This paper aims to provide a tentative roadmap for ensuring that higher education policy makers and practitioners are apprised of what might be done to advance a concept of socially just assessment praxis. It extends current thinking around the notion of social justice approaches to assessment by further developing the conceptual framework proposed in McArthur's recent work (2016). It does so by extending understandings of how a socially just perspective might be realised. Drawing upon recent conceptual developments within both Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP), the paper proposes a typology for praxis and organisational change. Crucially, this typology focuses upon enhancing learning outcomes for all learners, but it is particularly concerned with enhancing educational experiences and learning outcomes for students that have been systematically marginalised by the normative procedural practices that have traditionally informed the nature of supposedly objective assessment.

This paper focuses upon the largely under-recognised, under-researched world of non-specialist teaching in Higher Education (HE). Three categories of nonspecialist teaching were devised from findings from a qualitative study aimed at exploring the reality of non-specialist teaching at two UK HE institutions. The implicit expectation of teaching as a non-specialist was perceived by staff as a consequence of broader, sector-wide changes in the role of the contemporary academic. Whilst clearly recognised as an implicit expectation of the lecturer role, non-specialist teaching was found to be a cause for tension in how lecturers perceived themselves as HE professionals and their academic identity. The need to recognise implications of non-specialist teaching in terms of support structures was a key conclusion and paramount in order to enable staff to manage tensions and conflicts arising from their increasingly fragmented and multifaceted work.

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