Decolonizing the curriculum: philosophical perspectives—an introduction

Abstract

This Special Issue is focused on supporting the transformation of education called for in the decolonizing the curriculum movement by advancing discourse on the diverse philosophical ideas, concepts, and theories that can undergird practical efforts to decolonize curricula across education sectors. The special issue brings together voices from a range of backgrounds, who draw from a variety of theoretical positions within and beyond philosophies of education. The authors offer diverse forms of scholarly contributions, including philosophical articles, practice-focused reflections, and a reflection on ‘education’ in the public sphere. In this introduction, we consider the relevance of educational-philosophical thinking to the pressing issue of decolonizing the curriculum. The volume is divided into two parts, with the first covering issues of university and postcompulsory education, and the second discussing issues related to schools. We discuss three interconnected themes that permeate both sections: (i) whose knowledge and whose narratives are embodied in curricula? (ii) who is the curriculum for? Who is the learner? What does it mean to be human? (iii) what implications does decolonizing the curriculum have for pedagogy? With these themes, we indicate some of the ways that the articles contribute to a critical extension of the meaning of education itself.

What does it mean to decolonize the curriculum? This special issue brings together voices from a range of backgrounds, who draw from a variety of theoretical positions within and beyond philosophies of education. The authors offer diverse forms of scholarly contributions, including philosophical articles, practice-focused reflections, and a reflection on ‘education’ in the public sphere. Taken together, the articles in this volume show the relevance of educational-philosophical thinking to the pressing issue of decolonizing the curriculum. These articles also extend understandings of the nature of philosophy of education, of whose voices should be included in defining it, and of what approaches and types of scholarship should be included under the name ‘philosophy of education’. In doing so, the volume takes a significant step towards decolonizing the discipline of philosophy of education itself.

The decolonizing the curriculum movement recognizes that the content of what is taught is inherently a matter of value and carries assumptions that frame epistemological and ethical concerns and values. What is apparent is that there is a complex and problematic web of factors—including racism, white supremacy, the legacy of empire, hegemony and patriarchy—impacting on educational theory, practice, and policy today. In light of this, there is a renewed need for philosophical and theoretical consideration of the principles, values, and assumptions underlying choices around how curriculum is conceptualized, designed, and implemented.

Educators are called upon to find ways to support the next generation, recognizing that students today—children, youth, and adults alike—are confronted in their daily lives with the damage caused by previous generations to people of colour and other minoritized groups, to cultures, languages, lands and environments, and relationships between communities. The next generation must be prepared to navigate these conditions, not only for the sake of their own survival, but so that future generations might live in a better world. Supporting the next generation in this endeavour gets to the heart of the purpose of democratic education. This involves curricula that enable learners’ ‘reflective critique’ of present problems by fostering individual and collective imagination of other possibilities (Greene 1995: 100). Fostering such imagination is fundamentally related to the project of decolonizing the curriculum, which as Foluke Adebisi states, is intimately connected to the bringing about of ‘worlds otherwise, worlds full of hope, where the devastation that we have visited upon the world and upon each other is disrupted and can cease’ (Adebisi 2021: 32:49–33:00).

This special issue centres the idea that philosophies of education are vital for the development of just and equitable futures of education. Yet, philosophies of education can only aid this development if they are informed by ideas built from a rich and diverse set of cultural ways of knowing and theorizing. This volume takes an important step towards this goal. Specifically, the focus of the volume is on supporting the transformation of education called for in the decolonizing the curriculum movement by advancing discourse on the diverse philosophical ideas, concepts, and theories that can undergird practical efforts to decolonize curricula across education sectors.

The volume arose from an international speaker series, Decolonising the Curriculum in Higher Education, held online during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2021, which we (the editors) organized and which was supported by the University of Edinburgh Moray House School of Education and Sport and the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain.¹ The series featured international experts providing philosophical insight into the meaning of decolonizing curricula, and had over 500 participants from around the world, including scholars, teachers, students, policymakers, and members of the public. The talks and discussions supported collaborative reflection on the topic and brought into focus the strong interest from international educational communities in theories and ideas that could support thoroughgoing—rather than superficial or piecemeal—practical changes across educational settings. In this vein, for this volume, we have broadened the scope of the work from the seminar series, by inviting additional authors deeply engaged with the topic, as well as by issuing a call for papers directed at school teachers and teacher educators interested or experienced in decolonizing school curricula.

