Reflective prompts, tips for practice, introductory resources, and case studies. Reflective prompts These four reflective prompts are drawn from a longer list that you can access on the Decolonising the Curriculum Hub SharePoint site. As you are reading, you may also find it useful to consider these prompts in the context of the climate and nature crises and the unequal way in which their impacts are experienced by people living in the Global South.Does my discipline privilege Euro-centric knowledge and research? Do I only draw on Western definitions of concepts that are central to my discipline? Is there scope for including knowledge from the Global Majority (i.e., people who are Black, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the Global South, and/or have been racialised as 'ethnic minorities')?Are we sure that what we do in the classroom allows everyone to participate equally and feel able to contribute to their and others’ learning? Are there opportunities to reflect on power imbalances between people with different relationships with colonisation due to their heritage?Do assessments focus exclusively on the replication of Euro-centric modes of knowledge representation? Are there opportunities for students to explore alternatives or draw on their own lived experience?Are there adequate resources and opportunities to support a diverse, global curriculum, and can all students access them? Tips for practice Efforts to decolonise the curriculum and introduce anti-racist practices are ongoing and complex and require moving beyond minor tweaks and changes. However, this should not be a barrier to attempting the work in the first place.These tips, summarised from a Times Higher Education article by Rowena Arshad, Professor of Multicultural and Anti-Racist Education at the University, may be helpful for anyone getting started:Begin by developing your own understanding of why this work is important. Rowena suggests reading Walter D Mignolo’s 2017 paper “Coloniality is far from over, and so must be decoloniality” as a starter.Examine your own subject discipline to see if there are areas of knowledge that have been left out as a result of colonialism. You might find it helpful to take a look at the RACE.ED teaching page to see what connections are already being made within disciplines.Make sure a range of voices and perspectives are represented and consider ways you might think about the curriculum differently to reflect and incorporate wider global and historical perspectives.Think about the diversity of our student groups and try to move beyond western frameworks. This could include incorporating the worldviews of indigenous communities, many of whom conceptualise their relationship with the natural world very differently. Introductory resources Executive Summary- Towards an Understanding of the BAME Undergraduate Degree Awarding Gap at the University of Edinburgh: This executive summary highlights that many Black and Minority Ethnic students do not feel like they belong. The summary concludes with recommendations for future actions.Decolonising the curriculum: a global conversation (3 mins): This short video explores how SOAS are approaching the work of decolonising their curriculum.Decolonising the curriculum (11 mins): Melz Owusu, Education Officer from the University of Leeds, talks about decolonising the curriculum.Recognising and Counteracting Racial Microaggressions (8 pages): An infographic resource to help you understand, recognise and counteract microaggressions.From inclusion to transformation to decolonisation: A Teaching Matters blog post by Professor Rowena Arshad who explains how the process of decolonising the curriculum begins with developing reflexive, inclusive and transformative pedagogical practices. Case studies Decolonising the Curriculum: A conversation with Dr Omolabake Fakunle"This entails the development of a university-wide holistic framework for decolonising the curriculum. The first step is to understand how decolonisation is currently conceived and embedded in the curriculum across all three Colleges. [...]In conversations with other people, including staff, the question arose: what about the students? Because students are the intended recipients of the decolonised curricula. So, I then devised a plan to do a roundtable discussion with a maximum of ten students. Due to connections with Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program, I asked Sharon and Megan if they could refer students. We had done a Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program in-person [workshop] during Black History Month. I felt that a similar in-person roundtable would work perfectly for intimate conversations."Teaching approaches for decolonising and diversifying the curriculum"The presentation, delivered by Dr Sílvia Pérez-Espona, focused on teaching practices that she has implemented to provide diverse lecture content, activities and assessment, in particular focusing on increasing representation of audio-visual material and research in courses from two collectives: women, and people from different ethnic backgrounds and countries of origin. Finding this type of audio-visual material is still challenging due to the scarce portrayal of non-white people, and to a lesser extent women, leading wildlife-related research or conservation activities rather than assisting such activities. Therefore, Sílvia advocates the need to support projects focusing on the compilation of such audio-visual material for teaching purposes."From inclusion to transformation to decolonisation"An inclusive approach is not necessarily one that is anti-discriminatory and transformative. In my area of race equality, a transformative approach would be to move from a position of ‘being’ non-racist to a space of ‘doing’ by being anti-racist. Therefore, I would seek to adopt an anti-racist approach which I have defined as: one that understands ‘race’ to be a social construction, challenges the values, structures and behaviours that perpetuate systemic racism and other forms of societal oppression.An anti-racist approach is one that acknowledges racism is real and opens up spaces for talking about racism and how racism at a personal, cultural and institutional level might manifest itself in contemporary contexts. This approach acknowledges that racism is learnt and can be unlearnt." This article was published on 2024-11-08
