Decolonizing University Teaching and Learning

An Entry Model for Grappling with Complexities

D. Tran

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350160033
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Educación superior

Decolonizing University Teaching and Learning considers apprehensions around decolonizing and offers a summary of key arguments within critical discussion around its meaning and value through engagement with a growing body of literature. The contextually based and complex discussions concerning decolonization means one cannot be guided through the process in a particular way. Therefore, the text is not intended to be read as a handbook for decolonizing teaching and learning, nor is it an anthropologically oriented text. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the book highlights the benefits of decolonizing teaching and learning for all students and staff. This book offers up the TRAAC model as an entry point for challenging conversations. By bringing together questions raised within existing scholarly discussions, the TRAAC model provides prompts to instigate deeper reflections around decolonizing by way of supporting colleagues to start a productive dialogue. Through these critically reflective and reflexive conversations, action-oriented discussions can simultaneously take place. The value of this book lies in the contributions from authors based across a number of universities and disciplines. Reflecting on personal experiences, staff and student relationships, subject specific challenges, and wider issues within HE, the contributions are grounded in the employment of the TRAAC model as a mode of entry into discussing particular issues around decolonizing teaching and learning.

1

What Does It Mean to Decolonize Teaching and Learning?

This chapter begins with an overview of the recent renewed interest in decolonizing within the higher education (HE) sector globally and particularly within the United Kingdom. It then moves on to an examination of the term and its associated meanings. The increasing use of the word “decolonizing” to cover a range of areas and activities means its detail can sometimes be lost or unappreciated. The chapter puts forth an understanding of decolonization as an extension of discussions concerning inclusivity, as a process which confronts issues concerning colonial manifestations in current institutional structures, curriculum, and pedagogy. Focus then turns to the relationship between race and education before outlining the way critical race theory can be used as a lens which connects issues that are central to the critical discussion of decolonizing teaching and learning.

The Recent Rise of Decolonizing Curricula: Rhodes Must Fall

The current university learning environment is one with strong ties to a colonial history. “University as we understand it today can be traced to a western genealogy” (Icaza and Vázquez 2018: 111). Calls to decolonize teaching and learning interrogate the extent to which universities in their current state are able to offer a learning environment that can be effectively engaged with by everyone. The tension between coloniality (Quijano 2000) and a growing push toward thoughtful change across all sections and layers of HE is captured in the campaigns and discussions on decolonizing teaching and learning.

South Africa has been at the forefront of decolonizing university campaigns. In March 2015 at the University of Cape Town (UCT) Activist Chumani Maxwele threw excrement on to the campus statue of Cecil Rhodes, a nineteenth-century imperialist. A short article for South African History Online (2015) reports, “Maxwele’s protest, staged as a political performance, was in response to the lack of attention given to the symbols on campus that are physical reminders of White supremacy and Black subjugation and oppression that is rooted in South Africa.” Rhodes’s (1877) belief in a racial hierarchy, once confessing he thought “[the British] are the finest race in the world,” meant that the statue was, for many, a constant reminder of past traumas and continuing racial inequalities in South Africa that go back further than apartheid. An interview with a senior researcher at UCT in 2018 made note of how “Rhodes’ colonial architectural ideals are deeply embedded in the education system. Eventually, these conditions fuelled the students’ demands for decolonized curricula and a transformed institutional culture” (Matebeni 2018).

Maxwele’s demonstration quickly grew into a larger student protest with the #RhodesMustFall campaign, eventually leading to Rhodes’s statue being dismantled a month later. Universities across South Africa could not ignore the growing calls for greater change toward a more equal and accessible education. Attention on student demonstrations was further powered by the #FeesMustFall protests (Fihlani 2019). Debates addressing the ongoing colonial legacies within universities have been widespread, with decolonizing efforts taking place in Canada, Australia, and America, to name some examples. Some of the action by students and faculty in America has led to the renaming of university buildings (Brooks 2017; Namakkal 2015; Simpson 2017). The same has happened at the University of Cape Town (Patel 2019).

Inspired by events at UCT, student activists at the University of Oxford in the UK led their own Rhodes Must Fall campaign, though the latter did not end with the removal of Rhodes’s statue (Rawlinson 2016). There have been a number of other university campaigns that have also focused on addressing racial and educational inequalities. University College London (UCL) led the “Why Is My Curriculum White?” (WIMCW) campaign and produced a video in 2014 where students discuss their views on colonial legacies, whiteness, and decolonizing universities. The Students Union also led a “Decolonise UCL” (2017) campaign. The WIMCW campaign steered other UK universities to question their institutional structures and the heavy reliance on Western knowledge in course content and raise further questions about how to engage in the decolonizing process.

