1 Education without boundaries: Equity in action

What might it look like for higher education to be truly accessible for all? This edited collection, Education Without Boundaries, stems from the belief that accessibility, inclusivity, and equity are not peripheral or an afterthought to the design and delivery of teaching and learning – rather, they are inherent principles of quality teaching. As higher education institutions face continuing challenges and opportunities in the 21st century, the themes of accessibility, equity, and inclusivity in higher education are more critical than ever to the future of learning. Access to education is a basic human right (UNESCO, 2025); while learners may have access to education, systemic barriers can create further challenges. When we design learning that places these values of inclusion at the forefront, we do not just adhere to policy or provide cursory access to education; we enhance the lifelong transformative potential of education and advance social justice.

Education Without Boundaries brings together a diverse array of voices to explore approaches to learning and teaching that enable and enhance accessibility, equity, and inclusivity in higher education. Recognising the profound impact of education, the collection centres on the belief that equity, accessibility, and inclusivity are central tenets of quality teaching and learning in higher education. Importantly, Education Without Boundaries is grounded in community and the power of sharing knowledge and practice between educators, professional staff, and students across institutions and countries.

In 2022, the University of Waikato | Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand and the University of Newcastle, Australia established a Memorandum of Understanding, including a strategic partnership agreement. The partnership included a focus on research and teaching collaboration; as one action from this, the University of Waikato | Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato (UOW) and the University of Newcastle (UON) partnered to facilitate an international teaching and learning symposium.

UOW’s Te Puna Ako Centre for Tertiary Teaching and Learning (CeTTL) had previously run a biannual online symposium, Te Puna Aurei LearnFest, including a successful partnership with the University of Cardiff in 2022. This led to the volume Revitalising Higher Education: Insights from Te Puna Aurei LearnFest 2022. UON has a twice-yearly teaching and learning showcase for their community of practice, the Educator Network (tEN). The Educator Network Showcase is facilitated by the Educator Network Steering Group and the Education Development team at Learning Design and Teaching Innovation (LDTI) to share teaching and learning innovations and practice. We – the editors of this collection, along with our respective colleagues – came together in an exciting opportunity to share our practice across institutions, forge connections, and explore opportunities to support students in their learning journey.

While some aspects of organising such a significant symposium across international borders may be challenging, we found it easy to agree upon a theme for the showcase: Education Without Boundaries. Equitable, accessible higher education is something we are all deeply passionate about, and which holds particular resonance for our institutions.

UON is a regional university in Australia with a unique and diverse student cohort, including high proportions of first-in-family students, mature-age students, and Indigenous students. UON is proud of its demographics and the demonstrated successes of its graduates, with 91.6% of undergraduates and 94.5% of postgraduates finding employment within four months of graduating (The University of Newcastle, 2025). The high proportion of equity and “equity-like” groups (Crawford & Emery, 2021; Clarke et al., 2024) at UON means that many students face additional challenges to higher education, and as such supporting students to succeed is core to the work of UON, LDTI, and tEN.

The University of Waikato |Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato (UOW) has campuses in Hamilton and Tauranga, in Aotearoa New Zealand’s upper North Island. It has a diverse student population; approximately 20% of students identify as Māori, and nearly 25% are international students (Times Higher Education, 2023). Like UON, UOW is a regional university; it services a large section of the North Island consisting of both urban and rural areas. Finally, close ties to local Māori iwi (tribes) are a key characteristic of the university. The Hamilton campus is situated on land leased from the Waikato-Tainui tribal confederation, and iwi representatives act in partnership with the University Council (The University of Waikato, 2023). The university also has a campus in the coastal city of Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty on the land of iwi affiliated with Tauranga Moana.

We regard the topic of education without boundaries to be broad and encompassing of many aspects of equity, inclusivity, and accessibility. The 1994 Salamanca Statement by UNESCO (UNESCO, 2025), building on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, acknowledged equitable and inclusive access to education as a human right (Hernández-Torrano et al., 2022). The increasing availability of higher education around the world has created opportunities for students from a wide range of backgrounds and identities (O’Donovan, 2021) to access education. This includes students: from lower socio-economic status backgrounds (including those who must continue working while studying); from rural and remote areas or with parenting or caring responsibilities; whose first language is not the language of instruction; with disabilities; or who have been otherwise historically marginalised due to their identities.

