of learning that demonstrates how transformative practices are happening in the Changemaker’s own classroom.

This professional learning pathway to rank change involves mostly asynchronous work through online modules focused on the awareness and implementation of what Kentucky calls “vibrant learning” in the classroom, with module topics such as Learner Agency and Inquiry Based Learning. It’s my contribution to the latter module where the content below originally began, but I’ve expanded and added more detail for this blog entry.

Inquiry-based learning is a powerful pedagogy. For students, it can be as extensive as working on a multi-week project-based learning unit, or as simple as asking more high-quality questions in class. Inquiry comes from curiosity, and the attempt to answer challenging questions and solve problems that have no obvious solution.

Complicated problems requires help. Two heads are better than one, after all. With this in mind, seeking community partners can make perfect sense. (As an aside, this teacher guide can help shape your conversations when you attempt to bring the community into your classroom; while it mentions PBL, the strategies can help for any scale project or problem you want your students to tackle.)

These community partners or “outside experts” can authenticate what may seem abstract into real world problems, and even motivate students to “dig in” when the work gets difficult, to echo the title of this excellent Next Generation Learning Challenges article. But before we consider how bringing in experts from outside of your classroom can increase vibrant learning, let’s first discuss inside experts, and even the idea of “expertise.”

Keep in mind that traditionally, and for decades (centuries!), you have been considered to be the expert in the room – of your content, of your pedagogy, of your ability to manage your classroom. The professionalism required of the vocation, much less the idea of professional standards boards that grant, review, and in some cases revoke certification to teach, adds to the foundational belief that a teacher has earned their well-deserved “expert” credentials.

But you are usually one human in a room of thirty. Leaning into the expertise of your students can be at its most basic level a strategy of smartly leveraging your numbers. Viewing your classroom through an asset mindset, we can see students as learners that bring their own powerful POVs which can enrich your culture and community. For example, with the right scaffolding, structures, and practice, your students are capable of providing peer-to-peer feedback.

However, some of our stumbling blocks in education are self-induced, born out of a desire to remain humble. For example, calling yourself or anyone else an “expert” can sound or feel lofty and divisive. Educators are sometimes their own worst critic, and may wonder aloud what right they have to declare themselves the expert on such-and-such. As for students, they may view their own bountiful and beautiful knowledge with a shrug of their shoulders. If someone in middle school knows how to disassemble and reassemble a car engine, it simply reflects their personal interests, or the fact that their mother loves hot rods. They are told early and often in traditional school that such knowledge isn’t “book learnin’.” Loving hot rods or diesel mechanics doesn’t matter, thinks the student, because it’s not a part of my third period class, and it won’t show up on my multiple choice test on Friday.

Therefore, let’s consider a broadening of our definition of “expert,” and look more at the first five letters of the word. What we really hope to provide, increase, articulate and bring into a classroom is experience. From another person’s POV, your experience may be long and traveled (which can make you “more experienced”), or simply a road I’ve never traveled upon (which makes your experience a novel one, compared to mine). Viewing expertise in this kind of inclusive light opens up what an “expert” is. We can see an expert as simply (but powerfully!) a person with a different, valued perspective. The key word is “valued.” You may have a different POV, you may have twelve degrees on the wall, but if I don’t care about you and especially if you don’t care about me, your “expertise” won’t matter much. We can also see an expert as a person who is recognized as skillfully applying knowledge. The key word is “applying.” Remember that old chestnut that answers the question, “What’s the difference between intelligence and wisdom?” Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is knowing you would never put a tomato in a fruit salad. Expertise that feels too detached and theoretical, or a bunch of random facts you can Google anyway, won’t personally matter very much to your learners.

With our new, more expansive definition of “expert” behind us, how do these experts from outside of a classroom still have potential to help? Vibrant learning is memorable and authentic, and community partners can be both. A parent who is a car mechanic might come in to demonstrate the torque caused by automobile engines. Not only does that make abstract laws of motion and physics seem more relevant to students, it also has a far greater chance of making tonight’s dinner conversation when the student is asked “What did you do at school today?” By permitting alternative voices into your learning space, you open up different perspectives and bring the outside community inside of your classroom community. Outside partners could also provide feedback to students as they ideate and prototype a solution in a PBL, or serve as a panel audience for defenses of learning. Of course, in a world full of wondrous technology, we are not limited to in-person guest speakers. Someone from a European museum might Zoom in for a mini-lecture and a Q & A. There are over twenty billion uploaded YouTube videos, so with the right discernment and curation skills, an expert is just a click away.