Examples of other institutions grappling with these issues include the Leeds University Union “Why Is My Curriculum White?” campaign (2015) and the Warwick Open Education Series (2015). The University of Sussex Students’ Union (2019) “Decolonize Sussex” campaign “aims to raise awareness of and challenge the complex and varied legacies of racism, imperialism and colonialism within all spheres of [the] university.” Keele University (2019) set up a decolonizing curriculum network and published a manifesto online, and De Montfort University launched Decolonising DMU in November 2019. The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) set up a Decolonizing SOAS working group and published a decolonizing curriculum toolkit online (2018). Work on race equality at the University of the Arts London (UAL) has heavily stemmed from long-standing efforts by Shades of Noir and student voices. “In 2009 Shades of Noir (SoN) was created by Aisha Richards. SoN is an independent program that supports 1. Curriculum design, 2. Pedagogies of social justice through representation, 3. Cultural currency, 4. Accessible knowledge” (Shades of Noir 2020). With an influential social media campaign UAL SO WHITE (2015), “‘UAL so White’ won the best national campaign of the year at NUS Black Students conference 2016” (Tajudeen 2016). In recent years at UAL a Decolonising the Arts Curriculum Zine (2018) and a Decolonising the Arts Institute (2020) have been launched. Such campaigns and sites across these universities are not the products of decolonized institutions but are markers of institutions engaged in the ongoing process of decolonizing.

Student-led campaigns draw attention to more than just statues on campus. They underline student dissatisfaction with the university curriculum, teaching, and learning environment. Efforts to decolonize teaching and learning consider how these areas and others can be reviewed to help enhance the university environment into one that is shaped by the needs and voices of the present rather than the past. Critical discussion on the hierarchy of what is studied and how within HE has long been debated, but the recent succession of student-led campaigns around decolonizing has meant that HE institutions must thoughtfully respond to these concerns by implementing necessary changes across all areas of the institution, or risk failing the lifeblood of the sector, the students themselves.

The work that has been carried out by universities across the country so far is evidence of the growing interest in decolonizing, an acknowledgment of continued inequalities that run deep within an institution and an effort to address these. However, in spite of the recognized campaigns and work that has been carried out, the impact these have had to change core practices and the culture of an institution has been limited. Decolonizing is a continuing process for long-lasting change, and current work reflects the early stage the sector is currently in regarding the decolonizing journey. Retaining this commitment and developing the resource and capacity for decolonizing work is vital if significant change is to occur.

Understanding Decolonizing Teaching and Learning

It is difficult to outline what decolonizing university teaching and learning means in one definition as it covers various intersecting issues and topics such as history, politics, culture, and, of course, education. But for Tuck and Yang (2012: 1), applying the term “decolonization” to an educational setting is problematized, “The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to ‘decolonize our schools,’ or use ‘decolonizing methods,’ or, ‘decolonize student thinking,’ turns decolonization into a metaphor.” It is a subject rooted in a number of interrelated topics, all of which should be treated sensitively.

Behari-Leak et al. (2017) also comment on the complexity of the term: “People want a precise definition. But it’s not that simple. [. . .] An understanding of the process of ‘decolonisation’ lies more in its detail than its definition.” Anjana Ragavan, taking part in a video talk on “Decolonising Higher Education,” stresses the role which context plays in discussions of decolonizing, “the work that decoloniality is means that it has to be diversely understood and diversely framed depending on the context you are working with” (Abdi 2020: seventeenth minute). As Pirbhai-Illich, Pete, and Martin (2017: 4) appreciate, “we recognise that all attempts to know, and to cocreate new knowledge, are socially situated—as individuals our standpoints will necessarily limit what can be known and what we are permitted to know. It is through solidarity and critical intercultural dialogue that we are able to begin to imagine human relations differently.”

