LAUSR

In academic discourse there is an increasingly dominant focus on “decolonising” the curriculum and making way for more diverse and inclusive practice. Understanding of both issues is varied, sometimes creating rather than dispelling confusion. Are we talking about breaking down the dominance of White European and Eurocentric knowledge content, and bringing into the curriculum a much wider appreciation of the historical and continuing contributions of Black, Asian and other indigenous academics? Are we talking about enabling improved attainment of non-white learners in multicultural societies, where attainment gaps are part of the metrics facing educational institutions at all ages? Are we talking about ensuring that race and ethnicity and other discriminating factors such as gender and age and ability do not get in the way of a learner’s potential? Probably all of the above and more. The questions we ask of our curricula, our assessment practices and our learning environments will often be affected by our own educational and cultural experience. This means, of course, that asking the right questions is itself subject to potentially misguided assumptions absorbed through the educators’ own learning. To progress our thinking, rather than aiming to dismantle structures in education which have been based on a typically Western and White colonial perspective of academic thinking and endeavour yet are categorised as “universal”, we may do better openly to challenge and re-interpret them. This can involve reaching out to nonwhite writers and intellectuals, and to promote discourse from non-academic communities in the global South which has often been excluded from curricular thinking (see, for example Simaan, 2020). On the question of whether this process should result in a dismantling of current Western pedagogies, the answer is both yes and no. No in the sense that many teachers in educational institutions will not be intentionally aiming to impose colonialist perspectives on their learners and may be thinking deeply about their own and their students’ exposure to multicultural and diverse experience. But yes in the sense that attainment gaps (in Higher Education this is the difference between white and non-white students achieving first or upper second class degrees) exist and are not being tackled. Pedagogic questioning and challenge are vital here as teachers surface their own assumptions and break old stereotypes relating to race, ethnicity, gender and ability in particular. Cultural norms, for example preference for working in groups or individually, response to feedback, expectations of marking, will vary considerably among different ethnic groups with experience of non-European education, and for those non-white students studying in a majority white educational context, there will be additional issues of belonging or a sense of exclusion within the student community. If any or all of these issues lead to lower engagement and lower satisfaction levels among learners, there is a likely association of lower attainment. However this should not be an excuse for a targeted approach of intervention which runs a significant risk of promoting separation and stereotypes. Mountford-Zimdars et al., 2015 suggest more inclusive thinking here: