Inclusive Pedagogy: Toward a Pedagogy of Belonging and Transformation

Inclusive pedagogy is increasingly promoted within higher education as a response to inequity and exclusion, yet it is often framed as a technical or policy-driven intervention focused on access and accommodation. Drawing on decolonial and humanising scholarship, this article challenges such framings by conceptualising inclusive pedagogy as an ethical, political, and ontological praxis concerned with epistemological equity. Using qualitative interview data from historically marginalised psychologists, drawn from a doctoral study employing a Decolonial Constructivist Grounded Theory approach, the article examines how inclusive pedagogy is experienced, contested, and reimagined within Westernised higher education contexts. The findings reveal how pedagogy operates simultaneously as a site of epistemic violence and as a space of relational possibility, shaped by racialised standards of legitimacy, embodied reflexivity, ethical discomfort, and institutional constraint. Inclusive pedagogy is shown to function not as a fixed set of strategies but as an ongoing praxis of becoming, sustained through relational care, critical consciousness, and resistance to Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies. The article contributes to scholarship on inclusive and decolonial pedagogy by advancing epistemological equity as a central analytic lens and by foregrounding lived experience as a critical site for understanding the harms and transformative possibilities of pedagogy in higher education.