The volume was developed in the context of growing public concerns around racism, racial harassment, social justice, and the need for equity, underscored by the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the subsequent global outcry for justice through protests against racism connected to Black Lives Matter movements. Alongside this, there was growing awareness that COVID-19 was having a disproportionate impact on people of colour. On university campuses, there was a rise in racial discrimination and violence against BAME² and BIPOC² students and colleagues. These acts of racial violence became increasingly acknowledged in the sector as part of long-standing systemic and institutional racism.

In this context, the groundswell of discussion around decolonizing curricula came at the level of student movements and UK policy alike. Supporting the push to decolonize, student groups drafted manifestos, policy bodies established ‘toolkits’ for programme leaders and course teachers, university departments set up working groups to organize change, and universities set out to examine and reconcile their histories with regard to slavery, empire, and racial injustice (e.g. Decolonising SOAS Working Group 2018; Gokay and Panter 2018; Nicholson 2021; Anti-racist Curriculum Project Working Group 2021; Laville et al. 2023). While these developments can be seen as situated in a longer history of resistances to the colonial heritage of education, this more recent increased focus on decolonizing the curriculum in universities can be traced to the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and its 2015 ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign. In ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ students demanded that the statue of Cecil Rhodes—on central display—be taken down, on the grounds that it had no place in the new South African context. With regard to the meaning of this, Cameroonian historian and political theorist, Achille Mbembe signals where attention should, and should not, be focused when he states:

to bring Rhodes’ statue down is far from erasing history and nobody should be asking us to be eternally indebted to Rhodes for having ‘donated’ his money and for having bequeathed ‘his’ land to the University. If anything, we should be asking: how did he acquire the land in the first instance? (Mbembe 2015: 3)

Mbembe’s words help situate the removal of the Rhodes statue as an act of decolonizing the university curriculum that signalled a principled refusal to accept the influence of Rhodes’ racist ideas on notions of what university education is and for whom it is designed.

‘Rhodes Must Fall’ in Cape Town was soon followed in the UK by the ‘Rhodes Must Fall Oxford’ campaign, which in turn influenced other university movements. Subsequent calls to remove statues of prominent people linked to the slave trade have proliferated and publications have posed such questions as, ‘Why is my curriculum white?’ (Peters 2015; Waghid 2017). These developments have impacted on disciplinary discourses in university education, both in humanities and STEM subjects, with disciplines increasingly seeing as an imperative the task of ‘decolonizing’ their curricula (e.g. Lawson et al. 2023). In addition, this movement, which began in the university sector has spread to the primary and secondary phases of compulsory schooling, where it now gives a new impetus to the challenge to teachers, teacher educators, school leaders, and policy makers to consider the colonial legacy and the corresponding history of racism that has shaped school curricula (e.g. Moncrieffe 2020; Education Scotland 2021; Johnson and Mouthaan 2021; Kebede 2022). Given these developments, we have designed the volume to address questions of decolonizing curricula across educational sectors.

Themes across the volume

The volume is divided into two parts, with the first covering issues of university and postcompulsory education, and the second discussing issues related to schools. As an initial introduction to the articles in the volume, we point to three interconnected themes that permeate both sections. These themes indicate some of the ways that the articles contribute to a critical extension of the meaning of education itself.

Whose knowledge and whose narratives are embodied in curricula?

Across the articles, there is a recognized need to interrogate the content of what is taught and the assumptions which frame the ideas of knowledge and knowledge creation passed on to students. Issues of the interconnectedness between knowledge, language, and culture are examined through diverse philosophical lenses. With reference to a range of different disciplines, and to contexts of both the Global North and Global South, authors discuss how, in educational institutions today, curricular choices around what can and should be taught, and what language should be used to communicate knowledge, can be seen as still largely influenced by the history of colonial power. Further, authors offer ways of thinking about these issues that can support the forging of new pathways for the flourishing of diverse knowledges and ways of knowing.

Who is the curriculum for? Who is the learner? What does it mean to be human?

Decolonizing the curriculum is wrapped up with a call to rehumanize education for minoritized groups who have been subject to educational systems, institutions, and practices that are undergirded by what Freire calls a ‘dehumanizing ideology’. As Freire explains, a dehumanizing ideology denies certain individuals or groups opportunities to see themselves as ‘reflective, active beings, as creators and transformers of the world’ (Freire 1985a, 1985b: 115). Interrogating colonized notions of what it means to be human, and how racialized notions of the human have been entangled with racialized demarcations of who is educable is thus viewed here as a necessary precondition for decolonizing the curriculum.

