One of the first steps when thinking about decolonising the University and the Business School is to look at ways to decolonise our curriculum. Decolonising the curriculum is not about replacing one source with another, it’s about interrogating the current canon and the positionality of the key voices within it, looking at whose words are privileged and whose are missing. It’s about developing these critical literacy skills in students and finding ways for them to access previously unheard perspectives. When starting to decolonise the curriculum, it’s important to think about learning aims and objectives and why we might choose to include or omit certain content on courses. 

“A largely white or largely male curriculum is not politically incorrect, as is often believed, but intellectually unsound.

Monocultures do not produce good thinking and are in themselves a lethal form of unmarked narrow identity politics.” (Gopal 2021, p877)

Decolonising is an ongoing process that occurs at many levels, and there’s also no “on-size-fits-all” process for decolonising. Below is taken from the article ‘How not to decolonise your curriculum’, and is a good place to start:

• Deconstructing ourselves. Who are we? Where do our roots lie? What privileges and disadvantages have we experienced in our own lives? Whose knowledge do we value? Whose perspectives have we ignored or dismissed? What do we fear?
• Deconstructing our subject discipline. What does the accepted canon of knowledge in our subject area look like? How has it varied over time and place? What’s missing? Might there be alternative canons? Is the very concept of an unchanging, “sacred” canon of knowledge becoming redundant in our subject area? Should our subject area even be a distinct discipline on its own? Are there different, more helpful ways of categorising knowledge?
• Deconstructing our institution. What does it stand for? Who is let in, and who is kept out? Who stays, and who drops out? Who achieves and who scrapes by? What assumptions are made about students’ prior cultural capital, expectations and potential? What assumptions are made about higher education traditions? Can these be broken down and re-interrogated? How might it be different? An example is what counts as valid knowledge – peer-reviewed journal articles only, or in a fast-changing world, can we teach our students to draw from a wider range of sources, applying their own critical analysis to what they find?
• Deconstructing our students. This is work that should be done with them rather than to them. Who are they? What’s important to them? What are their interests, goals, values and fears? What kind sense of entitlement do they have about being in higher education, or do they suffer from imposter syndrome, waiting to be found out? The Sewell reportLinks to an external site. talks of giving students a sense of “Britishness”, a shared heritage, in order to help them feel like they belong, but this feels to be in danger of producing the opposite effect and simply alienating them further. How about simply listening to what they have to say, and starting from where they’re at?
• Exploring our curriculum. When looking at the history of our subject can we find other sources of knowledge? How might our course content be reconceptualised in order to reflect wider global and historical perspectives? How might it be taught in a way that enables students to think for themselves and to evaluate and debate current cultural norms and traditions? How can we work with our students to help them shape their own educational experiences?