You might have noticed that artificial intelligence wasn’t mentioned above as a potential “outside expert.” Going back to our expanded definition, it certainly can seem to checkmark the same boxes. AI can offer a different perspective, powered by code and fueled by billions of artifacts from our culture and knowledge. Is that perspective valued, or valuable? It might, although AI is not always accurate, unbiased, or trustworthy; however, the same can be said of Wikipedia entries created by humans, or the theory from a popular scientist of the past which has been discredited in the present. Discernment and critical thinking is key, particularly from the teacher who should be monitoring, filtering, and observing the AI usage (and teaching students to be critical AI users as well). AI can also certainly apply its knowledge scraped across the terabytes of the Internet within (milli)seconds of being prompted. Is that knowledge skillfully applied? Based on the uploaded rubric of a teacher alongside the first draft of a student’s essay (being mindful of your platform’s privacy protections, of course), or the public domain text of an author, AI could provide nuanced feedback on student writing or pretend to be a character in a book for a fascinating interactive conversation. But some of the proficiency of AI’s application will depend on qualitative measures: of the rigor of the rubric you uploaded, or the veracity and bias of the knowledge it grabbed from its database, or the depth of skills the AI has been taught to emulate. And again, AI hallucinations can happen.

What will hopefully emerge, as we become more skilled and critical users of AI, is that our ethical priorities will shape the machines instead of letting the machines shape us. A promising example is the “Dimensions in Testimony” website, a partnership between the University of Southern California and the Shoah Foundation. The site began by digitizing recorded interviews of actual survivors of the Holocaust and the Nanjing Massacre. Next, an interviewee has a separate page where, via a looping video, they seem to sit and wait for your questions.

When prompted, a short video plays where the interviewee “answers” your question, creating a virtual conversation. You can do this via your microphone or by typing. What may seem miraculous is really just clever programming – the interviews were transcripted and time-coded, so AI simply takes your prompt, scans the text, finds a corresponding clip that seems to best answer your question, and plays from that particular time-stamped portion of the interview. Still, you can see the power of providing such “expertise” to students, giving them a chance to be both empathetic as well as practicing their questioning/prompting skills. (It should also be noticed the dignity and care given to the subject matter by USC and Shoah. The interviews were real, using genuine survivors of genocide and the Holocaust, not actors. While you technically could have AI “pretend” to be a survivor of a war crime as a customized chatbot, or have students interact with some kind of digital fictionalized Holocaust survivor avatar, there are many reasons why this would be an unethical and inappropriate use of such technology.)

As you ponder ways to increase and improve inquiry, reflect on the nature of “expertise,” both inside and outside of your own four walls. As you do so, you can cautiously consider how AI can be one of many types of “outside experts” you can bring into your classroom.

For more information on Changemakers, be sure to check out this page for the latest links to sign up for updates and apply to join the next cohort.

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October 26, 2025
Living in an expertise economy – Campus Review

Corporate learning expert and former chief strategy officer at Southern New Hampshire University Kelly Palmer shares the ideas from her new book, The Expertise Economy: How the Smartest Companies Use Learning to Engage, Compete, and Succeed in this episode.

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July 28, 2025
Harnessing Intercultural Expertise in an International Classroom – Faculty Focus
The increasing internationalization of higher education does not automatically lead to global knowledge and skill exchange in the classroom. Hierarchical barriers in pedagogy and classroom geography impede peer-to-peer learning. This article outlines the benefits of using a community cultural wealth approach – with an example – to disrupt academic and cultural hierarchies by drawing on the multiplicity of students’ assets, skills, and knowledge bases within international cohorts. Such a method enables international students to share their diverse expertise and breakdown assumptions about where and in whom relevant knowledge and information lies.

The Challenge of Hierarchy

I have been asking myself the following questions with increasing frequency as I grapple with teaching international cohorts of learners:
- How can I move away from being considered the sole source of knowledge in the classroom?
- How can I enable my international students to benefit from each other’s knowledge and insights?
- How can I support students to co-construct their learning?
As an educator, working out how to center students in the process of learning remains an ongoing challenge, whether working with international or domestic students. For international students, their diverse expertise and experiences add significant value to the learning community. Yet, many of these students have experienced the banking model (Freire 1996) in their previous educational experience, where they were likely considered empty vessels to be filled with information by their instructors. Thus, when confronted with the liberal expectations of a Western education, where students are expected to engage with new people and evaluate and apply new knowledge, many feel underequipped to succeed, as they wrongly assume they have nothing to contribute. This fear of lack may further drive international students to remain in cultural enclaves within the classroom, to mask their concerns. In the grips of this fear, the benefits of an international education are not immediately granted by proximity in the classroom space.

