Beyond Remediation: Critical Pedagogy, Decoloniality and UDL in Postgraduate Writing Support

Abstract Book of the 4th World Conference on Teaching, Learning, and Education

Year: 2026

[PDF]

Beyond Remediation: Critical Pedagogy, Decoloniality and UDL in Postgraduate Writing Support

Prof. Dr. Jessica Murray

ABSTRACT:

Postgraduate academic writing support is still too often built around a quiet deficit logic: students are assumed to lack the linguistic, technical or scholarly competence needed to succeed, and support is then designed to correct what is perceived to be missing. This paper argues for a different starting point. While postgraduate writers do need structured and sustained support, they also bring intellectual histories, languages, disciplinary experiences and epistemological resources that should be taken seriously in the writing-development process. Drawing on critical pedagogy, decoloniality and Universal Design for Learning, the paper considers how academic writing support can become a space where postgraduate students learn to read disciplinary expectations more critically, make hidden curricula visible, develop scholarly voice, and participate with greater confidence in knowledge-making communities. Critical pedagogy helps reposition students as active contributors rather than passive recipients of instruction. Decoloniality foregrounds the colonial residues that continue to shape assumptions about criticality, argument, citation, authority and legitimate scholarly expression. Universal Design for Learning adds a practical concern with access, flexibility, learner agency and inclusive resource design. The paper therefore reframes postgraduate writing support not as remedial training, but as a central site of postgraduate pedagogy, scholarly identity formation and epistemic justice.

Keywords: Critical Pedagogy; Decoloniality; Universal Design for Learning; Academic Literacies; Postgraduate Writing