{"id":3249,"date":"2026-05-08T09:07:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T09:07:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/festivaloflearning\/?page_id=3249"},"modified":"2026-05-08T13:27:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T13:27:38","slug":"external-keynote-lecture-2026-afternoon","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.glos.ac.uk\/festivaloflearning\/external-keynote-lecture-2026-afternoon\/","title":{"rendered":"External keynote lecture 2026 afternoon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
<\/span>
\n

External keynote lecture<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Professor David Webster<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Against the Comfortable Curriculum: Inclusion, Decolonisation, Justice and the Trouble with \u201cGood Practice\u201d<\/strong> <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cgood practices\u201d are part of the problem, rather than the solution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is our commitment to a narrow view of \u201cinclusion\u201d masking a deeper reluctance to confront difficulty, difference, and the unsettling demands of genuine intellectual transformation and equity? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

David Webster<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

David Webster is Professor of Philosophy & Pedagogy and a National Teaching Fellow. He worked\u202fat UoG from 2000 to 2019, launching and teaching on the Religion, Philosophy & Ethics degree and leading institutional conversations about learning and teaching. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, he has held roles at SOAS, and the University of Liverpool, now working as a Senior Advisor at\u202fBuckinghamshire New University. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He writes and speaks widely on pedagogy, technology, and ethics, and is particularly interested in how higher education might resist becoming merely efficient, standardised\u2014and intellectually hollow.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>
\"Head<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Find out more about the FoL 2026 afternoon keynote lecture. 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