A community cultural wealth model may help to overcome these challenges. This model, developed by Yosso (2005), foregrounds other than academic assets that students possess, including linguistic, familial, navigational, cultural, resistant, and community “capitals”.

This model disrupts the banking model of education as students are affirmed as arriving replete with assets and releases students from their fears by affirming a diverse array of expertise and in whom this expertise may reside. As social theory arises from daily life (hooks, 1994), in response to the circumstances of one’s existence and its connection to history, politics, and power, the community cultural wealth model enables students to connect their life experiences with their learning. Not only does this model transform student-to-student learning, but it also transforms instructor-to-student learning, upending the classroom hierarchy around who in the room holds relevant and useful information (Schoen 1991), and reducing reliance on the instructor as the arbitral of knowledge.

Asset Recognition and Intercultural Exchange

In both the USA and the UK, I have taught Master level courses in public health ethics. In these courses, I help the students to consider ethics applying theory and using evaluation tools to assess degrees of harm or benefit a given policy might cause. Regardless of country, Master’s cohorts consist of students from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda, in varying proportions. Most of these students have trained as clinicians or hold degrees in the hard sciences.

One semester, Indian students were in the majority. I shared a case that helped students to consider the impacts of Indian government policy, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which provides financial incentives for poorer, rural Indian women to give birth in a hospital. The case, developed by D. K. Bhati (2016, section 4.12, case 4), highlights the clash between traditional birth practices and hospital birth incentivization and the various challenges it poses, amid the benefits. Underpinning information in the case included cultural nuances around marriage migration to the husband’s region, traditional practices of returning to the wife’s homestead to deliver, maternal consent, maternal control over financial resources, as well as logistical issues around lack of continuous emergency care for obstetrics and the exclusion of private health care provision from the program.

My intention was to explore the risks and benefits of incentivization through a case that would foreground the strengths of Indian cultural expertise. I gave each student a number from one to five to allocate them away from their comfort situations into ones in which each group formed a diverse assemblage of backgrounds. There, they were to discuss the case, by working through a set of questions. These included questions Bhati (2016) provided in the case:
- Who are the various stakeholders involved and what are their values and perspectives?
- What are the pros and cons of using cash incentives for a public health program?
- Given her status as poor, young, married, and pregnant, how could the young wife’s autonomy have been upheld?
- Should there be different notions of autonomy depending on context – individualist (Euro-American) sensibilities or interdependent (non-individualist, non-Euro-American) sensibilities?
To these, I added the following questions:
- Given her lack of status societally, how might the cash incentive remain in the mother’s care?
- The JSY policy recommends that fathers or mothers be sterilized to prevent future pregnancies; should this be incentivized with cash? Is this a just incentivization? Explain.
As anticipated, some Indian students were able to provide context for the case and speak from a place of knowing, about rural birthing practices, marriage migration, lack of health literacy, and power imbalances between husbands and wives and their respective families. Unexpected outcomes, which arose in the dialogues, were supplemental knowledge from across the cohort. These included familiarity with other governments’ policies on maternal health, similar situations involving poor rural women in other geographical locations, related experiences from those practicing obstetrics, and insights from the academic theory. Further unexpected outcomes arose through students’ recognition of their educational and social differences between those represented in the case, and themselves, revealing gaps that the ‘cultural experts’ could not fully broker. Interestingly, the recognition of this gap increased senses of connection across the cohort, as the students realized that amid their differences of language, culture, and nation, they shared class, wealth, and education-based assets.

I highlight this example as a watershed moment. Following these intercultural conversations, students’ confidence increased over their capacity to understand, to integrate different voices, and to use and critique evidence, exemplified in their individual coursework. Throughout the semester, students more readily reorganized themselves into small groups, without my explicit directing, suggesting that once nudged across boundaries, the benefits of learning to and from one another outweighed emotional resistance. Informally, students expressed their appreciation of learning together and further related that this approach would support them as public health practitioners, where they would need to connect to, communicate with, and learn from people different from themselves. The community cultural wealth approach further enabled me as instructor to overcome my internalized hierarchies of knowledge creation by allowing learning to unfold in accordance with the various skills in the room, and to arrive at unanticipated and novel outcomes.