Running through the volume, readers will find various counters to deficit views of minoritized learners (Valencia 2010). These critiques open up avenues for delinking (Mignolo 2007) the notion of educability from its colonialist determined meanings. Readers will also find authors underscoring, in different ways, the idea that all learners must be respected as having inherent dignity and worth as human beings. This idea is indispensable if substantive change in education is to occur.

What implications does decolonizing the curriculum have for pedagogy?

In the call to rethink the epistemologies that shape curriculum and to radically disturb ontological assumptions about minoritized learners’ educability, there is growing awareness that the transmissive, ‘banking’ model of education, as Freire calls it, must be subverted in schools and universities today (Freire 1985a, 1985b). The lasting significance of Freire’s early critique of the banking model can be understood in light of the distinction between ‘affirmative’ and ‘non-affirmative’ forms of teaching (English 2023). In banking education, teaching is ‘affirmative’; it promotes learners’ passive in-take and regurgitation of pre-packaged knowledge and ready-made problems, in a way that instils in learners that their job is to affirm the established order of things. Instead, what is called for are non-affirmative forms of teaching that value what learners bring to the educational situation as essential for developing their capacities to critically, reflectively and equitably participate in discussions of how societal futures should be shaped.

Various articles in this volume provide insight into how decolonizing the curriculum cannot occur without the effort to decolonize pedagogy. The important role of the teacher is brought into sharp relief. Teachers play a critical role in altering long-standing dehumanizing practices, often dictated through curriculum and curriculum implementation guidelines that reify what counts as ‘learning’. Such, practices reduce what learners should do or say in the classroom, in ways that force conformity to a standardized, Western model of knowledge, learning, and the human. Authors point to how the needed decolonization of teaching involves recognizing and transforming how power plays out in classroom learning and in society at large. They signal that part of the work of teachers requires the pedagogical responsibility to build educational relationships between teachers and students, and students with one another. These entail relationships wherein students are given opportunities to ‘see themselves in the curriculum’, including opportunities to draw on their own experiences, narratives, and languages, and to ‘have a view onto a broader world’ (Gutierrez 2012).

An overview of the articles

Part I decolonizing the curriculum in higher education

Part I of the special issue begins with an article by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. In ‘The epistemologies of the South and the future of the university’ Santos calls for cognitive justice, a demand for recognition of knowledges which have been delegitimatized in the academy. He reveals how present cognitive injustice is linked to the crises which the world currently suffers through ignoring epistemic diversity. Santos presses us to consider whether the new era ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic will affirm a dystopian future or whether indeed it will inspire an alternative, more equitable model of civilization. He proposes that the latter gives the university an important role as a ‘privileged site for the production of independent, critical, and plural knowledge’ that could help humanity. However, Santos argues that the university must first undergo deep-seated change, which involves a challenging, but possible, shift from monocultures to ecologies.

In ‘Decolonization in South African universities: storytelling as subversion and reclamation’, Nuraan Davids argues that a narrow focus on the content of the curriculum will not suffice for delegitimizing coloniality. Rather, what is needed, she underscores, is a reckoning with epistemic harm to individuals through recognition of their lived experiences and stories. Her analysis of the context of these harms reveals why decolonization has faltered in South African higher education. Drawing on her own work with students, she details what it means in practice to centre students’ stories as a path towards decolonization, in which students ‘“black” and “white”’ can ‘reconceive the way they engage with each other’ and can learn from one another.

George J Sefa Dei and Alessia Cacciavillani, in their article, ‘Actualizing decolonization: a case for anti-colonizing and indigenizing the curriculum’, point out that decolonizing education systems is part of broader social struggles. They call for education that is transformative, in which educators express solidarity with their students. They focus on the terms ‘decolonization’, ‘anti-colonization’ and ‘Indigenization’, to argue for resistance against the ‘domestication of the decolonial movement’. They draw on the Canadian context to illustrate their ideas. In closing, they put forward the notion of ‘educational decolonization’, which involves creating learning environments that centre Indigenous knowledges and perspectives.

In ‘Decolonizing higher education: the university in the new age of Empire’, Penny Enslin and Nicki Hedge argue that ‘new forms of Empire’ rooted in neoliberalism and capitalism, have been created in the university which rely on a mode of domination and competition. The authors maintain that unless attention is paid to the institutional structures and processes which control the university, only superficial changes will be made. They point to the need to widen the focus of current debates beyond the curriculum in order to consider the structures of Empire still existing in higher education.

