Conference Agenda

This symposium brings together three papers from Canada, Australia and England that each take relationality as central to truth-telling and reparative educational work in higher education contexts. Across distinct national, historical, and institutional contexts, the contributors converge on relationality not as a pedagogical add‑on, but as a necessary response to educational harm produced through exclusionary policies, settler‑colonial legacies and managerial cultures of teaching in higher education . The relationship between truth telling and relationality in classrooms is a complex and uncomfortable space (Gannaway, 2025) but fruitful developments and learning can be seen in literature in an increasing number of professional disciplines in higher education space such as community-engaged learning (Dobrich,2025), medical education (Williams, 2016), mental health (Akbar et al,2025) and legal education (Eaglewoman et al, 2022). We argue this demonstrates a pressing need for higher education institutions to move beyond procedural or compliance‑based approaches to confront historical harms and instead cultivate relational pedagogies that can sustain truth‑telling, repair, and collective responsibility across diverse learning communities.

The symposium asks three connected questions: 1) why and how has relationality become central to our truth telling and reparative work? 2) what is the current ‘state of the nation’ in how relationality is framed within teaching? and 3) does contemporary literature signals a re/turn to relational approaches?. Our routes are practice‑led and ethically connected, and we explore how working with students, colleagues and wider communities showed that truth telling and reparative praxis requires accountability and shared meaning‑making that cannot be reduced to metrics or indicators. In each context, we treat relationality not as pastoral add‑on but as epistemic practice. How we know is inseparable from how we stand in relation to others, land, and histories.

While global policy and institutional discourse increasingly valorise belonging, engagement, and student experience, relational labour remains structurally undervalued within assessment regimes, audit cultures, and AI‑mediated teaching infrastructures. Big‑data preferences and platform metrics re‑centre what is legible and rewardable, risking the eclipse of situated knowledge and slow pedagogies. We see uneven but discernible re/turns in truth telling and reparative practices in our work. Yet these re/turns are contested by the expansion of techno‑managerial knowledge production, generative AI, and the seductions of standardised comparability. Our symposium situates relationality within ECER’s concern for authenticity and public trust in knowledge. In a time of poly‑crisis, we argue that truth-telling and reparative education requires (re) building relational infrastructures across classrooms, communities, and knowledge ecosystems so that research can act with, not merely on, those most affected. The papers in our symposium offer concrete practices and conceptual tools for making such relationality actionable in classrooms, and that are vital to develop our own and our students' capacities for staying with the discomfort will inevitably arise.

Canada, like other settler-colonial nations, has an abominable legacy of atrocities against Indigenous Peoples. In response, the Canadian government mandated a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (NTRC) which delivered its final report in 2015. Over a decade later, much work remains to be done and many calls to action put forth in the final report have not been actioned (Wilson-Raybould, 2022). There are also concerns for reconciliation education and work becoming tokenistic (Stein, 2020), which is why more relational and reparative frameworks are necessary. Within Canada’s NTRC are several calls to action for newcomers. A complex and poorly addressed question is: how, where and when do we education newcomers about the treatment of Indigenous peoples by the Canadian state and how do we shift the historical narratives about Indigenous peoples from a damage cantered framework (Tuck, 2009) towards honouring and celebrating the exquisite knowledge and culture of Indigenous Peoples? This paper shares findings from a community educational research project that developed a strengths-based approach to educating newcomers about the presence of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. In relation to the focus of the symposium, this paper explores how learning to think more relationally supported these newcomers with building a deeper connection to place and engaging in the praxis of reconciliation. This project employed decolonial methodology (Tuhiwai Smith, 2021) and embodied learning pedagogical approach (Ng, 2018). Participants attended twelve educational sessions featuring different embodied learning activities. Among these was a sharing circle which fosters relational awareness and connection (Graveline, 1998). Pre-project interviews were conducted to set a baseline for comparison post-project. Participants were interviewed post-project about what they learned and their learning experience. It became clear that participants knowledge and comfort to discuss Indigenous Peoples and the issues of colonization in Canada increased dramatically. Of all the topics discussed, relationality was both the most challenging to conceptualize, but in the end one of the most significant. While this shift may initially be challenging, it is significant for feeling more connected to each other and the land. Understanding this interconnected way of being, through a relational understanding of place, helped participants feel closer to their new home and not so alone. Thus, this research concludes relationality is a critical educational concept for supporting newcomers in their learning, both for how it can support them with engaging in the praxis of reconciliation and helping them feel more connected to place.

Graveline, F. J. (1998). Circle works: Transforming Eurocentric consciousness. Fernwood Publishing. Ng, R. (2018). Decolonizing Teaching and Learning Through Embodied Learning: Toward an Integrated Approach. In S. Batacharya & R. Wong (Eds), Sharing breath: Embodied learning and decolonization (pp. 33-54). Athabasca University Press. Stein S. (2020) ‘Truth before reconciliation’: the difficulties of transforming higher education in settler colonial contexts, Higher Education Research & Development, 39(1), 156-170. Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard educational review, 79(3), 409-428. Wilson-Raybould, J. (2022). True reconciliation : how to be a force for change. McClelland & Stewart.

