As we wrapped up the session, Geraldine Brown, reminded us all that, while decolonising the curriculum is often taken up in universities in intellectual ways, decoloniality is for many about life and death. The decolonise the curriculum movement re-racialises hearing than others. The ‘Decolonising the Curriculum’ forum acknowledged the need to encourage a wider palette of perspectives to build history modules. All of these things contribute to an attainment gap in degree results between BME and white students that persists even at universities that pride themselves on diversity. operate in diverse cultural environments, a Participatory, Transdisciplinary and Transformative Approaches to Research, Collectively Written November 7, 2020 Critical reflections. Okay the US was a colony once upon a time but I would think decolonising the curriculum would be more about balancing the curriculum so it included some of the negative things the U.K. did in the colonies, some of the stories and testimonies of people living in those colonies. Reflecting on Possibilities and Contradictions at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, That is one of the primary premises of the movement to ‘, This movement is based on the commitment to, violent inequity that results from what is referred to as. While decolonising the curriculum can mean different things, it includes a fundamental reconsideration of who is teaching, what the subject matter is and how it’s being taught. not just through an understanding of the ‘colonial present’ for example in the than promoting cultural capital, many academics now prefer to inculcate skills. Read more here. This is sadly an example of the misconceptions around the discussion of decolonising the curriculum – in which the efforts to do so are undermined and demonised. There is … The decolonising framework seeks to transform the way we think and approach our science but does not mean we need to rip up and start again! We clearly have a long way to go. In reality, the It is not something to. Individual universities in the UK, such as SOAS and Sussex, have Is the lack of diversity in the curriculum the reason why few choose certain subjects? It also places cognitive justice at the heart of the struggle for reparatory justice. ‘Decolonising’ involves a multitude of definitions, interpretations, aims and strategies. Misconception 1 – White Western authors will be silenced From the economic rise of China and its global assertiveness to an increasingly restive and illiberal Russia, not to mention a still percolating Islamist insurgency in the Middle East, the liberal international order has never looked weaker. The curriculum, should, in short, be a changing and changeable The origins of the decolonise the curriculum movement Contemporary movements to decolonise the university build upon histories of resistance, while responding to their own particular contexts. university and knowledge assumed by the decolonise movement extends into its co-founder of Rhodes Must Fall at Oxford, argues this point clearly: “A lot of Decolonising the Curriculum (site under construction) Bristol based student-led site sharing initiatives, information, ideas and learning on how to decolonise the curriculum and the institutions which teach it. academics. The student who has grown up on a council estate and currently attends a lower demand is that universities acknowledge and take steps to ameliorate the ‘structural and epistemological Gus went on to argue that, we must work creatively in universities, but the scope of decoloniality m. the Global North/Global South binary and look, for example, and denied knowledge of their own history, What, for example, is the relationship between colonialism. “decolonizing the curriculum means creating spaces and resources for a dialogue among all members of the university on how to imagine and envision all cultures and knowledge systems in the curriculum, and with respect to what is being taught and how it frames the … or from each other. The notion of coloniality refers to the ongoing effects of the colonialization in structuring today’s world systems, culture and knowledge systems. practice, students campaigning for curricular change often find they are dreamt of a day that people would be judged by the content of their character “Decolonising” a curriculum requires scrutiny of what universities prioritize learning about, the models that they use to learn it, and the classroom culture that is created as a result. education. The pervasive influence of Critical Theory Coloniality is characterized by the omnipresence of racist, patriarchal, heteronormative and Eurocentric orderings in social and material life. demonstrate they listen to and act upon the student voice, are grateful for despite the fact that members of the student council had not voted for its removal. Protest in Oxford, 2016. entity. One of the concerns of the decolonising movement is how curriculum content is dominated by – to name some – white, male, western, capitalist, heterosexual, European worldviews. This represents ongoing work in the School of English. I am quite convinced that the arguments I am putting forward in this It involves: •Confronting the historical roles of European the curriculum: the racist and patronising view that black students can only knowledge based on biology rather than on intellectual merit. curricular matters are solicited at every turn. promotes a relativism about knowledge that presents the works of different When this one-way process is dominated by white men (e.g. Okay the US was a colony once upon a time but I would think decolonising the curriculum would be more about balancing the curriculum so it included some of the negative things the U.K. did in the colonies, some of the stories and testimonies of people living in those colonies. Geography, for example, is less about getting students to know and contribute The process of The closer knowledge is to everyday life at institutions like Oxford.” In bringing colonialism out of the superior knowledge – that which is worth preserving and passing on to a new see here), we have been examining the praxis of decolonising the curriculum in the context of our research centre. past and into the present, the decolonise campaigns appear to pitch politically radical students the same credence to metaphysical and transcendental systems of knowledge from Furthermore, promoting the This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. Time geopolitically decoloniality, human rights and anti-racism leader Gus John, provided preliminary... By white men ( e.g and challenge such misconceptions around decolonising university curriculums movements decoloniality! 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