by Aishwarya Bhuta
Z is a student of colour from the global South. A first-generation learner, they are thrilled to be accepted to a university in the United Kingdom (UK) after years of struggle and hard work. Their dream has finally come true. It is their first day at university and they can barely contain their excitement as they enter the classroom for their first lecture.
But as soon as they step inside, they notice themselves standing out amidst white peers. They cannot decide where to sit as nobody seems welcoming; they are either stared at or ignored. Other students are too busy chatting among themselves. They choose the furthest table in the room which is empty, feeling like a fish out of water. They ask themselves to be calm, wait for the lecturer to arrive and silence to befall.
The lecturer finally enters. The white male professor speaks with an accent which they struggle to decipher. In a few minutes, he has projected his presentation, and he mechanically continues to take the class through each slide. Z has never studied this topic before. They cannot relate to the examples shared because things happen differently in their country and culture. They keep checking the time, waiting for the lecture to end.
When the lecturer is done with his slides and allows them to ask questions, Z’s peers actively engage, but Z cannot. The same ordeal continues as the semester progresses. A bright student back in their own country who always participated in classroom discussions, they find themselves lost, unable to find their way among varied accents, alienating reading lists, unrelatable classroom content, and no friends to support them through any of this. Z begins hating their classes and courses, regrets their decision to study abroad and often contemplates dropping out. They battle isolation, alienation and a crisis of belonging, which takes a toll on their mental health. This further discourages them. They cannot wait to finish their programme and be done with it once and for all.
Depressing as it sounds, this is not Z’s story alone. Every year, thousands of international students of colour, including racially marginalised students from the Global South seek admissions to universities in the Global North, arriving with dreams and aspirations only to meet disappointment and despair. This is corroborated by the findings of a study report by Ankita Mishra published by the Centre for Equity Inclusion, University of Sheffield, which shed light on the challenges faced by international postgraduate research students which hamper their overall university experience. Reasons include but are not limited to racism inside as well as outside the classroom, linguistic barriers, cultural differences, and vulnerabilities induced by intersectional disadvantages, lack of peer support, isolation and loneliness. These multifaceted challenges tend to be compounded by the intersections of race, (inter)nationality, gender, religion, and disability, among others. For instance, structural barriers ranging from physically inaccessible infrastructure to lack of assistive technology impacting students with disabilities can hinder a sense of belongingness.
There is a strange paradox within Northern academia. On the one hand, international students of colour face the aforementioned challenges which can be detrimental to not only their academic performance but also their mental health. On the other hand, there is an increasing emphasis on enhancing equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in higher education. Universities are assigned key performance indicators and various measurable metrics to evaluate their performance in this domain, most often quantified by data on the enrolment of students of colour over various years. Without concrete and serious attempts by universities to address the difficulties faced by students of colour, EDI may be reduced to a buzzword.
The present approaches to EDI in higher education seem to be largely focused on increasing enrolment of international students. However, it is worth noting a major reason why universities are encouraged to recruit international students – the significant difference in the fees paid by the so-called ‘home students’ and overseas students. For instance, a look at the fee structure of the University of Sheffield for 2024-25 shows that the annual tuition fee for full-time PhD programmes for ‘home’ students is £4,786 for 2024-25. The upper limit is £19,786 in case of some STEM courses. In stark contrast, their overseas counterparts pay at least £21,560 (4.5 times higher) and up to £42,670. Similar trends can be observed in universities across the UK. It is therefore not surprising that in 2023, the UK Department of Education resisted the then Sunak government’s plans to curb the enrolment of international students, arguing that they subsidise ‘home’ fees.
To take an illustration from another UK university, the Race Equality Strategy of the University of Oxford mentions metrics such as the proportion of staff in academic as well as professional services identifying as Black, Minority and Ethnic; and the gaps between the proportions of various racial categories of students being enrolled for postgraduate programmes. While these and other metrics such as comparison of career progression rates are important, concerns of EDI cannot begin and end with increasing enrolment alone. Much more needs to be done to make international students of colour as much a part of the university as ‘home students’, make their university experience worthwhile, support them in dealing with a wide range of transitions, nurture belongingness, and help them flourish in a new environment. While there is a need to integrate and support international students of colour within the university, specifically in the classroom, they also need spaces outside which they can call their own. For this, they need to see more people like themselves in the faculty as well as their cohort. Greater racial diversity in staff and enrolment of students is a crucial starting point, however, it should mark only the beginning of EDI efforts by university administrations.
EDI concerns need to be incorporated in every aspect of the university ecosystem, especially in the classroom. The teaching-learning process is an integral part of a student’s everyday university experience. The tyranny of the classroom can be averted in various ways such as diversifying the modules and their curricula, reading lists, classroom examples, as well as teaching aids. In addition, there is a need to question the predominant whiteness of curricula, pedagogies, and lecturers themselves. However, creating supportive environments and safe spaces for asking questions and discussing differences is necessary for these measures to be effective. Taken together, such efforts contribute to decolonising the classroom, which in itself is a huge stride but not the final one.
Pedagogical approaches need to be inclusive and diverse from their very conception rather than as an afterthought. Bringing in case studies, scholars, researchers, thinkers, ideas and resources from different parts of the world and providing international students of colour the opportunity to share examples from their cultures and countries can go a long way in fostering EDI in the classroom. Diversecurricula and pedagogies can set the stage for inclusive classrooms, departments/schools, faculties and universities by extension. Long story short, making universities equal, diverse and inclusive requires EDI by design. Potential measures range from increasing accessibility in infrastructure, to amplifying a plurality of voices, facilitating knowledge exchanges about varied contexts, racial and ethnic groups, cultures, geographies, histories, sexualities, and so on.
What does EDI in higher education look like in practice? There is no singular answer. However, it has to begin from the classroom – by decolonising it, by experimenting with pedagogies and introducing ideas, ideologues, texts and people from the Global South; by making it democratic, diverse and inclusive; by making every student feel welcome and their opinion valued. For this, lecturers will have to reinvent what and how they teach. Such radical changes take a long time to materialise. This is not an easy task either – egos and sentiments of the dominant majority will certainly be hurt, and there will be pushbacks from the privileged if the status quo undergoes an upheaval. But that is how change and social justice are possible – one inclusive step and classroom at a time. As bell hooks reminds us in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994), “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy”.
Aishwarya Bhuta (she/her) is a postgraduate researcher at the School of Geography and Planning, University of Sheffield. She is interested in research on gender and development issues in India.