When I first began this project, I thought I was researching discomfort. What I’ve come to realise is that I was actually researching silence, the kind that sits quietly in classrooms, between glances, beneath feedback, or inside someone’s decision not to speak. Silence doesn’t always mean exclusion, but it often points to something unacknowledged. And this project became, for me, a way of paying attention to that.
In a very early stage of this ARP unit, I had added a four objective: To test whether co-creating a brief Cultural Sensitivity and Dress Guidelines can enhance mutual understanding of self-expression across cultures at a HE creative space such as UAL. I imagined it not as a policy, but as a shared artefact: something that might signal care, create reflection, or offer a bridge between worlds that don’t always meet.
But the findings make clear why that was premature. The terrain is not only complex; it is politically and emotionally charged in ways that make any “guideline” vulnerable to flattening nuance, hardening polarities, or being taken up as a tool of control. What I can responsibly take forward at this stage is not a draft document, but a clearer sense of what needs to exist before any co-created principles could be ethical: sustained listening, careful facilitation, and shared language that can hold disagreement without immediately converting it into complaint, discipline, or moral judgement.
I have had to reflect on my own positionality in a more disciplined way. I come from fashion, where visibility and aesthetic experimentation are often treated as forms of confidence, creativity, even legitimacy. I am also someone of faith, for whom dress can carry meanings of dignity, privacy, and intention. Holding these orientations together has shaped my research instinct: I do not want to “solve” dress through rules, nor romanticise self-expression as automatically inclusive. The data has pushed me toward a more difficult, but more honest, stance: inclusion in creative HE requires not only permission for difference, but cultural literacy, interpretive humility, and better ways of speaking when something feels uncomfortable.
This project has not given me a neat solution. It has given me a direction. If we are serious about belonging (not just inclusion), we need to attend to what gets decoded quickly, what becomes contextual “normal”, and what people choose not to say because the social cost feels too high. I may return to the idea of a Cultural Sensitivity and Dress Guidelines in the future, perhaps as part of a wider co-creation process involving staff, more students, and faith groups. But for now, the most ethical move is to stay in inquiry. To allow the conversation to remain open.
As I continue teaching across CSM and LCF, I will carry this learning with me: not as a fixed outcome, but as a habit of attention. I may not always get it right, but I will keep asking: Who is in the room? Who is not speaking? And what might it take for them to feel like they belong as they are?
Final note: Many thanks to the PgCert course team and my tutorial group peers for their insightful feedback throughout this journey. And a special thanks to my tutor, John O’Reilly, for his generous support and guidance throughout the development of this Action Research Project.