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Facilitated and chaired by: Dr Richard Davies and Dr Vanessa Cui, co-convenors of the Academic Practice Network. For more details about the network and its activities, please click here

Overview

The rapid institutional adoption of GenAI in Higher Education (HE) has prompted curricular revisions, policy responses, and “teaching innovations”. Yet much of this discourse remains technocratic: it treats GenAI as a set of tools to be integrated or regulated without sufficiently interrogating the social, environmental, political, and epistemic conditions that shape its development, design and pedagogical impact.

Drawing on decolonial theory (located within post-disciplinarity), this paper advances a critical examination of GenAI in HE that moves beyond the hype and toward questions of critical consciousness, epistemic disobedience, and pedagogies of resistance and refusal. Decoloniality attends to how racialised epistemic hierarchies, extractive knowledge practices, and asymmetrical power relations have long structured academia. Applied to GenAI, this lens exposes not only algorithmic biases and data inequalities, but also the embedded colonial logics in who is imagined as a “learner”, whose knowledge counts, and whose labour underpins the datasets that GenAI systems consume and reproduce. Within such a framing, seemingly “neutral” practices become sites of power. This paper contributes to SRHE’s academic practice conversations by positioning critical GenAI literacies (including the capacity to recognise complicity in harm) as foundational to contemporary pedagogies.

Through the reflective analysis of a collection of provocations and resources (on Padlet) designed to support educators and students, I argue that HE must cultivate their ability to respond, i.e. our response-ability (including choosing to refuse GenAI), pushing us to consider how we can ensure that students and teachers can maintain their place as subjects and not objects of control. The Padlet functions not as a repository of good practices but as a reflective space where users are confronted with research-based knowledge on the coloniality of GenAI, and critical questions about power, accountability, and pedagogical choices when working (or not) with GenAI in HE. By attending to the intersections of research, policy, and pedagogical practice, this contribution situates GenAI as a contested terrain where educators, students, and institutions must articulate the values they wish to uphold. The paper concludes by inviting others to engage in radical dreaming to move toward practices that preserve the role of education as a public good.

Speaker bio

Dr. Sam Passeport (she.her.hers) is the Founder of No Borders Learning that helps schools and universities build relational and relational feedback cultures through workshops, courses, coaching, and creative consulting. She is a French educator who has worked across international schools in India and in the Dutch public higher-education sector. She centres critical and relational pedagogies, treating feedback as a dialogic encounter through the lens of socio-materiality. Her doctorate (2025) explored students’ experiences of teacher feedback, using creative research methods.