By breaking down academic and cultural hierarchies in the international classroom, both the students and instructors can acknowledge and advance diverse understandings and harness the richness of an international cultural, professional, and educational encounter.

Julie Botticello holds a PhD in Anthropology and has taught in the UK and the USA for the past 20 years, predominately to diverse and international cohorts of students, on subjects relevant to the social sciences and to public health. Julie holds a teaching fellowship at the University of New Haven on inclusive pedagogy, teaches a group of incarcerated women at a Federal Prison, and serves as the program director for the undergraduate Health Sciences BS degree.

References

Bhati, D. K. 2016. Case 4: Decoding Public Health Ethics and Inequity in India: A Conditional Cash Incentive Scheme—Janani Suraksha Yojana, in H. Barrett, D. W. Ortmann L, Dawson A, et al., editors. Public Health Ethics: Cases Spanning the Globe. PubMed. Cham (CH): Springer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK435775/#ch4.Sec21

Freire, P. 1996 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Hammondsworth: Penguin.

Hooks, Bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

‌Schön, D. 1991 [1983]. The Reflective Practitioner, How Professionals Think in Action, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

Yosso, Tara J. 2005. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race Ethnicity and Education 8 (1): 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006.
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July 25, 2025
Harnessing Intercultural Expertise in an International Classroom – Faculty Focus
The increasing internationalization of higher education does not automatically lead to global knowledge and skill exchange in the classroom. Hierarchical barriers in pedagogy and classroom geography impede peer-to-peer learning. This article outlines the benefits of using a community cultural wealth approach – with an example – to disrupt academic and cultural hierarchies by drawing on the multiplicity of students’ assets, skills, and knowledge bases within international cohorts. Such a method enables international students to share their diverse expertise and breakdown assumptions about where and in whom relevant knowledge and information lies.

The Challenge of Hierarchy

I have been asking myself the following questions with increasing frequency as I grapple with teaching international cohorts of learners:
- How can I move away from being considered the sole source of knowledge in the classroom?
- How can I enable my international students to benefit from each other’s knowledge and insights?
- How can I support students to co-construct their learning?
As an educator, working out how to center students in the process of learning remains an ongoing challenge, whether working with international or domestic students. For international students, their diverse expertise and experiences add significant value to the learning community. Yet, many of these students have experienced the banking model (Freire 1996) in their previous educational experience, where they were likely considered empty vessels to be filled with information by their instructors. Thus, when confronted with the liberal expectations of a Western education, where students are expected to engage with new people and evaluate and apply new knowledge, many feel underequipped to succeed, as they wrongly assume they have nothing to contribute. This fear of lack may further drive international students to remain in cultural enclaves within the classroom, to mask their concerns. In the grips of this fear, the benefits of an international education are not immediately granted by proximity in the classroom space.

A community cultural wealth model may help to overcome these challenges. This model, developed by Yosso (2005), foregrounds other than academic assets that students possess, including linguistic, familial, navigational, cultural, resistant, and community “capitals”.

This model disrupts the banking model of education as students are affirmed as arriving replete with assets and releases students from their fears by affirming a diverse array of expertise and in whom this expertise may reside. As social theory arises from daily life (hooks, 1994), in response to the circumstances of one’s existence and its connection to history, politics, and power, the community cultural wealth model enables students to connect their life experiences with their learning. Not only does this model transform student-to-student learning, but it also transforms instructor-to-student learning, upending the classroom hierarchy around who in the room holds relevant and useful information (Schoen 1991), and reducing reliance on the instructor as the arbitral of knowledge.

Asset Recognition and Intercultural Exchange

In both the USA and the UK, I have taught Master level courses in public health ethics. In these courses, I help the students to consider ethics applying theory and using evaluation tools to assess degrees of harm or benefit a given policy might cause. Regardless of country, Master’s cohorts consist of students from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda, in varying proportions. Most of these students have trained as clinicians or hold degrees in the hard sciences.

