Transformative Strategies Towards Inclusion: Re-imagining Student Engagement in Dutch Higher Education

Abstract

Diversity and inclusion projects have increased in Dutch higher education in recent years, but the role of student engagement and focus an equity and inclusion-based approaches remain limited. As an engaged student, practitioner and emerging scholar in the field of diversity and inclusion work and research, I guide the reader through my own auto-ethnographic accounts and narratives of students, practitioners and scholars which shares different encounters with D&I work in inhabited, closed and visited spaces. While drawing on the narratives of this group I show the importance of collaboration and co-creation in which the student voice is centralized, but also invested in relation to transformative strategies towards inclusion. This research did not aim to provide a one-dimensional answer to the question of BIPOC’s student’s contribution to transformative narratives of inclusion, but rather tried to stir up a debate of what the role of students can and should be. Namely, that for inclusion to foster in higher education in The Netherlands, equitable co-creation should take place between practitioners, scholars and students in which intergenerational knowledge is exchanged and a network of those who inhabit closed spaces, actively use the narratives of students, while also investing in their capacities to flourish.