There is an increasing awareness that university enrolment does not automatically equate to equitable access or meaningful inclusion, and that an inclusive education is a goal that all stakeholders must acknowledge and work towards. One pedagogical approach to the promotion of equitable and inclusive education has been Universal Design for Learning (UDL) (Cumming & Rose, 2012). Growing out of the field of disability education, UDL focuses on catering for the broadest possible range of students as the default setting, which can bring advantages to all students (Cumming & Rose, 2012; Galkienė & Monkevičienė, 2021).

The success of the symposium in 2023 led to a desire to share the experiences and innovations in teaching and learning more widely, thus the idea for this edited collection was born. Presenters at Te Puna Aurei LearnFest were invited to contribute, and we also opened the call for papers more widely to include other voices. We were thrilled at the response and opportunity to highlight key practices in enhancing equity, accessibility, and inclusivity in teaching and learning in higher education.

The responses came from a range of institutions and educational fields, including STEM, language teaching, law, the social sciences, and health, and explored technological and pedagogical innovations across a range of educational contexts and delivery modes. In fact, finding a way to meaningfully categorise the variety of responses posed an enjoyable challenge to us as editors. The authors cross numerous disciplines and institutions and all centre inclusive practice in their teaching through a range of innovative approaches. The chapters have been organised under common threads of inclusion and equity in education, although many of the chapters reflect an intersectional focus. We have adopted four central subthemes: Supporting Student Success, Applying Inclusive Pedagogies in the Classroom, Inclusive Technology Enhanced Learning, and Equitable and Quality Teaching through Professional Development.

In Part 1: Supporting Student Success, chapters highlight opportunities to foster inclusivity, accessibility, and equity in higher education. Fittingly for the overall approach to education without boundaries, Kate Stevens and Dan Weijers explore the benefits and success of adopting a pedagogies of kindness approach in teaching, noting the significant benefits for students facing barriers to inclusion. Stevens and Weijers report on their findings through embedding pedagogies of kindness through syllabi and communication with students, and how this can result in inclusivity, student success, and benefits for teachers. Jessica Anderson and Nikita van Dijk share their invaluable student perspective on access to university campuses and learning for disabled students. With Chelsea Blickem, they report on an accessibility audit undertaken at the University of Waikato, highlighting everyday barriers through their experiences of access and mobility, and call for culturally responsive approaches in creating inclusive and accessible spaces on campus. Zoe Griffiths, Michelle Mansfield, Zlata Johnson, Clovia Holdsworth, and Jennifer Baker reflect on their development of an inclusive pedagogical tool aimed at supporting and retaining minority students in STEM through the development of student success skills. Their success provides opportunities for other educators to adopt similar approaches. Sarah Bashir explores challenges to student success and wellbeing in processes of conflict in group work, arguing that while interpersonal conflicts can negatively impact learning, they can also facilitate opportunities to develop teamwork and communication skills when supported appropriately. Bashir’s discussion and recommendations offer powerful insights to consider when designing group work processes to support all students in developing collaborative skills. Finally, Sadie Whittam evaluates approaches to increase inclusivity through authentic assessment, finding it can enhance student employability, aid in skill development, and allow students to showcase their learning in a range of different ways.

In Part 2: Applying Inclusive Pedagogies in the Classroom, authors share the ways in which they have adopted playful, artistic, or otherwise unconventional approaches to teaching and learning, and the outcomes of this. Alice Neikirk asks whether we can approach serious topics in a playful manner in disciplines such as criminology. Noting the seeming discrepancy between play and the confronting content in criminology, Neikirk outlines her ‘playful’ teaching experiments and argues that when structured appropriately, play can support student well-being while developing the resilience and innovative thinking necessary for careers in the criminal justice system. Next, Furkan Yazici explores opportunities for aesthetic experience to improve critical thinking skills through active and emotional engagement, for a more expansive model of reasoning. Yazici advocates for the recognition of the arts as a powerful tool in cultivating critical, imaginative, and emotionally intelligent thinkers. In their chapter, Michael Kilmister, Victoria Grace-Bland, Mathew Haine, and Aaliya Williams draw on a case study from the University of Reading on alternate, inclusive, and authentic modes of sharing the student voice through zine-making workshops and distribution. The student voice and student-staff co-creation project was centred on and enhanced creative self-expression and wellbeing, gathering student insights missed by traditional methods, and aimed at closing the awarding gap. Next, Elaine Xu and Emily Rokobauer discuss their inclusive teaching strategies through active and inquiry-based learning, enabling them to foster learner agency and increase student engagement. They share their choices in the design and delivery of learning activities and assessment tasks that were creative, leveraged digital media technologies, and allowed for learner agency. Closing this section, Dimity Wehr, Melinda J. Lewis, Gesa Ruge, Fariza Sabrina, Shaleeza Sohail, and Sweta Thakur explore their collaborative work in a professional graduate program for academic and teaching staff’ in a transdisciplinary, multi-university project developing dialogue opportunities to enhance critical reflexivity in collaborative reflective circles. They share their experiences in developing and implementing collaborative reflective circles, noting the potential for innovation, inclusivity, and engagement for all learners.

Part 3: Inclusive Technology Enhanced Learning focuses on the integration of digital tools and online methods to improve inclusivity and accessibility in higher education. Acknowledging systemic challenges and advancements in technology and knowledge that require educational strategies in healthcare, Joëlle V.F. Coumans and Stuart Wark explore the potential of generative artificial intelligence as a complementary tool within a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) educational approach to enhance healthcare education. They find PBL facilitates critical thinking, collaboration, and authentic engagement with complex, real-world problems. Next, Kay Harrison and Nicole Perry reflect on the design and delivery of a virtual student exchange course that used relational learning, empathy-building activities, and inclusive teaching practices to foster global collaboration and engagement with diverse perspectives in an online classroom. Harrison and Perry prioritised the development of empathy alongside knowledge acquisition, recognising the value of each for lifelong learning. Melissa Tadros, Paul S. McDonald, Karen Mate, Josephine Smith, and Jude Weidenhofer consider other elements of asynchronous learning in their discussion of the value of digital lightboard recordings. Their integration of digital lightboard recordings enhanced instructor presence and student engagement in asynchronous biomedical science lectures. By integrating visual and interactive elements, Tadros et. al argue this format improves accessibility, motivation, and conceptual understanding, leading to increased student satisfaction and course success. Shifting to forms of assessment, Jennifer Campion examines the use of online multiple-choice quizzes in a law course as a tool for benchmarking learning and revising content to support flexible, interactive learning, and how they can be designed to go beyond their traditional role of testing content knowledge to develop analytical skills. Campion highlights student feedback and explores the benefits and limitations of multiple-choice quizzes in enhancing engagement and learning outcomes in legal education. Salwa presents a case study on the use of audio-visual aids (AVA) in Indonesian junior high school English as a Foreign Language classrooms, highlighting their positive impact on student engagement and motivation. Salwa discusses challenges such as technical limitations and the need for clearer institutional support, while advocating for AVA integration in teacher training to promote inclusive, student-centred pedagogies in language teaching. Finally, Anthony Richardson uses Bourdieu’s theory of hysteresis and systems thinking to explore how the COVID-19 disruption challenged entrenched norms in university teaching. He argues that rather than simply reverting to pre-pandemic practices, educators can recognise the lasting systemic shifts and embrace adaptive, transformative approaches to online education.

The final section, Part 4: Equitable and Quality Teaching through Professional Development, addresses staff development, institutional practices, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. In the opening chapter, Alison Jolley, Victor Fester, Nigel Robertson, Jennifer Campion, Stephanie Gibbons, and Angela McGaughran outline a structured model for cross-disciplinary teaching partnerships that foster reflective practice and pedagogical development through facilitated collegial conversations. They share benefits for participants, such as peer feedback, accountability, and tangible teaching improvements, highlighting the value of intentional collaboration across academic fields. Next, Annika Herb and Clare Lloyd reflect on their work in targeted professional development for academic staff to support student retention, with a key focus on equity and equity-like groups. Herb and Lloyd outline their practice-based ‘Know/Show/Do/Discover’ framework, based on Miller’s Pyramid, that frames their approach to professional development to enhance inclusive, evidence-based teaching practices that foster a student-centred learning environment and improve educational outcomes. They provide insights to how this could be adopted by other institutions. Elenora Leopardi, Graeme Horton, and Katie-Jane Wynne discuss another form of professional development in their exploration of the QueerHPE Project, a faculty development initiative aimed at fostering LGBTQI+ inclusive learning environments in health professions education. Using a train-the-trainer model and co-designed workshops, the program equips educators to challenge heteronormative standards and support diverse learners across clinical and classroom settings. Finally, Brendan D. Sheridan discusses the redesign and delivery of research communications workshops to promote inclusivity, with a focus on removing barriers to education for Māori, Pacific, and disabled communities. Drawing on Universal Design for Learning and cultural competency, the workshops equip postgraduate research students with the skills to communicate research effectively in both academic and public contexts.