Siseko H. Kumalo discusses the ‘Pedagogic obligations toward a decolonial and contextually responsive approach to teaching philosophy in South Africa’. In this ‘pedagogic autocritique’, Kumalo analyses his own situatedness as a university lecturer teaching a third-year philosophy course online during the COVID-19 pandemic in a context of deep-seated inequalities. The course focused on the topic of decoloniality, attending especially to analysis of epistemic hierarchies and the associated ideas of who counts as a valid knower. Kumalo argues that university educators, specifically those teaching philosophy, have a pedagogic obligation to their students to ‘attend to the human condition’. He discusses how to develop a culturally responsive philosophical approach as a means of addressing this obligation. His discussion brings to light significant questions surrounding the nature, purpose, and real possibility of teaching philosophy today.

Dominic Griffiths, in his article ‘“The whitest guy in the room”: thoughts on decolonization and paideia in the South African university’, draws on Plato and Heidegger to consider whether education as paideia, or ‘turning of the soul’, can be reconciled with the decolonizing African university. He shows how the idea of paideia is connected to the Western conception of the university which has reinforced epistemic injustice. However, he points out that there are aspects of paideia involving developing teacher and student self-reflexivity that can support the needed reckoning with the forces of coloniality. Drawing on his own teaching practice, as well as that of Cornell West, he presents a critical decolonial pedagogy that aligns the genuine transformative power of education, as paideia, with the demands of supporting epistemic justice and criticality.

Jo Byrd and Jack Bryne Stothard engage in ‘A reflection on the teacher education curriculum and the decolonizing agenda in England’. The authors discuss the current growing tensions and resistance to decolonizing the curriculum that they have observed in the context of their work as teacher educators in a university teacher training programme. They use a fictional vignette to illustrate two common opposing positions taken by their students (pre-service teachers). Drawing on the vignette, they seek to demonstrate how the system works to curtail in-coming teachers from truly questioning the status quo. They reflect on the teaching profession as a profession that ‘self-polices’, a practice that prevents teachers from engaging in the fundamental changes required for decolonizing education. In conclusion, the authors point to possibilities for helping teacher educators to decolonize their own ways of thinking.

Part I concludes with Barbara Becnel’s ‘Racism, public pedagogy, and the construction of a United States values infrastructure, 1661–2023: a critical reflection’. Becnel approaches the issue of decolonizing the university curriculum by examining public pedagogy—that is, education that takes place outside the classroom in the public sphere. She argues that public pedagogy has had a profound and lasting impact on racism in the USA and she traces ‘racialized public pedagogy’ to a confluence of historical circumstances, going back to slave codes drawn up in Barbados in 1661 and adopted by the American colonists. She illustrates how a ‘range of black-derogating public pedagogical practices conducted over hundreds of years has functioned as propaganda, educating millions of people to absorb a racialized belief system’ entrenched in the ‘racialized values infrastructure’ still found in the USA today. Her reflection seeks to counter the ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ around race that have been engendered in and by white society. Becnel concludes by signalling the vital need for increased scholarship in education on racialized public pedagogy as part of the work of building antiracist curricula.

Part II decolonizing the curriculum in schools

Part II begins with Rowena Azada-Palacios’ examination of ‘The role of the philosopher of education in the task of decoloniality’. Azada-Palacios first takes a historical look at the interconnection between coloniality and education in the Philippines. This provides a backdrop to her discussion of the meaning of decolonizing the curriculum viewed in the larger context of decolonial justice, which builds on the Latin American tradition of decolonial thought. Drawing on her own attempts to reimagine how national identity is taught in Philippine schools, she argues that the task of the philosopher of education lies not only in the clarification of concepts to support a vision of justice, but also in the translation of ideas to educational practices oriented towards justice.

In ‘The OECD’s new discourse of curriculum reform: student agency, competency, colonization, and translation’, Sang-Eun Lee takes a critical look at what she refers to as a ‘humanistic turn’ in the OECD’s reform discourse. She focuses on the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030 project, which encompasses the creation of a global reference for curriculum redesign. Her article asks whether the OECD’s global curriculum governance is a form of curriculum colonization. Here, she takes the view that colonization can be understood as ‘a process of capturing and transforming “the other” through conceptualisation and description rather than political domination’. Lee uses the example of South Korea to discuss the problem of language and translation in the new reform, and closes with possible directions for curriculum decolonization.

