Decolonising the Curriculum and University: Practice-based dialogues
Decolonial theory and practice have been gaining new momentum since 2011. Decolonizing the Curriculum, a continuation of the paradigm (or a subset) of Decolonizing the University, saw its formal emergence with the Rhodes must fall movement at the University of Cape Town, South Africa[1]. The students demanded pulling down the Cecil Rhodes statue as a way to intervene in the colonial history it represented. Recognizing that the statue stood, not only for a history of oppression but also for the continued alignment of the university with the colonial history, highlights a key aspect in the current practice of Decolonizing educational institutions and practices. Similar movements have ensued across the globe and resulted in manifestos (Keele Manifesto[2]), reports (Let’s do Diversity led by Prof. Gloria Wekker[3]), student-led zines (UAL’s Decolonising the Arts Curriculum: Perspectives on Higher Education), and journal issues (student-led Junctions Journal issue 6.1 — Decolonising the University[4]) to name a few.
On one hand, the diversity of such movements indicate that the practice of decolonizing the curriculum or university entails a reconfiguration of the literature studied (mainly consisting of strategies that aim to include perspectives outside the dominant western perspective), but also of the architectures that house the curriculums (mainly consisting of strategies that seek to transform organizational structures). Therefore, decolonial work, is not and cannot be a practice at a single level but needs to consider the systems that reproduce coloniality. While such practices do achieve to demonstrate the myriad ways decolonisation in the educational space can be understood, the adoption of the term and movement by neo-liberal institutional practices highlights the risk of applying the strategies without context.
Thus, such strategies aim to dismantle entirely the colonial history that had engulfed lands, cultures, ideologies, and discourses, it risks contributing to the essentialism it stands against. Over time, the call to decolonise seems to have failed the project for which it had put into motion, the term, the criticality of it, and the recognition for the need to address it, or the lack thereof. This has occurred, partly, due to the rapid conflation with the decolonial efforts of settler-colonial nations (Tuck and Yang, 2012) with decolonial thought praxis in the field of knowledge production and transmission and partly due to the absolute “…rejection or negation of Western Thought” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 3) solely based on the fact that they constitute western perspectives. As a way to salvage the movement that is born out of a specific colonial history, they give us a sense of what decolonial work could entail in the modern context in On Decoloniality — Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (2018).
Instead, they state that decolonial thinking and practice embody a situated reading — “…the ways that different local histories and embodied conceptions and practices of decoloniality, including our own, can enter into conversations and build understandings that both cross geopolitical locations and colonial differences and contest the totalizing claims and political-epistemic violence of modernity” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 1). According to them and fellow decolonial thinkers (Tuck and Yang, 2012; Bambra et al., 2018), decolonial work must not elevate or demote knowledge solely based on the ethnic background, theoretical privilege, or historical positionality of the authors because in contemporary realities coloniality and decoloniality aren’t separated by unfathomable distances, specifically when we discuss knowledge production for a networked society. Rather, they argue that colonial and decolonial thought sit together in a matrix that produces them off each other. Thus decolonial work mustn’t assume that knowledge produced with decolonial intentions escapes influences and theories produced by authors from colonial histories.
So, what could decolonial work, which might seem quite a nebulous look like? A conversation with Toni Pape.
Aishwarya Kumar
What does decolonization of curriculum mean from the perspective of Critical Media Studies?
Toni Pape
To decolonize a classroom, it is really important to give students a say in what they need to learn. Interestingly, that creates a lot of resistance, probably because we have this sense of the teacher as the one who “masters” the subject-matter and knows what the students are supposed to learn. One of the reasons why the course design of the M.A. course “Queer Intersections” allowed for so much student-led teaching is that young people know what the problems are nowadays. There are some really big and urgent questions that the teachers themselves don’t ask themselves, because we’re so habituated to a certain kind of learning and teaching. It’s fair to say that we are really in a moment of historical transition. Do you then have to learn everything that came before? Or can you jump in right where you feel a sort of existential urgency? Can you start where the students are starting with the question and fill in some answers and then go back to the history of knowledge as it becomes relevant or necessary? So in the course, I decide the starting point — the first two readings — and then it’s the students who decide, and it’s my task to prevent mistakes, point out inconsistencies and facilitate connections to things that students perhaps aren’t aware of, because, you know, I have a fifteen-year head start in reading. I often put it to myself this way: The main difference between me and my senior colleagues, or me and my younger students, is that we have a head start on each other in terms of reading. I have 10–15 years of reading experience on you and always will. So for me as a teacher, the important thing is to understand that people who are 10–15 years younger may desire and value different ways of thinking and knowing. What I can do is give guidance with that. This guidance is obviously inflected by my own beliefs and convictions, but are not imposed or authoritative. People who engage in study — and I include myself in that group — usually know and feel what they need to learn. So for me, that’s a shift that can help decolonize learning environments from a Critical Media Studies perspectives.
Aishwarya Kumar
Could you elaborate a bit on your role in such an environment?
Toni Pape
Perhaps we could say that a teacher is a moderator or a facilitator. What you try to facilitate all the time is learning. And learning, for me, is to create ideas in your mind. And you try to make them consistent with each other so that they allow you a consistent outlook on the world that allows you to also evaluate what’s going on around you politically, economically, environmentally, and so on. And so I consider myself as someone who helps people form ideas in their head in a consistent manner that allows them to then encounter the world in a productive manner. And that’s very different from knowledge transmission. In teaching, for instance, there are lots of initiatives based on problem-oriented teaching, which can go in the right direction. But I have the same problem with that term as you have with diversity or diversification and decolonization. They can mean something important, but they can also be watered down to become sort of a formula. For example, who decides what the “problem” to be solved is? Before solving problems, we should perhaps practice problematization, that is, the formulation of problems. When we’re talking about decolonization, we’re talking about people’s lives. So, for example, how do I — even if our own life isn’t negatively affected — deal with the fact that my mode of living directly and indirectly creates neo-colonial, extractivist conditions of existence for other people? What concrete problems of thought ensue from that?
AK
Patrick O’Neill and Mick Wilson in The Educational Turn (2010), express “counter-institutional ethos” as a way to subvert/ step out of/ dismantle such environments. How closely related do you see this to how you understand decolonial work?
TP
I think that’s very important, but then I wonder what we mean by ‘subverting’ or ‘stepping out of’. The “neoliberalization” of education is also an attempt to colonize people’s minds and it is oftentimes successful. So if, let’s say, I wanted to “subvert” the institution by going into a first-year and saying “You tell me what you want to learn, and you tell me how you want to be assessed,” many students would probably freak out. And then I would be adding to already high levels of stress and anxiety when my idea was to reduce them. So you have to think carefully about what it means to act “against” the institution’s colonial habits, which are habits that many of us have internalized. I would probably want to undo some of those habits by suspending them, by blocking the nonconscious acting-out of the habit. For example, one practical result of the neoliberalisation of education is that students want to know what exactly they’re supposed to know. And they want to know what they need to do in order to get the credit points. There’s a real anxiety about that that can lead to a kind of self-censorship. You know, where instead of thinking freely, you try to figure out what the teacher wants to hear. And I take that anxiety seriously because I share it too. It’s a colonial habit that was trained into us. So to suspend or block that habit in a first-year course, as a teacher I can ‘stage’ a moment of study where the certainty of authoritative knowledge is questioned and where we as a group have to ask ourselves what it means to learn certain things. That doesn’t mean that we throw out the ‘old’ knowledge, but that we change the perspective, that we shift the relation between what we consider major and minor thinkers. Which ideas do we want to pull into the foreground, what can be backgrounded?
To give you a — fairly canonical — example, I’ve been teaching a media history course for several years, in which I address the film Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith, a film from 1917, which is a racist piece of garbage. But at the same time, it is also an important technological achievement in the history of film. Griffith is very important for the development of continuity editing and what we now call Classical Hollywood Cinema. For all of these reasons, I have to mention him. But instead of making students watch that film, I frame it by showing an excerpt about it from Ava DuVernay’s The 13th. That’s important because you cannot silence the matter and you want to understand how an important cinematic genius, if we want to call him that, could end up thinking such violent thoughts and putting them on a screen.
How can these things go together? How can some of the things that we consider the most valuable achievements of Western civilization be so closely entwined with the most disgusting and violent things that are part of modernity? How could that happen? How can that still happen? Following Julietta Singh’s argument in her book Unthinking Mastery, I would say that it is also because what we consider the mastery of an art is never far from the mastery over people. And once we acknowledge that, we can then take this idea that we’ve arrived at through Griffith, DuVernay and Singh to think about our own ideas about education as well as our learning habits that oftentimes pursue some kind of mastery.
AK
How do you balance decolonial thought and work with the universities demands for skill development and technique?
TP
There’s a lot of emphasis on knowledge transmission and the acquisition of skills. And I’m suspicious and a bit scared of that. Because when I look at Western civilization, it’s clear to me that overall our methods are bad. In the sense that we’re slowly but really destroying the planet, our world. There have surely been important achievements — medical, legal, cultural. But much of what we’ve been doing since the advent of Western imperialism and industrialization and what we have been telling ourselves is good, also in terms of philosophy and research, contributes to the destruction of worlds. So I think we should really stop and think twice before we continue to teach the same stuff to the next generation. What you can do instead is to step on the brakes — to suspend business as usual — and emphasise a thinking that asks which ways of living, thinking, and doing have value. Because if you only just teach a skill in a straightforward manner, you already assumed that whatever that skill allows you to do, has value. And value for whom, from what perspective? Sometimes social and environmental values may be at odds with each other. How do we evaluate that? The question of value is central to what one might call the challenges of the 2020s, including ecological justice and decolonization. And I think that a focus on value can help balance some of the contrasting requirements we face.
AK
How do you negotiate the urgency of our times with what you said earlier about slowing down thinking or critical thinking, how do you negotiate that for students in the classroom?
TP
Hm, slowing down is only part of it — because I do think that we’re too busy. But the question is also whether we’re busying ourselves with good things. So it’s also about shifting what kind of research and study I do. For instance, when I create an open course like “Queer Intersections”, there is a starting point for thinking that I propose as a teacher and if you’re interested in that you come to class, but then we’ll see collectively which way we want to go. And that does a few things. For instance, it takes away the fear that there is a certain amount of material that we need to cover, which is always this bad idea of completeness. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney say, we’re All Incomplete. The openness also takes away the idea that there’s a linear way of learning about a subject-matter. Rather study works by association and appetite. Every week, we check in with the group and ask “What do we need to read next?” And then it’s the group that actually has to negotiate it, which creates a sense of responsibility. And since we can’t read everything at once, we also need to come to a real collective decision. (So no voting.) And so you really build a network of ideas, rather than following a plot that is already laid out for the course. And then you have to trust that this activates students in the sense that you can’t just rely on the fact that the teacher has everything served up for you. You have to trust that the openness of the adventure will still lead to something that has value. It also allows students to bring themselves in much more because they come with their suggestions and their suggestions obviously come out of their lives, things that they’ve read and that are important to them. Sometimes when we take one student’s suggestion over another, I wonder if that person then feels like their suggestion was rejected. But in the end it’s hopefully clear that what matters is how the ideas flow in an impersonal manner. So bringing people in, to create an impersonal movement of thought, that’s important to me. And impersonal doesn’t mean that the personal doesn’t matter, it means that what matters is how a person can participate in a collective. That you allow everyone to contribute to something that we all do together.
AK
Could you elaborate on the manner and degree to which the term decolonization has unfolded in the current climate?
Toni Pape
Decolonial strategies come in many different guises and overall that’s a good thing. Even though there is a danger of diluting the idea of decolonization, I don’t think that one can do decolonization without pluralism. I want to hear all the ideas about how we can do this together, which also means we can share the tasks. For instance, at my department, there are colleagues who are working on requesting or sourcing non-Western media examples that we can study with our students.. I think that’s really good and it is one thing that decolonizing the curriculum can mean. But it can’t be the only strategy because, obviously, we also want to study European cinema from a decolonial perspective. What would that mean? Very generally, it would mean that you might still study the same research objects (say, European cinema) but that you start thinking about it differently, that you start asking different questions. And I think that this approach is closer to my heart because it’s about how we think about certain things, which concepts we have inherited from the Western tradition, how they order our minds, how they make us look at the world in ways that are biased and how we think ourselves out of that. We have to do a lot of work to do there. Perhaps that’s the scarier part because then you have to not just change your research objects, which you could study with the same old theories, but you have to change the theories, your models for describing and interpreting the world. That’s the challenging part. But for me that’s also the exciting part. That is where adventures of ideas lie. It’s what I am enthusiastic about. And in the end, you have to follow the enthusiasm.
[1] Similar movements have been visible in UK, Netherlands and USA with statements such as the Keele Manifesto outlining what the task of Decolonising the Curriculum is. Read also:
[2] Launched on July 7th, 2018, Keele University established their position on what it meant to Decolonise the Curriculum by focusing on how it is different from diversification and inclusion. They also elaborate on guidelines that seem critical for curriculum design through the lens of Decolonial Thought. Read: https://www.keele.ac.uk/equalitydiversity/equalityawards/raceequalitycharter/keeledecolonisingthecurriculumnetwork/
[3] The report studied diversity in its myriad forms and report what diversity of institution and knowledge is and require. Read the report here: file:///Users/aishwaryakumar/Downloads/2.-diversity-commission-report-summary-2016–12–10.pdf
[4] As a response to the call for Junctions Journals 6.1 issue, I worked with co-editors Diana Willemijn Helmich, Amira Fretz and hosted a panel on Decolonizing the University (to be published) with prof. dr. Layal Ftouni, dr Maaike Bleeker, Dhr. dr. T. (Toni) Pape, Rolando Vazquez. In line with their call, the panel was a way to contextualise decolonial theory and practice within educational spaces in the Netherlands, so as not to risk transforming it into an empty metaphor.
