Decolonise the curriculum: doing nothing is not an option

As an academic activist, political activism and academic endeavours have always been one. Aged eighteen, an A-level student studying Sociology, Politics and History in 1981, I found myself on a demonstration against the murder by arson of thirteen Black children in New Cross, London. A firebomb allegedly was dropped through a letter box during a sixteenth birthday party. I can still hear the chant on the demonstration: ‘thirteen dead and nothing said’. This harrowing experience has marked me for life – not by fear – but to speak out against racism. I carry this torch into my classes (Housee, Reference Housee2012). This is the background to why I believe we should never give up on anti-racism teaching and curriculum development. I have taught for over thirty years, teaching modules on racism and general sociology. My intent has been to de-colonise our curriculum, teaching through an anti-racist lens. The current changing times have re-energised me, seeing the anti-racist struggles finally aired in academic spaces (Peters, Reference Peters2015)

The recent UK student-led campaigns – ‘Why isn’t my Professor Black?’ (Arday et al., Reference Arday, Belluigi and Thomas2020) and ‘Why is my Curriculum White?’ (Peters, Reference Peters2015) began their life at University College London. These sparked national debates about the need to de-colonise the university, drawing attention to the Eurocentrism that underpins the curriculum. This student movement made me remember as a student at Essex University in 1982 leading a student campaign against my department asking why our curriculum was white and Eurocentric. The dismissive reply was: the staff body did not have the expertise to teach more diverse modules. I took it upon myself to do my own research and wrote my final year dissertation entitled ‘A Critique of Race relations in Sociology’. Exemplary work I was told, for which I received a first class degree. This dissertation was consequently used to develop a sociology module on race relations.

Forty years later I find myself here again. But this time, I am the teacher and I feel both disheartened that so little has been done over these years but excited by current student protests and demands starting with the 137-day occupation of Deptford Town Hall. The student campaigners compiled a list of anti-racist demands, calling on Goldsmiths College to implement change. The occupation ended when the university committed to implementing changes without initiating legal action against the protesters. Unlike my student protest, this was a real achievement. The students’ questions of ‘Why isn’t my Professor Black?’ and ‘Why is my curriculum White?’ have since become national campaigns, drawing attention to the racial divide, the under-representation of BME staff, and the Eurocentricity of the curriculum. In each campaign, students have been clear to point to the institutional and structural racism facing UK Higher Education. Much of this protest has coalesced in a movement to ‘decolonize’ Higher Education (Bhambra et al., Reference Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu2018; Doharty et al., Reference Doharty, Madriaga and Joseph-Salisbury2020; Moncrieffe et al., Reference Moncrieffe, Race and Harris2020).

Although it is a ‘better late than never’ scenario, I welcome the current talk about changes in higher education. We are teaching a twenty-first century student body, which will not simply accept the status quo: as we see from these campaigns, they are insisting that change in the academy must come before long.

When our BME students articulate their experiences and demand that universities address systemic racism and decolonise education, we must listen. When students ask why there are so few BME professors, teachers and university leaders, and yet so many students from BME backgrounds, we should explain. And when they see that our BME students do not attain the best graduate outcomes, or achieve the higher degree classifications, we should address this. Universities can no longer hide behind the façade of being ‘liberal’ and pioneers of equal opportunities; our performance shows we too are institutionally racist. In this case study, I am focussing on work at Wolverhampton and just one grievance – De-colonising the Curriculum.

To de-colonise means to diversify and de-construct the curriculum

Decolonising the curriculum is now a critical topic in education, fostering action for change in schools, colleges and universities. Decolonisation of the curriculum is not new, but today it has renewed momentum because of socio-political awareness of racism within and beyond the university. Many post-1992 universities have become more diverse – I began my career at Wolverhampton University in 1990: BME student numbers were around 20 per cent, today we are nearing 60 per cent. BME students in some of these universities are the majority! We have a duty to offer curricula speaking to their experiences and interests, with BME students seeing themselves reflected in it, beyond Black History Month.

Challenging Eurocentricity is about providing an anti-racist curriculum that critiques the colonial past, presenting a narrative that can imagine a future that is not hierarchically racialised having European whiteness and white supremacy at its centre. This requires an awareness of the British Empire and its global economic and political dominance (Bhambra et al., Reference Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu2018) and how this past laid the foundations for continuing racism and inequality. As Hall (Reference Hall1978: 26) reminds us, links between Britain as Empire and Britain as Nation are clearly evident:

This understanding of our racialised colonial past, as Joseph-Salisbury (Reference Joseph-Salisbury2019: 65) asserts, is central to our understanding of current post-colonial British race relations; if we do not make this connection we are in the danger of facilitating white amnesia, by which he means:

If the first step is to acknowledge colonial history and the making of racism, the second step must be to de-construct the current Eurocentric curriculum as legitimate knowledge based on the values and knowledge of the dominant western societies (Bhambra et al., Reference Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu2018; Warmington, Reference Warmington2019). This dismantling of Eurocentric curriculum is an essential part of the social justice work of challenging white supremacy. First, it questions what is in the curriculum, and secondly, replaces it with what is missing in the curriculum – with an offering of BME academic contributions, through an anti-racist approach to the teaching of these modules (Arday and Mirza, Reference Arday and Mirza2018; Arday et al., Reference Arday, Belluigi and Thomas2020).

