Beyond Race-Neutral Teaching and Curriculum

• In Event: It's about damn time: Protesting racism in global higher education through teaching, research, and practice!

Proposal

This presentation will center on the question, where is ‘race’ in the teaching of my discipline? Specifically, where is 'race' in the teaching 'canon'- meaning the curriculum/curricula, theories, research methodologies and pedagogy that we teach or that underpin our teaching? Where do I, as an educator, begin to introduce or advance analysis of race and racism in teaching in my discipline?

The presenters argue that higher education institutions are culturally constructed spaces and sites of power, privilege, and hierarchy masquerading as sites of meritocracy, objectivity, and neutrality (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008). They in particular challenge the notion of ‘race-neutrality’ in teaching and curriculum design used to camouflage or even deny the racialised nature of teaching and curricula in global higher education (Harbin et al., 2019; O’Neill & Miller, 2015). The presenters propound that teaching can be a powerful tool and site of protest against racism in global HE. Teaching must help students critique that mainstream curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment which draw upon majority discourses and their grand narrative that perpetuates racism (Davis & Livingstone, 2016; Fritzsche, 2021). Teaching can help to expose this obfuscation and help students understand that all texts are socially constructed, draw on the grand narrative, are not neutral, and that there are always gaps and negations that are oppressive and racist.

The presenters both will share examples from their own practice to showcase teaching as a tool of protest against racism. The first presenter will share his experiences of co-creating an online curriculum (‘Race' and Space’) that aimed to challenge the absence of ‘race’ and racism across a range of disciplines at The Bartlett, UCL Faculty of the Built Environment. The newly introduced online curriculum challenges and at the same time supports teachers to explore how issues of ‘race’ and racism manifest and also affect the built environment disciplines in their teaching (Zewolde et al., 2020). The second presenter will share her experience modifying a traditional graduate level introduction to research design class into a course titled “Unapologetically Black and Anti-Racist Research in Higher Education.” She will also discuss her experiences teaching this year-long course, which centered on extant scholarship written by Black scholars from across the global African Diaspora and research focused on anti-racism and Black higher education issues, as a means to socialize doctoral students on the decisions and processes associated with good social science research in higher education. The presenter will highlight the joys and challenges in providing intentional pedagogical structures to support doctoral students in their journeys towards becoming anti-racist scholars.

Authors

• Solomon Zewolde, University of East London, School of Education & Communities

• Chrystal A. George Mwangi, George Mason University