One semester, Indian students were in the majority. I shared a case that helped students to consider the impacts of Indian government policy, Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY), which provides financial incentives for poorer, rural Indian women to give birth in a hospital. The case, developed by D. K. Bhati (2016, section 4.12, case 4), highlights the clash between traditional birth practices and hospital birth incentivization and the various challenges it poses, amid the benefits. Underpinning information in the case included cultural nuances around marriage migration to the husband’s region, traditional practices of returning to the wife’s homestead to deliver, maternal consent, maternal control over financial resources, as well as logistical issues around lack of continuous emergency care for obstetrics and the exclusion of private health care provision from the program.

My intention was to explore the risks and benefits of incentivization through a case that would foreground the strengths of Indian cultural expertise. I gave each student a number from one to five to allocate them away from their comfort situations into ones in which each group formed a diverse assemblage of backgrounds. There, they were to discuss the case, by working through a set of questions. These included questions Bhati (2016) provided in the case:
- Who are the various stakeholders involved and what are their values and perspectives?
- What are the pros and cons of using cash incentives for a public health program?
- Given her status as poor, young, married, and pregnant, how could the young wife’s autonomy have been upheld?
- Should there be different notions of autonomy depending on context – individualist (Euro-American) sensibilities or interdependent (non-individualist, non-Euro-American) sensibilities?
To these, I added the following questions:
- Given her lack of status societally, how might the cash incentive remain in the mother’s care?
- The JSY policy recommends that fathers or mothers be sterilized to prevent future pregnancies; should this be incentivized with cash? Is this a just incentivization? Explain.
As anticipated, some Indian students were able to provide context for the case and speak from a place of knowing, about rural birthing practices, marriage migration, lack of health literacy, and power imbalances between husbands and wives and their respective families. Unexpected outcomes, which arose in the dialogues, were supplemental knowledge from across the cohort. These included familiarity with other governments’ policies on maternal health, similar situations involving poor rural women in other geographical locations, related experiences from those practicing obstetrics, and insights from the academic theory. Further unexpected outcomes arose through students’ recognition of their educational and social differences between those represented in the case, and themselves, revealing gaps that the ‘cultural experts’ could not fully broker. Interestingly, the recognition of this gap increased senses of connection across the cohort, as the students realized that amid their differences of language, culture, and nation, they shared class, wealth, and education-based assets.

I highlight this example as a watershed moment. Following these intercultural conversations, students’ confidence increased over their capacity to understand, to integrate different voices, and to use and critique evidence, exemplified in their individual coursework. Throughout the semester, students more readily reorganized themselves into small groups, without my explicit directing, suggesting that once nudged across boundaries, the benefits of learning to and from one another outweighed emotional resistance. Informally, students expressed their appreciation of learning together and further related that this approach would support them as public health practitioners, where they would need to connect to, communicate with, and learn from people different from themselves. The community cultural wealth approach further enabled me as instructor to overcome my internalized hierarchies of knowledge creation by allowing learning to unfold in accordance with the various skills in the room, and to arrive at unanticipated and novel outcomes.

By breaking down academic and cultural hierarchies in the international classroom, both the students and instructors can acknowledge and advance diverse understandings and harness the richness of an international cultural, professional, and educational encounter.

Julie Botticello holds a PhD in Anthropology and has taught in the UK and the USA for the past 20 years, predominately to diverse and international cohorts of students, on subjects relevant to the social sciences and to public health. Julie holds a teaching fellowship at the University of New Haven on inclusive pedagogy, teaches a group of incarcerated women at a Federal Prison, and serves as the program director for the undergraduate Health Sciences BS degree.

References

Bhati, D. K. 2016. Case 4: Decoding Public Health Ethics and Inequity in India: A Conditional Cash Incentive Scheme—Janani Suraksha Yojana, in H. Barrett, D. W. Ortmann L, Dawson A, et al., editors. Public Health Ethics: Cases Spanning the Globe. PubMed. Cham (CH): Springer. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK435775/#ch4.Sec21

Freire, P. 1996 [1970]. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Hammondsworth: Penguin.

Hooks, Bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

‌Schön, D. 1991 [1983]. The Reflective Practitioner, How Professionals Think in Action, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

Yosso, Tara J. 2005. “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.” Race Ethnicity and Education 8 (1): 69–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006.
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July 25, 2025
Educational expertise in a post-truth society
by Richard Davies

The inauguration ceremony for Donald Trump was interesting to watch for several reasons, but the Battle Hymn of the Republic caught my ear. Whilst the song has cultural connections for Americans, its explicit religiosity and commitment to truth seems at odds with modern sensibilities. Rather than truth, recent political history, eg Johnson, Trump, Brexit and Covid-19 (anti)vaccination, has shone a light on our post-truth society, where, as Illing (2018) notes, there is a disappearance of ‘shared standards of truth’. In such a society politics shifts from being the discussion of ideas or even ‘what works’ to a play for the emotions of the majority. A context within which Michael Gove, an early adopter, was able to label a raft of educational luminaries ‘the blob’ (see Garner, 2014).