The UK education system from primary to university has been accused of lacking a coherent syllabus which offers depth and understanding of the dynamics of race and racism within its curricula. This imbalance is highly problematic as it fails to reflect an ever-increasingly multi-ethnic British population (Shilliam, Reference Shilliam2014). This has led to a grave injustice as the education of minoritised students and pupils remains an alienating and negative experience, hence requiring serious re-construction so it does speak to these students’ experiences and interests. As Arday et al. (Reference Arday, Belluigi and Thomas2020: 03) note:

What is to be done?

Singh (Reference Singh2011) suggests that minoritised students feel alienated from their studies because of Eurocentricity. He suggests there is a need to de-colonise the curriculum by making it more inclusive, including more diverse/multicultural content, along with a more critical anti-racist pedagogy drawn from students’ interests. From our experience here, De-colonising the Curriculum requires a hands-on approach – it is not simply diversifying it with more non-white texts and stories. Although this is a good start, it also requires systematic challenging of the misrepresentation of minorities – such as the racist myths and misinformation of, say, the criminalisation of Muslim youth through paedophile stories. To do this, we have to seek out literature and research materials from diverse communities; this includes BME and white anti-racist academic writings. Thus, when teaching about the rise of Islamophobic racism and attacks, I access Tell MAMA, a national project recording and measuring anti-Muslim incidents in the United Kingdom. I access the research and academic papers from the Institute of Race Relations – and their Journal Race and Class, alongside mainstream sociology literature and texts.

As Arday et al. (Reference Arday, Belluigi and Thomas2020: 17) argue, Eurocentrism currently dominates the curriculum throughout the academy. Such exclusionary forms of education, Arday et al. (ibid.) argue, ‘minimises diverse histories by not critically interrogating the outcomes of a history of patriarchy, slavery, imperialism, colonialism white capitalism and white supremacy’.

In my sociology course I teach on the Module ‘Racism in the British Context’; some colleagues have modules, however, that hardly mention non-European writers and references. When challenged, they point to the fact that there is no need, because after all, I do! My response is collegial, suggesting we permeate BME contributions throughout our degree. And just as the ‘icons’ like Durkheim, Marx, Weber are central to our curriculum, so should Stuart Hall be (Hall, Reference Hall, Hall and Gieben1993). This blind Eurocentrism or unbiased racism remains an ongoing battle. In my pedagogic practice, I respond by developing our Sociology curriculum, speaking to our students’ cultural interests, and to the racism that is part of their everyday lives. I proactively disseminate such practice and support colleagues as they adopt it. I have led initiatives to ensure that diversity and BME experience permeates the Sociology curriculum and help colleagues develop their modules accordingly, directing staff to educational materials that help diversify their material and white colleagues are currently working on projects to de-colonise the curriculum, positively welcoming this support, one observing:

One key task was to re-construct reading lists, going beyond the Eurocentric ‘expert’ canon and bringing in writing from BME and indigenous writers from the Global South (Arday et al., Reference Arday, Belluigi and Thomas2020). This instils confidence in BME students who come to realise that BME and indigenous academics from outside Europe are well-placed to challenge dominant discourses. Through these readings, students – BME and White – gain perspectives from outside the dominant frameworks of learning, linking, for example, European colonialism to modern-day migration, thereby connecting their parents’ and their own experiences to the contemporary context of power in the motherland. The decolonising project goes beyond reading lists and is about how knowledge is imparted, delivered and assessed, asking critical anti-racist questions, equipping students to critique dominant discourses. This helps diverse students to develop their critical thinking, maximising their engagement and participation (Chetty, Reference Chetty2020: 11):

As I have argued elsewhere (Housee, Reference Housee2012, Reference Housee2018), our students provide our best teaching material and template. Our teaching should value our BME students’ experience and view it as cultural capital, and privileging Blackness. We must involve our students with curriculum developments; we must talk to their interests and ask what is going well with our curriculum development and what it is we can improve on. We aim to encourage a teaching/learning style that is empowering, that enables student voice, so their experience is shared and validated. This enhances their sense of belonging, promotes self-esteem and indeed builds their confidence. The aim is also to help with retention and progress.

Here I share a comment from a module evaluation from one of my students:

The comment above is testimony of what students want from their education. Responding to current political racialised reality is not only central to our anti-racist project, it is also about reaching out to what interests our students and what is true to their reality. Minority experience is rarely included in a critical and anti-racist way. Ignoring racism in the curriculum legitimises whiteness as normal, and minority experience as exotic and ‘othered’. This in turn racialises our minority students. If racism against Muslims, for example, is not challenged through our curriculum, we produce racial knowledge and racialised subjects, preparing students to expect racism in their world, thereby perpetuating Islamophobia. The failure then to address Islamophobia leaves dominant frameworks and discourses intact as legitimate knowledge (Housee, Reference Housee2012).

