| Festival of Learning
External keynote lecture
Professor David Webster
Against the Comfortable Curriculum: Inclusion, Decolonisation, Justice and the Trouble with “Good Practice”
The HE sector talks at length about inclusive and decolonised curricula. But much of this work has become comfortable: checklists, toolkits, and quietly managed consensus. This keynote asks if some of our most familiar “good practices” are part of the problem, rather than the solution.
Drawing on philosophy, pedagogy, and contemporary debates around generative AI, the session will argue that curriculum design is not primarily a technical task but an ethical and epistemic one. Who gets to know what? What counts as knowledge? And what forms of thinking are we quietly training students out of?
Is our commitment to a narrow view of “inclusion” masking a deeper reluctance to confront difficulty, difference, and the unsettling demands of genuine intellectual transformation and equity?
This lecture seeks to unsettle our assumptions while offering practical ways forward: approaches to curriculum, assessment and feedback that take difference seriously, resist standardisation, and create the conditions for genuinely transformative and ethical learning practice.
David Webster
David Webster is Professor of Philosophy & Pedagogy and a National Teaching Fellow. He worked at UoG from 2000 to 2019, launching and teaching on the Religion, Philosophy & Ethics degree and leading institutional conversations about learning and teaching.
Since then, he has held roles at SOAS, and the University of Liverpool, now working as a Senior Advisor at Buckinghamshire New University.
He writes and speaks widely on pedagogy, technology, and ethics, and is particularly interested in how higher education might resist becoming merely efficient, standardised—and intellectually hollow.