National calls for truth-telling in Australia have renewed attention to the responsibilities of educators in confronting colonial violence and developing historically informed, relational approaches to teaching. This paper draws on data from a two‑year study of capacity‑building for discomfort within an Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programme that directly engages with Australia’s colonial histories. Grounded in scholarship on difficult knowledge and pedagogies of discomfort (Britzman, 1998; Boler, 1999; Zembylas, 2015), the study examines how non-Indigenous pre‑service teachers navigate the affective, ethical, and relational demands of learning about Indigenous histories of dispossession, violence, and ongoing settler colonialism. Indigenous scholars such as Martin and Mirraboopa (2003) describe Indigenous ontologies as fundamentally relational, emphasising interconnectedness, reciprocal responsibility, and ethical modes of being with the land and with one another. For learners raised within Western epistemic traditions, characterised by binaries, hierarchy, and separation, the encounter with relational worldviews can provoke both discomfort and affective disruption. Experiences from the classroom illustrate how such disruptions compel students to rethink inherited assumptions about knowledge, selfhood, and their implication in colonial histories. Yet these moments of discomfort often surface anxieties about what action is possible: pre‑service teachers frequently ask, “What do I do with this?”, revealing concerns that learning about colonial violence risks collapsing into paralysis or guilt. Drawing on TallBear’s (2019) conceptualisation of “good relations,” the study positions truth‑telling as an ongoing ethical practice through which students are supported to witness historical and contemporary harms, recognise their entanglement in colonial structures, and commit to more respectful, accountable ways of being in relation to Indigenous histories. Within this framework, discomfort becomes not a barrier but a necessary condition for re‑orienting ontologies, unsettling worldviews, and cultivating the relational sensibilities essential to reconciliation and decolonial futures. The paper calls for pedagogical approaches in ITE that honour Indigenous relational epistemologies and support educators to enter, remain in, and act from within the challenging but transformative possibilities of truth‑telling.

Boler, M. (1999). A pedagogy of discomfort: Witnessing and the politics of anger and fear. Feeling power: Emotions and education, 175-203. Britzman, D. P. (1998). Lost subjects, contested objects: Toward a psychoanalytic inquiry of learning. State university of New York press. Martin-Booran Mirraboopa, K. (2003). Ways of knowing, being and doing: A theoretical framework and methods for indigenous and indigenist re‐search. Journal of Australian Studies, 27(76), 203–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/14443050309387838 TallBear, K. (2019). Caretaking relations, not American dreaming. Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 6 (1): 24-41. Zembylas, M. (2015). ‘Pedagogy of discomfort’and its ethical implications: The tensions of ethical violence in social justice education. Ethics and education, 10(2), 163-174.

This paper examines the central role of relationality in the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP) at University College London (Knowler & Wright, 2025), where relational pedagogies emerged not as optional enhancements but as methodological and ethical imperatives. Because eugenics functioned through distanced modes of knowing, classification, statistical abstraction, and claims to neutrality that authorised harm while disavowing responsibility (Bhimani & Knowler, 2026), teaching its legacies exposes a core tension in contemporary higher education: can institutions address historical and ongoing injustice through information alone, or does meaningful repair require re‑working relationships between educators, students, and the histories universities continue to inhabit? Drawing on practice‑led case studies from ELEP, the paper shows how relationality materialised through students’ encounters with discomfort, resistance, and uncertainty (Altunbas, 2025). Institutional strategies that rely on naming or acknowledging eugenics, through lectures, archival access, or official statements, proved insufficient for fostering ethical engagement. What mattered instead was the relational infrastructure through which students met this knowledge: how vulnerability was held, whose experiences were centred, and how responsibility was shared rather than individualised. In this context, possibilities for repair depended on cultivating trust, dialogic openness, and collaborative meaning‑making while resisting forms of closure that function as institutional self‑absolution. The paper also situates this work within broader national conditions in England, where discourses of inclusion and belonging sit uneasily alongside audit cultures, metric‑driven governance, and increasingly constrained teaching labour. Relational work especially when engaging with histories of racism, ableism, or colonial violence remains structurally unsupported and frequently dismissed as pastoral rather than epistemic. Anti‑eugenics education therefore illuminates the contradictions of a sector that rhetorically values relationship yet systemically undermines it. Finally, the paper places the ELEP within contemporary scholarship that signals an uneven but growing re/turn to relational paradigms across decolonial pedagogy, disability studies, feminist ethics of care, and Indigenous methodologies. At a moment when higher education is increasingly shaped by datafication and technological optimisation, this project argues that relationality constitutes a form of knowledge‑producing infrastructure. How we know the past, how we teach it, and how we act in the present are inseparable from how we stand in relation to those historically and presently harmed by university knowledge.

Altunbas, H. G., Guo, X., Liu, Y., Knowler, H., & Wright, T. (2025). Can education heal? Staff and students exploring reparative pedagogies in the context of institutional harms in higher education. Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (35). https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi35.1337 Bhimani, N., & Knowler, H. (2026). Eugenics, education and exclusion: Challenging the past to change the future. In E. J. Done & S. Tomlinson (Eds.), Challenging exclusionary pressures in education: How inclusion becomes exclusion. Palgrave Macmillan. Knowler, H., & Wright, T. (2025). ELEP end‑of‑project report. UCL Arena Centre for Teaching and Learning. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/sites/teaching_learning/files/elep_end_of_project_report_summer_2025.pdf