Decolonising the Curriculum: A Catalyst for Change, A Form of Protest or Just A Disruption?

• In Event: Decolonizing, critiquing, and reimagining higher education

Proposal

An increasingly globalised world with growing awareness of the (negative) impacts of human activity on the environment as well as society has resulted in what might be termed as an age of protest (Ortiz et al, 2022). For example, industrialisation and urbanisation have impacted global warming (Wang et al, 2020) as has the colonising of countries resulted in global social inequalities – on economies, institutions and structures. These inequalities all impact on the ability of humans to live fulfilling lives, reach their potential (Pandey et al, 2020) and thus solve big world problems.

Education has long been seen as a way to empower oneself as individuals, as communities, as societies, and as a tool for social mobility (Carstensen and Emmenegger, 2023). However, education is also a means of social engineering and reproducing societal inequalities (Wood et al, 2023) as evidenced for example, in degree awarding gaps between black and white student in UK universities (Ugiagbe-Green & Ernsting, 2022). Students in higher education have traditionally been activists protesting for social change and challenging status quos (Fúnez-Flores, 2023). One form of protest that has been taking place in the world of (higher) education is that of decolonising the curriculum where students are no longer content with western, Eurocentric forms of knowledge at the expense of other forms of knowledge (Begum & Saini, 2019). Beginning with the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa, decolonising the curriculum has entered the consciousness of universities and other education institutions across the world, further enhanced by the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd. This has served to bring the term from the confines of student protests to a wider understanding and recognition of the need to scrutinise curricula and how education itself can be a form of colonising (Pimblott, 2020).

The demands to decolonise the curriculum is a specific way in which to protest against historical and deeply entrenched structural inequalities that education has thus far perpetuated (Joseph, 2010). It can empower marginalised groups to be recognised as the producers and generators of knowledge on an equal footing. Decolonising the curriculum is also a way to provide a quality and global education for all by drawing on a range of perspectives and histories for an enriched education (La Grange, 2019).

As a result, many universities across the world are exploring ways of scrutinising their own curricula that responds to this protest to decolonise (Pimblott, 2020). Whether this change is stimulated by the genuine need to decolonise their curricula or whether this is a response to a more neoliberal internationalisation and marketisation of higher education (Le Grange et al, 2020) is not within the scope of this abstract, but the need to change is evident. However, just because universities themselves have recognised that this is essential, with many universities now moving in this direction, the journey towards decolonised curricula is not a simple one. This is not least because of the practical overhaul and deconstructing of existing structures that this requires, but also perhaps because not all personnel within universities may share this as a move forward.

This paper therefore, presents the efforts of one UK University as an example of an attempt to decolonise the curriculum and the challenges being faced, particularly when located within a largely homogenous white, middle-class demographic context in middle England where the natural demographic is not the driver for change (Winter, 2022). The presentation will present the initiatives, the challenges, the impact on those leading the efforts and the impact on students. These challenges included the need to convince university leadership to take the charge in leading the initiatives, the particular strain on identity holders to lead the initiatives as well as the varying levels of engagement of academics and professional staff. These are potentially fuelled by the time and resource needed to deconstruct existing curricula in a way that goes beyond the mere updating or diversifying reading lists (Abu Moghli & Kadiwal, 2021). In some ways, the challenges reflect the reticence of the arguments which view decolonising the curriculum as ‘tampering with’ or erasing history where the scale of changes needed are seen as simply unnecessary, disruptive or just overwhelming (Liyanage, 2020). To address some of these Shay (2016) emphasised that decolonising the curriculum requires a range of approaches, each with their own strategies in order to have the impact. However, for all those strategies to be effective for change, there is a need to for the full (and resourced) engagement of the relevant actors e.g. academics, professional staff and leadership as they are the purveyors of the changes.

The purpose of sharing the journey of a single university at a case study level is needed to better understand the specific nature of the challenges in order to address them. This is essential to move the narrative along from the principles of decolonising the curriculum to the practical how-tos in order to effect the changes needed.

The paper will thus end with a set of recommendations on how universities may approach decolonising the curriculum to be a catalyst for change as opposed to a fashionable buzz word (Abu Moghli & Kadiwal, 2021) or a tiresome disruption. The risk of not doing so are that the drive and motivation currently propelling the initiatives will dissipate before we can act and thereby once again, a perpetuating of the status quo.

Author

• Adeela ahmed Shafi, University of Gloucestershire