In “Decolonizing the University,” Gebrial (2018: 20) notes, “decolonization is about recognising the roots of contemporary racism in the multiple material, political, social and cultural processes of colonialism.” Decolonizing teaching and learning involves reviewing the ways in which the past manifests itself in the present through the problematic structures being upheld. These need to be fully recognized before purposeful steps can be taken to move forward. This process involves questioning power dynamics, hegemonic narratives, and hierarchies that can impact on levels of belonging. Pete (2018: 174) states, “decolonization begins with naming colonial structures then moving to reframe, remake and reform them.” Le Grange (2016: 6) speaks of decolonization as “decentring [Western knowledge] or perhaps deterritorialising it.” In the setting of university classrooms, these practical learning spaces are where colonial structures can be echoed or transformed. For Le Grange, “The decolonised curriculum is based on the 4Rs central to an emergent Indigenous paradigm [. . .] relational accountability, respectful representation, reciprocal appropriation, and rights and regulation” (2016: 9).

For Fomunyam (2017: 6797), decolonization is a move “away from the political or traditional notion of decolonising which means the process of relinquishing control of a territory by the coloniser to the colonised, to the more rigorous intricacy of shedding away colonial legacies from the education system be it material or ideological.” Expectations, goals, and the process to achieve the decolonizing agenda are further complicated by the origins of the institution itself. Abdi (2020: sixth minute) raises the question, “to what extent can we actually do that work [decolonizing in practice] within systems and within organisations that are not designed to do that work?” There is also the argument that the work to decolonize teaching and learning is only relevant to a few subject areas such as literature and history. But decolonizing considers aspects of teaching and learning that are central to all subject areas including teaching approaches, assessment, content, and the student learning experience.

The difficulty of discussing traumatic histories, ongoing legacies of the past, and hesitations toward efforts to engage in decolonizing teaching and learning has led to misunderstandings of and tensions around what decolonizing means and entails. Mgqwashu (2016), speaking of the South African context, notes the perspective “that decolonization equals an attack on white academics by black academics [. . .] requires unsettling.” While emphasizing how the country’s history created racial divisions that have become embedded in education, Mgqwashu (2016) goes on to explain that “Decolonization is not a project over which one racial group can claim sole custodianship.” While acts associated with colonization are undertakings of power and dominance, the process of decolonization is not aimed at substituting one type of control with another. It involves opening up new ways of seeing, examining, and producing knowledge which challenges the privileging of Western-centrism that currently pervades HE.

Misunderstandings of the decolonizing agenda can lead to miscommunication, which can lead to conversations breaking down at the earliest of stages. Rather than focusing on explaining what decolonizing involves through a short definition, it is helpful to acknowledge its evolving nature. There is no defined end point for decolonizing as it is not fixed in nature. Decolonizing is an evolving process and current understandings of the term will likely develop and change over time too. The process of grappling with decolonizing does not begin with trying to forcefully pin it down into a singular mode of understanding. To respond to calls of decolonizing teaching and learning is to listen, reflect, explore, and review.

Ferguson et al. (2019: 3–4) note the following regarding decolonizi ng learning, “it’s about considering multiple perspectives and making space to think carefully about what we value. Decolonizing learning helps us to recognize, understand, and challenge the ways in which our world is shaped by colonialism. It also prompts us to examine our professional practices.” This may lead to discomfort and tension, but such feelings should be recognized as necessary steps toward positive change. The process of decolonizing may create internal conflict as well as external conflicting viewpoints. But as hooks stresses (Brosi and hooks 2012: 76), “The truth is that you cannot build community without conflict.” “Decolonizing Learning opens up the most exciting, and the most unsettling, possibilities. This is a pedagogy that could produce radical changes in education, leading to learning that not only supports and develops communities but is also strongly rooted within them” (Ferguson et al. 2019: 7).

The fruition of these possibilities requires honest reflection and a commitment to being open to views and positions that may disorientate one’s own. Lorde (1984: 3) emphasizes the need for “learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” Although Lorde’s statement is here made in reference to the need for acknowledgment of differences among women when discussing feminist theory and the requirement for a greater incorporation of voices from poor women, Black and third world women, and lesbians, the points raised can also be applied to the process of decolonizing teaching and learning. hooks (2003: 35) comments that “through the cultivation of awareness, through the decolonization of our minds, we have the tools to break with the dominator model of human social engagement and the will to imagine new and different ways that people might come together.”

As Shay (2016) notes, “One of the concerns of the decolonizing movement, is how curriculum content is dominated by—to name some—white, male, western, capitalist, heterosexual, European worldviews. This means the content under-represents and undervalues the perspectives, experiences, epistemologies of those who do not fit into th...