Pedagogy 2025

Abstract

This presentation draws on over a decade of one-to-one support with neurodivergent students in UK higher education, exploring how effective pedagogy often emerges not from institutional accommodations or licensed software, but from relational trust, emotional safety, and radically adaptive strategies. Based on 6,000+ hours of DSA-funded mentoring and study skills support, I share a grounded practice informed by trauma-awareness, lived experience, and co-designed learning. Strategies include live proofreading, visual time-mapping, Socratic dialogue, AI-assisted co-writing, meditation, and mini-teaching, all tailored in real time to student needs. Rather than offering a single “method,” the session invites educators to consider inclusive pedagogy as a human process: dynamic, collaborative, and deeply shaped by trust. Many of these strategies were borrowed from dyslexia CPD or co-developed with students themselves – a bottom-up knowledge base often overlooked in official discourse. I also reflect critically on the wider DSA system: its visionary premise, but also its clunky tech provision and inaccessible application process. This paper argues that the future of inclusive teaching lies not in expensive interventions or over-engineered learning analytics, but in low-cost, high-trust environments where students feel seen, believed, and engaged as partners. In this context, “support” becomes less about fixing deficits and more about co-discovering strengths – for both student and mentor.