Rethinking Pedagogy: Designing for Participation and Justice
This Rethinking Pedagogy seminar examines how deliberate teaching design can foster fairer and participatory learning environments. Wumi Inyang and Yiwei Sun presented case studies showing how peer-assisted learning and algorithmic group allocation can boost student engagement and address awarding gaps.
From Passive to Participatory Learning
Wumi Inyang's peer-assisted learning (PAL) model tackles a common problem: students sitting silently in large lectures, absorbing information but not actively engaging with it. Drawing on Vygotsky's theories of social learning and Sfard's concept of learning as participation, Inyang redesigned teaching sessions to make students active participants in their own learning.
The approach is structured with students taking on specific roles such as lead presenter, evidence lead, Padlet scribe, case study creator, ensuring everyone contributes. Digital tools like Padlet create space for quieter students to share ideas in writing, while structured prompts guide disciplinary reasoning in small groups.
But does PAL truly redistribute authority in the classroom? Inyang says yes: lecturers shift from knowledge gatekeepers to learning facilitators, while students explain concepts, justify decisions, and critique ideas among themselves. The design deliberately prevents dominant voices from taking over, ensuring genuine participation across the board. Educators can explore the PAL Activity Template and Toolkit at pals.qmes.uk
Fairness by Design in Group Allocation
Yiwei Sun identified a troubling pattern in engineering team assignments. Analyzing over 9,500 student team placements across six years at a QMUL-NPU joint programme, Sun discovered that female students who significantly outperformed male peers academically were consistently assigned teammates with lower average GPAs.
Sun's algorithmic approach tackles this inequity while addressing a paradox: while random allocation achieves fairness at scale, it can create severe inequities for individual students. The new algorithm maintains the statistical fairness of randomization while narrowing the distribution to protect individual students from extreme disadvantage. Looking ahead, Sun plans to incorporate additional equity factors such as part-time working hours and English language proficiency, ensuring the algorithm accounts for diverse circumstances that affect students' ability to contribute to collaborative work.
QMUL staff and students can watch the webinar here
Festival of Education 2026
At this year's Festival of Education, Tom Lowe (University of Westminster and Chair of the RAISE network) gave a keynote on student engagement in higher education, and why the sector can no longer afford to rely on outdated assumptions about who students are and how they learn.
Lowe's central argument was that the 'typical' student of the 2020s looks very different from the generations before. Today's student is more likely to be a commuter student living with parents, working upwards of 23 hours a week in paid part-time work, navigating the cost-of-living crisis, and making strategic decisions about which lectures are worth attending. Nearly one in five students has considered dropping out for financial reasons. Against this backdrop, treating low attendance as a motivation problem rather than a structural one is not helpful.
Engagement, Lowe reminded us, encompasses far more than physical presence. Emotional belonging, cognitive challenge, and student voice in shaping their own education are equally important dimensions. Institutions share responsibility for creating the conditions in which engagement can thrive, through thoughtful curriculum design, authentic assessment, and timetabling that reflects students' real lives.
These themes were picked up in the subsequent Great Queen Mary Debate, where speakers wrestled with where institutional responsibility and student responsibility lie, a question that remains unresolved.
Recommended reading: Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed