Decolonising the curriculum: Some

ideas

Presentation by Carina van Rooyenon 24 May 2016 at APK UJ

Workshop on Decolonisation of the curriculum, arranged by Ad hoc Senate task team on the decolonisation of knowledge

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- Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2006:117)

“By decoloniality it is meant .. the dismantling of

relations of power and conceptions of knowledge

that foment the reproduction of racial, gender, and geo-political hierarchies that came into being or found new and more powerful

forms of expression in the modern/colonial world.”

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“It has two sides. The first is a critique of the dominant Eurocentric academic model – the fight against what Latin Americans in particular call “epistemic coloniality”, that is, the endless production of theories that are based on European traditions; are produced nearly always by Europeans or Euro-American men who are the only ones accepted as capable of reaching universality …The second is an attempt at imagining what the alternative to this model could look like.” (Mbembe 2015)

Decentering and re-centring

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My departure points

Key aspects of curriculum transformation

1.Content of the curriculum

2.Structure of the curriculum

3.Process of curriculum transformation

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1. CONTENT of curriculum

“A Eurocentric canon is a canon that attributes truth only to the Western way of knowledge production. It is a canon that disregards other epistemic traditions. …Furthermore, Western epistemic traditions are traditions that claim detachment of the known from the knower. They rest on a division between mind and world, or between reason and nature, as an ontological a priori. They are traditions in which the knowing subject is enclosed in itself and peeks out at a world of objects and produces supposedly objective knowledge of those objects. The knowing subject is thus able, we are told, to know the world without being part of that world and he or she is by all accounts able to produce knowledge that is supposed to be universal and independent of context.” (Mbembe 2015)

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Does decoloniality mean Africanisation? Source: http://im

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2. STRUCTURE of curriculum

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3. PROCESS of curriculum transformation

“Decolonisation, which sets out to

change the order of the world, is,

obviously, a program of complete disorder.”

(Fanon 1963:36)

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“In an age that more than ever valorises different forms of intelligence, the student-teacher relationship has to change. In order to set our institutions firmly on the path of future knowledges, we need to reinvent a classroom without walls in which we are all co-learners; a university that is capable of convening various publics in new forms of assemblies that become points of convergence of and platforms for the redistribution of different kinds of knowledges.” (Mbembe 2015)

Student participation

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Curriculum is fundamentally a colonising enterprise (Tuck & Gaztambide-

Fernández 2013)

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List of referencesBassier I 2016 On a UCT economics undergrad. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1teBYI6FfkPGZCGcE4pp8DTq0db137293c-OjK8YymFE/mobilebasic?pli=1

de Oliveira Andreotti V, Stein S, Ahenakew C & Hunt D 2015 Mapping interpretations of decolonization in the context of higher education. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 4(1): 21-40

De Sousa Santos B 2014 Epistemologies of the South: Justice against epistemicide. London: Paradigm Publishers

Ellsworth E 1989 Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review 59(3): 297-324

Fanon F 1963 The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press

Garuda F 2015 Knowledge the marginalised essential to curriculum. In Monday Monthly May. Available at https://www.uct.ac.za/downloads/news.uct.ac.za/monpaper/mp34_04.pdf

Grosfoguel R 2012 The dilemmas of ethic studies in the Unites States: Between liberal multiculturalism, identity politics, disciplinarity colonisation, and decolonial epistemologies. Human Architecture

Kamanzi B 2016 Decolonising the curriculum: The silent war for tomorrow. Daily Maverick 28 April. Available at http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2016-04-28-decolonising-the-curriculum-the-silent-war-for-tomorrow/#.V0MADZN95E7

Leibowitz B 2016 SOTL@UJ blog on first panel of UJ decoloniality series

Maldonado-Torres N 2006 Césaire’s gift and the decolonial turn. Radical Philosophy Review 9(2): 111-138

Maldonado-Torres N 2007 On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies 21(2-3): 240-270

Mbembe A 2015 Decolonizing knowledge and the question of the archive. https://africaisacountry.atavist.com/decolonizing-knowledge-and-the-question-of-the-archive

Mignolo W 2011 The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durhma: Duke University Press

Moreira S 2015 Steps Towards decolonial higher education in Southern Africa? Epistemic disobedience in the Humanities. Journal of Asian and African Studies DOI: 10.1177/0021909615577499

Morris SM 2016 On love, critical pedagogy, and the work we must do. Blog posting on Sean Michael Morris Blog on 23 March. http://www.seanmichaelmorris.com/blog//on-love-critical-pedagogy-and-the-work-we-must-do

Noonan J 2016 Ten theses in support of teaching and against learning outcomes. Blog posting on Jeff Noonan: Interventions and invocations on 6 March. http://www.jeffnoonan.org/?p=2793

Nyamnjoh F 2004

Rose DB 2004 Reports from a wild country: Ethics for decolonisation. Sydney: UNSW Press

Shay S 2015 Decolonise more than just curriculum content - change the structure, too. The Conversation 13 July. Available at https://theconversation.com/decolonise-more-than-just-curriculum-content-change-the-structure-too-44480

Tuck E & Gaztambide-Fernández RA 2013 Curriculum, replacement, and settler futurity. Journal of Curriculum Theorising

wa Thiong’o N 1981 Decolonizing the mind.

- Martin Luther King (1986:91)

“The stumbling block on the road to freedom is not the Klu Klux Klan… but

the whole moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice”

Source: de Oliveira Andreotti et al 2015:31