Curriculum

Decolonising Your Curriculum and Pedagogy

As a university we recognise that we need to rethink, reframe, and reconstruct the current curriculum to make it better, and more inclusive. We need to expand our notions of knowledge, so it does not always elevate one voice, one experience, and one way of being in the world.

We recognise that a colonial curriculum is unrepresentative, inaccessible, and privileged in nature. It is unrepresentative because it selectively constructs teachings which exclude certain crucial narratives. It is inaccessible because it prevents many of its recipients from identifying with the narratives constructed. It is privileged, because it ensures the continued participation, comfort, and flourish of a select group of people, in both an academic and a wider societal context. These features in higher education are detrimental to minority groups, marginalising them in a diverse range of ways.

A decolonised approach seeks to refocus the camera, as it were, to allow for a full picture, a more realistic representation of the world that challenges and interrogates the Eurocentric world view.

What We're Doing

Our work to decolonise the curriculum is taking place in many forms across the University. Decolonising Curriculum and Pedagogy Workshops have been running for all academic staff to engage in. The workshops have been designed as a conversation to develop academic understanding and to share best practice and ideas.

The themes of our Workshops are broad and collaborative:

• Decolonising: Why is it needed? Who is involved?
• Dismantling false 'myths' — enhancing, decentering, and re-centering, not erasing
• Decolonising our disciplines: curricula and pedagogies
• Practical tools to undertake a critical review of both our curriculum and pedagogy

Get in Touch

Dr Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo
Dr Syed Imran Ahmed
Dr Simon Obendorf
Dr Paul Igwe

To find out more about the Decolonisation at Lincoln project and the work we are undertaking, please contact us at decolonisation@lincoln.ac.uk.