Thenjiwe Major and Sheron Fraser-Burgess examine the educational present and possible future of Botswana in their article, ‘Decolonizing democratic aims of education in Botswana: kagisano and outcomes-based education’ (OBE). Taking into consideration the reality of OBE as the new paradigm of Botswanan education, they argue for a conception of OBE which aligns with Botswana’s concept of kagisano or ‘social harmony’, together with a political commitment to democracy. Their account demonstrates how Olúfemi Táíwò’s analysis of decolonization can provide a philosophical lens through which to interpret Botswana’s current educational pathway within a decolonization discourse. The authors draw on Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s decolonial epistemic perspective to frame the discussion. They argue that a justifiable goal for education would be followed if OBE could be integrated with Botswana’s ethnically inclusive, community-based view of democracy and associated virtues.

Asking the question, ‘Can Conversational Thinking serve as a suitable pedagogical approach for pre-tertiary philosophy of education in Africa?’, Jonathan O. Chimakonam and L. Uchenna Ogbonnaya argue for the teaching of philosophy in African primary and secondary schools, taking inspiration from Matthew Lipman’s philosophy for children movement. They put forward the argument that philosophy education that is rooted in the African culture-inspired philosophical system of ‘Conversational Thinking’ can support efforts to decolonize the African school curriculum. Such an approach, Chimakonam and Ogbonnaya argue, could develop learners’ criticality and creativity and ignite the ‘spirit of inquiry’ needed to help them contribute to the development of postcolonial Africa.

Two reflective pieces centring secondary teachers’ lived experiences in UK schools follow. First, Alexandra Brown provides ‘A reflection on a womanist theologian’s endeavour to dismantle whiteness, through creating the Religious Education module “Black Religion and Protest”’. She details how she was inspired by theologian Willie Jennings’ examination of ‘whiteness’ and the activism of the Black Lives Matter Movements. She reflects on her aim to support her students in unpacking and criticizing the ‘colonial residues’ that remain present in the Religious Education curriculum in the UK today. Brown notes that one particular motivation in creating a new course was to provide her ‘black students’ with a space to ‘heal, grow and theorize beyond their own reality’, and she gives insight into how she sought to do this in her teaching of the module. She ends with a discussion of her own and her fellow antiracist teachers’ collective experiences of students, parents, and colleagues supporting and also resisting efforts to engender thoroughgoing change.

In the second reflective piece, ‘On the epistemic urgency of decolonizing the school curriculum: a reflection’, Azaan Akbar draws on Miranda Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice and on his own teaching practice as a humanities teacher and education consultant in England. His underscores how the urgency to decolonize the National Curriculum arises in part from listening to the ‘calls of students’ who have expressed frustration with the status quo of education and the need to see themselves in the curriculum. He considers how decolonizing is not only a matter of justice but also aligned with the broad purpose of education to prepare learners with the intellectual, moral, spiritual, and social capacities needed to face the challenges of a changing world.

We close Part II and the volume with Paula Alexandra Ambrossi’s critical discussion of language and power. Her considerations traverse issues of decolonizing school and higher education curricula by interweaving questions of teaching and learning language with broader questions of language as constituting the very fabric of our beings. In her article, ‘The languages we speak and the empires we embrace: addressing decolonization through the gaze of the empire’, Ambrossi focuses attention on what it might mean to decolonize ‘at home’—that is, in postimperial nations. She argues that decolonization within postimperial nations requires a form of deep introspection to dismantle ‘the gaze of the empire’. Drawing on Michel Foucault, she first defines ‘the gaze of the empire’ and then examines how it works within foreign language education contexts to maintain the values that have ‘aided the expansion of empires’ and their injustices. Using this idea of the gaze as a lens, alongside reflections on her own positionality, she critically asks: ‘what does it mean that we unquestionably teach and embrace the languages of empire?’ Her discussion illustrates the complex interconnectedness of language and identity, and the challenges for educators to dismantle the imperial gaze within. Her conclusion suggests that any path forward in pursuit of decolonizing education must include forms of reflection that deeply ‘unsettle us’, ‘un-taming’ our ways of knowing, so that fresh perspectives can emerge.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all the authors in this volume for their valuable contributions and dedication to this project. We also want to thank the Special Issues Editor at the Journal of Philosophy of Education, Paul Standish, for his thoughtful feedback and support throughout the process of creating the volume, as well as Executive Editor David Bakhurst and the Editorial Board for supporting the project. We also thank Barbara Becnel for her helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this article, and the anonymized peer reviewers for their feedback on each of the articles which helped us guide the work. Finally, we thank the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain conference committee for supporting a panel discussion of this special issue at the 2024 annual conference.

References

Footnotes