Dr Nick Cartwright has been working in higher education for over two decades in teaching-focused roles.
In his practice Nick favours active and experiential forms of learning. He is passionate about valuing and rewarding students’ lived experiences and generating new forms of knowledge with students that relate to their social, political, and economic position. Nick argues that education should develop students as critically reflexive learners able to challenge dominant ideologies. Nick also holds that teaching staff should be critically reflexive and in 2018, to support this, co-founded the Anti-Racist Book Club which meets online most months.
He proposes that education can be used as a tool of liberation or oppression andHE has at times trained people to operate within, and perpetuate, patriarchal, heteronormative, and endemically racist social structures, and sustain economic inequality. He has therefore long been critical of models of learning and teaching that treat students as passive recipients of ‘knowledge’ and venerate teachers as near omniscient.
Nick’s PhD thesis investigated socially constructivist teaching methods to evaluate whether they were more inclusive. His work found that these pedagogies perpetuated racialised, and to a lesser extent gendered, inequalities within learning and teaching. He therefore advocates that education will always be oppressive unless it is explicitly and actively liberatory. As a trained learning designer he works in supporting the design of a decolonised curriculum.
Nick is an activist academic and this is evident through his anti-racist and social justice work. He was recently part of the research team that delivered the Living Black at University project which evidenced the pervasive and persistent nature of racism in all forms of the student experience. Previously he has worked on numerous projects advancing social justice through education, including with disadvantaged communities in Northern Ireland and with the United Nations through the UNODC’s Education 4 Justice (E4J) initiative.