Confronting the complexities of decolonising curricula and pedagogy in higher education

ABSTRACT

Recent critiques voiced by students in both the Global South and North have turned attention to the ways in which higher education practices have been informed by, and continue to perpetuate, a series of assumptions that favour particular epistemological perspectives. Across the world, students have criticised universities for the content of their curricula, institutional cultures, and pedagogic practices that perpetuate the attainment gap and exclusion. In response, curricula and pedagogic change is being debated and promoted on campuses. This introductory article lays the theoretical groundwork for a volume that brings decolonial theory into concrete engagement with the structural, cultural, institutional, relational, and personal logics of curricula and pedagogic practice. The article examines the relationship between decolonisation as a theoretical concept, and the practices of decoloniality unfolding in pedagogical practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogy
• higher education
• curriculum
• decolonisation
• decoloniality

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shannon Morreira

Shannon Morreira is an anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Education Development Unit at the University of Cape Town. Her research work centres on the anthropology of knowledge, including de/coloniality; migration; human rights; spatial legacies; legal anthropology; education; and the politics and geographies of postcolonial knowledge production.

Kathy Luckett

Kathy Luckett is Director of the Humanities Education Development Unit, Professor in the Centre for Higher Education Development and associate staff member of the Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town. She teaches and supervises on the School of Education’s Masters in Higher Education Studies and in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests are: higher education policy around equity, access and language; sociology of knowledge and curriculum studies with a focus on the Humanities, Africana, decolonial and postcolonial studies and research methods that apply social realism to educational evaluation.

Siseko H. Kumalo

Siseko H. Kumalo is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Decolonising Disciplines, a journal dedicated to decolonising disciplinary knowledge across faculties in higher education. His research covers epistemic justice, pedagogies of mutual (in)fallibility, feminist and queer theory, violence, Education for Sustainable Development and higher education transformation. His area of focus is education decolonisation in South Africa and he has subsequently authored a number of papers investigating the topic. He has published with Education as Change, Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL) and in the Theoria. He is a Mandela Rhodes Scholar (2017).

Manjeet Ramgotra

Manjeet Ramgotra is a lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS University London. Her research focuses on both European and postcolonial understandings of republicanism and decolonising the curriculum. Her articles appear in Millennium, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, and The Good Society. Currently she is co-editing a new political theory textbook called Reconsidering Political Thinkers.