A critical evaluation of the co-produced online pre-arrival course for international student nurses through a social justice lens.

Abstract

As international student mobility continues to expand within UK higher education, international nursing students face complex transitions shaped not only by cross-cultural movement but also by the demands of academic socialisation into unfamiliar higher education systems. In response, a co-produced online pre-arrival course was developed with international student partners to support this transition. This paper presents a reflexive, theory-informed critical inquiry into the practice of co-production, rather than solely the course content, using Nancy Fraser's three dimensions of social justice-redistribution, recognition and representation. The analysis generates three key conceptual insights. First, co-production partially redistributes informational resources but remains constrained by institutional power structures that limit epistemic and decision-making equity. Second, while student narratives enhance recognition, they risk reinforcing assimilationist norms when positioned as testimonial rather than epistemic contributions. Third, co-production often operates as bounded representation, where student participation is enabled but not fully extended to governance and evaluation. The paper argues that co-production must be understood not as an inherently decolonising practice, but as a contested praxis requiring deliberate structural, epistemic, and power-related shifts. It offers a transferable framework for global nursing education to navigate tensions between professional standardisation and social justice agendas, and proposes principles for embedding genuinely transformative coproduced curriculum design.