Whilst this is/might be irritating and socially disabling, I want to argue that it is also both deleterious to educational research and that its roots lie some 250 years ago.

Pring (2015) argued that what makes educational research distinctly educational is its intention to improve educational practice. So, research about education is not sufficient to qualify as educational research; educational research intends to change educational practice for the good of learners (and often wider society). This requires several activities including shared dialogues between researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders with common ways of talking about education and common standards of truth (see Davies, 2016). An environment of post-truth undermines such possibilities, as I hope will become clearer as I explore the roots of the present malaise.

The roots lie around 1744 or just before, signalled by Vico’s New Science, or at least in the 18^th century, where MacIntyre (1987) places the last foothold of the ‘educated public’ – and it is in MacIntyre that I ground the argument here. MacIntyre (1985) presents a historically informed account of the decline of ethical discourse and, on a more positive note, what is required for its restoration. Here I fillet that account for the resources I need for my purposes (see Davies, 2003, Davies, 2013 for more detailed reviews). He argues that ethical discourse has undergone a series of transformations, led by philosophers but now part of the public zeitgeist, causing a situation in which people believed there was no reasonable basis on which to resolve ethical disagreements.

Here, I identify just three key elements of the argument. Firstly, naïve relativism, the (false) view that because people disagree on a matter then, necessarily, there must be no rational means to resolve the disagreement. Secondly, MacIntyre identifies three, non-rational approaches to decision making: (i) personal taste, (ii) achieving the goals of the system of which one is a part, or (iii) through interpersonal agreement. These are embedded, MacIntyre claims, in our social activities and institutions. Thirdly, that these give rise to a distinctive form of political engagement, protest. In protest different sides shout their differing views at each other knowing both that their views will not change the views of their opponents nor that their opponents’ views will change their views.

When we see ‘toddler’ behaviour from politicians, it is a focus on personal taste and the tantrums that emerge when these are frustrated. What reasons, they might say, do others have to frustrate what I want, for no such reasons can exist. When we see claims that the democratic process must be followed, we are seeing a commitment to achieving the goals of the system; what else can be done? We regularly see examples of protest, often mistakenly seen as ‘facing down’ a critique of one’s behaviour. The views of others only count if they have some reasons for their views that might be better than mine. But for those embracing the obviousness of naïve relativism this cannot happen, rather protests (against Johnson, Trump, and others) are just attempts to make them feel bad. Such attempts must be resisted through and because of bravado.

How do the politician and policymaker operate in such an environment? Bauman (2000) offers a couple of practical conceptions consistent with MacIntyre’s critique. Firstly, Bauman draws attention to the effect of having no rational basis for decision making: it is increasingly difficult to aggregate individual desires into political coherent movements. Traditional political groupings on class, gender and race are dissolving (which is certainly a feature of the 2024 US election analysis). It matters less why you want to achieve something; it is just that we can have interpersonal agreement on what we claim we want to achieve. Secondly, Bauman talks of decision making as reflecting the ‘script of shopping’, we buy into things – friendship groups, lifestyles, etc – and as suddenly no longer do so when they do not satisfy our personal desires. Whilst this may seem overly pessimistic, Bauman and MacIntyre are identifying the unavoidable direction of human societies towards this already emergent conclusion.

Politicians and policymakers play, therefore, in this world of seeking sufficient co-operation to build a political base – to get elected and to get policies through. They do this by getting individuals to buy into the value of specific outcomes (or more often to stop other awful outcomes). They are not interested why individuals buy in, nor do they try to develop a broader consensus. There are no rational foundations, and any persuasive tactic will do, with different tactics deployed to influence different people. This scattergun approach is more likely to hit the personal desires of the maximum number of people.

Where does this leave the educational researcher seeking to influence educational policy and practice based on their research endeavours? At best, we might become the chosen instrument of a policymaker to persuade others – but only if our research agrees with their pre-existing desires. Truth is not the desired feature, just the ability to be persuasive.

