Prof Anne Nortcliffe and Dr Tim Beasley-Murray expound on the importance of inclusivity, creativity, experimentation, and “serious play” in building more innovative, humane, and socially responsive education systems that prepare students for leadership and global citizenship.

Before asking the crucial question, What are we preparing students for?, it is important to define and create the right learning and teaching spaces that respond to issues of the times we live in. Among many definitions and ideas in academic and policy circles, ECE/ECAH/EGen2025 identified two such definitions: inclusive spaces and spaces where play, creativity, and inquiry take precedence over rote memorisation, credentialism, and transactional models of education. The conference also touched upon what we should prepare students for, focusing on global citizenship and leadership skills in an AI-driven era, which is consistent with the four IAFOR Conference Themes selected for 2025-2029: (1) Technology and Artificial Intelligence, (2) Humanity and Human Intelligence, (3) Global Citizenship and Education for Peace, and (4) Leadership.

Engineering Inclusivity: How?

In photo: Professor Anne Nortcliffe of Wrexham University (United Kingdom) at ECE/ECAH/EGen2025

In her keynote presentation ‘Engineering Inclusivity, How?’, Professor Anne Nortcliffe, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Computing and Engineering at Wrexham University, United Kingdom, outlined practical steps as to how to engineer inclusivity by sharing her transformative journey in building an equitable, diverse, and inclusive engineering education provision at Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent.

Kent had long been a ‘cold spot’ for engineering with limited local programmes, causing student outflow and a persistent industry skills gap. Graduates often lacked practical readiness, while the field suffered from severe underrepresentation: low female participation (historically 7-8%), global majority students facing poor graduate employment outcomes (14%), and widespread talent leakage due to restrictive entry requirements (e.g., needing physics alongside maths).

Funded by £12.6 million from the Office for Students and local partnerships, the initiative created a new STEM-focused Kent-based school emphasising Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) from the ground up. Professor Nortcliffe and her team applied EDI research across all facets of the project:

• Building a diverse talent pipeline through meaningful primary/secondary outreach linked to the national curriculum, boosting regional STEM A-level uptake.
• Inclusive recruitment and marketing (gender-decoded language, representative imagery achieving ‘mirror image’).
• Staff diversity (38% female, 54% global majority).
• Curriculum design using CDIO (Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate) pedagogy with real industry projects.
• Facilities supporting inclusivity (e.g., round tables, appropriate PPE).
• Tools like allyship games and reciprocal mentoring.

Key successes included increased female and underrepresented student engagement, decolonised curricula prompting critical thinking on inclusive design (e.g., addressing biases in car safety or medical devices), and an openly available EPC toolkit for graduate employment. Professor Nortcliffe stressed that EDI drives innovation, profitability, ethics, and health/safety, urging ongoing effort: ‘Mirror image matters, language matters,’ and policies must be ‘lived and honest.’

The presentation underscored engineering’s societal impact—’If it’s not grown or biological, an engineer has touched it’—while advocating bold leadership to challenge biases and sustain progress in a field critical yet historically exclusionary.

Watch the full Keynote Presentation in the video below.

Play and the University

In photo: Dr Tim Beasley-Murray of University College London (United Kingdom) at ECE/ECAH/EGen2025

In his keynote ‘Play and the University’,  Dr Tim Beasley-Murray, Associate Professor of European Thought and Culture at University College London (UCL), United Kingdom, offered a provocative defence of higher education amid rising populist attacks, reframing universities as essential spaces of ‘serious play.’

Dr Beasley-Murray began his keynote by citing current US Vice-President JD Vance’s 2021 call to ‘aggressively attack the universities,’ portraying them as hostile institutions that control truth while peddling ‘ridiculous ideas.’ This double rhetorical charge—universities as dangerously powerful yet laughably trivial—echoes the broader anti-elite sentiment seen in Brexit-era rhetoric (e.g., ‘enough of experts’) and current global trends. Critics cast academia as both a threatening establishment and an absurd, detached bubble preoccupied with ‘safe spaces’ and ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’.

Rather than countering solely by asserting seriousness and impact, Dr Beasley-Murray embraced the second critique: universities are indeed playful and ridiculous, and this is their strength. Drawing on Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938), he described play as occurring within a ‘magic circle’—a bounded space and time where special rules and freedoms apply, risks are taken, and transformation occurs, yet nothing ultimately ‘matters’ outside the game. Universities function similarly: separate from everyday demands, they permit experimentation, disagreement, and exploration of dangerous or alien ideas under ethical and methodological constraints.

Just like the famous 1973 Barbarians try in a rugby match, which exemplified the players’ great teamwork, skill, and creativity in the face of exhaustion and impossibility, he argued that universities provide ‘safety to’ experiment and ‘safety from’ real-world consequences, enabling society to imagine alternatives—fairer, more effective systems—that politics or economics cannot. Safe spaces, properly understood, protect this freedom while maintaining respectful rules.

Dr Beasley-Murray contrasted two student narratives: a linear, high-stakes ‘seriousness’ where university is merely a competitive stepping-stone exacerbated by constant assessment, versus a liminal ‘holiday from seriousness’—a transformative threshold between childhood and adulthood for identity exploration and value formation. He advocated embracing the latter: more risk-taking within safety and more playful disagreement, to foster better global citizens.

Ultimately, Dr Beasley-Murray, while quoting American novelist Donna Tartt, called for academics to own the ‘glorious kind of play’ inherent in their work, transforming students and society through bounded freedom rather than defensive insistence on utility alone.

Watch the full Keynote Presentation in the video below.

Banner image: Meredith Spencer, Unsplash