But what if truth does matter, and we want to take seriously our moral responsibilities to support educational endeavours that are in the interests of students? There are four things we can do.
1. Understand the situation. It is not just that the political environment is hostile to research, it does not see facts as a feature of policy and practice development.
2. Decide if we want to be educational researchers or policymakers. The former means potentially less engagement, impact, and status, perhaps walking away from policymaking as more ethically defensible than staying to persuade using simulacra of evidence.
3. Get our own house in order. We have too many conferences which provide too little time to discuss fundamental differences between researchers, with so many papers that we are only speaking to people with whom we more or less agree. The debates are over minutiae rather than significant differences. Dissenting voices tend to go elsewhere and move on to different foci rather than try and get a foot in the door. Bluntly, our academic system is already shaped by the same post-truth structures that have given rise to Trump, Johnson, et al (and no doubt most of us could identify our equivalents of them). Although we will never speak with one voice and will, I hope, always embrace fallibility, getting the house in order will enable us to model what rational dialogue and truth seeking can achieve in identifying how educational policy and practice can be enhanced. Of course, we should value each other’s contributions, but not confuse value with valid (it is just another form of naïve relativism).
4. Find some allies who accept a similar account of the decline of reason from amongst politicians and policymakers and work out how we start to make educational research not only relevant but influential.
Richard Davies leads the MA Education Framework programmes at the University of Hertfordshire. His research interests include philosophical issues in higher education. He is a co-convenor of the Academic Practice Network at SRHE.

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Categories: Government & Higher Education Policy, Higher Education, Research | Tags: Bauman, MacIntyre, Philosophy and Education, policy, policy making, Post-truth, relativism | Permalink.

Author: SRHE News Blog

An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education
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February 11, 2025
Combining AI and Human Expertise to Better Protect K-12 Students Online

Content warning – this article discusses suicidal ideation. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call, text or chat 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or visit 988lifeline.org for more resources.

AI was one of the major themes of 2024.The discussion frequently revolved around its impact on work, but there are innovative ways it can be used to complement human insight to address significant societal challenges.

For example, suicide was the second leading cause of death for people ages 10-14 (2022) according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This impacts everyone from families to educators. In one small Missouri town, a K-12 Safety Support Specialist was alerted when a student searched, “How much Tylenol does it take to die?” and “What is the best way to kill yourself?” These online searches triggered the school’s student safety tool which uses machine learning to identify harmful content. A specialist was immediately notified and was able to quickly intervene, providing the student with the necessary support to prevent self-harm.

There is an urgent need for effective solutions to protect students from threats like suicide, self-harm, cyberbullying, and exposure to harmful content. A combination of machine learning detection to allow for speed and scale, and human review to allow for context and nuance, is required for a comprehensive K-12 student safety tool. This allows schools to act when needed, as guided by their own Safety Plan. According to Talmage Clubbs, Director of Counseling for Neosho District in Missouri, “Our students know about it [student safety K-12 tool]. We have students purposely typing in keywords so they can be pulled in and talked to about their suicidality, their mental health issues, anything like that because they are struggling, and they just don’t know how else to reach anybody.”

Another example where human intervention is essential is when a machine learning-powered solution flags anatomical text as explicit content, but this might be for legitimate science coursework. Human reviewers can verify educational intent by examining context like student age and subject.

In the 2022-2023 school year, 94% of public schools report providing digital devices, such as laptops or tablets, to students according to the National Center for Education Statistics. This is a 28% growth from the number of devices provided pre-pandemic in middle schools and a 52% growth for elementary school students. As students spend more time online for school, they also use these devices for extracurricular learning and making social connections. However, they also have easier access to inappropriate content online. The challenges of ensuring online safety have become increasingly complex, as more students may seek harmful information or engage in distressing or inappropriate behaviors.

To truly support all students — regardless of their socioeconomic background or technological literacy — in the digital age, solutions must be user-friendly and adaptable to the diverse needs of schools and districts. By collaborating — educators, technology providers like GoGuardian, and policymakers can create a future where AI enhances educational experiences for students, fosters healthy human connection and empathy, and ensures privacy.

This also supports educators in today’s digital world who require innovative safety and security solutions to enable students to thrive physically, mentally, and academically while ensuring their well-being and academic progress. “You can rest well at night, knowing you are changing districts and saving lives,” says Dr. Jim Cummins, Superintendent of Neosho District.

To learn more, visit GoGuardian.com

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December 6, 2024