Invisible, or just simply bias?: the role of White privilege in university spaces

Challenging Eurocentricity, then, is the first step to dismantling supremacy. One of the most challenging aspects of the de-colonisation project is exposing the invisibility of white privilege. However, continuing to educate students through an Eurocentric lens prepares white students to accept British National identity and white privilege, marginalising our BME students’ experiences and making them invisible. Historically-made whiteness is central for citizenship, as recently seen throughout the Brexit debate: if such nationalism is not challenged, we will move into dangerous territory that could usurp any collective identities such as class (Bhambra et al., Reference Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu2018). For this reason, white supremacy must be challenged. One key problem in higher education is that white privilege is often blindly seen as the norm: there is a lack of critical understanding and knowledge about whiteness and how it works to maintain and reproduce the status quo. Applying a critical race lens to an understanding of educational racialised inequalities means making sense of social identities. The dominance of Whiteness/Englishness in contrast with other identities, such as blackness and ‘Muslimness’, has to be challenged.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a framework is useful here (see for example Williams, Reference Williams1991; Ladson-Billings, Reference Ladson-Billings1998; Delgado and Stefancic, Reference Delgado and Stefancic2001; Gillborn, Reference Gillborn2008; Bell, Reference Bell, Taylor, Gillborn and Ladson-Billings2009; Dixson et al., Reference Dixson, Gillborn, Ladson-Billings, Parker, Rollock and Warmington2018). CRT explains that white domination is normalised and is seen (and unseen) as perfectly natural and legitimate. CRT has been employed in the area of education to provide an appropriate context and framework for research. Gillborn (Reference Gillborn2005), a leading UK CRT proponent, shows how white supremacy describes a system of structural white domination that is built upon racism. White supremacy from a CRT perspective is not by any means a reference only to white-skinned people as, clearly, not all white people from different class backgrounds will hold the same economic power or cultural/capital or privilege, as Warmington (Reference Warmington2019: 6) also argues,

White supremacy is understood to encapsulate racism that exists in Western societies; it is seen as normal and persistent, benefiting whites to the detriment of non-whites. White supremacy/privileges should be seen in the same way as patriarchy; when one critiques patriarchy, one is not necessarily saying that male dominance and privilege resides with all men, but that in a social system that privileges male gender as superior, men will benefit.

Critiquing racism is never an easy ride, because de-colonising the curriculum is not simply about highlighting the historical and inherent racisms imbedded in the readings but also about offering alternative non-white world views and critical ways of reading it that centres racism in its argument. If this de-construction does not take place, students will not understand how we are all implicated in maintaining the status quo in power relations. In my own classes I come across situations of discomfort where white students feel awkward, guilt-ridden and embarrassed by the racism they come to learn about. We have to interrogate how whiteness and white structures are not only about how this superiority is personified but how whiteness is a shifting signifier, that resides not only in skin colour, but is an ideological representation of privilege and power (Hall and Jhally, Reference Hall and Jhally1996).

I distinguish between whiteness expressed as individual prejudice and whiteness expressed as institutionalised racism. In both cases, though, whiteness is a marker of power in relationship to blackness. Levine-Rasky (Reference Levine-Rasky2000) offers an analysis of whiteness or white dominance that goes beyond the person, to an understanding of structures and processes. Marking whitearchy (whiteness with hierarchy) (Housee, Reference Housee2008) is about recognising its ideological, socio-economic and political dominance and about acknowledging Eurocentric racisms. The key point is to acknowledge this and reflect critically. The use of critical pedagogical teaching strategies that question patriarchy and whitearchy is what should be interrogated.

I conclude with two suggestions in the project of de-colonisation and anti-racism in higher education, responding to the two student campaign demands ‘‘Why isn’t my Professor Black?’ and ‘Why is my Curriculum White?’

Diversify our curriculum and employ anti-racist pedagogical practices

Decolonising the curriculum (Moncrieffe et al., Reference Moncrieffe, Race and Harris2020) and offering a more diverse curriculum means ‘educating’ and re-training staff. If our education has been Eurocentric and limiting, we have to take responsibility and say enough is enough, we will re-train our staff and find the resources to do it. Higher education communities must unlearn racism in all its manifestations and embrace diversity in all its forms. Eurocentric education should not be the norm in the twenty-first-century classroom: if we do not make these changes, we remain complicit with racism. Our students should be exposed to a pluralism of ideas so they feel a sense of belonging, able to expand their worldview. This is good for our BME student experience, they will feel more engaged with their learning, they will feel valued and this will lead to greater progress and retention. It is also significant for our white students as they begin to take responsibility for the unequal racialised world that we live in.

Increasing the representation of BAME academic staff

Secondly, it is clear that the fastest-growing ethnic groups at universities are BME students. With this pool of graduates, we should be able to find graduates to fill university lecturing posts: this requires making equal opportunities a reality, offering training and resources that open doors to BME graduates looking for academic and teaching careers. We have much untapped talent: I often see young BME PhD researchers and academics at conferences. Our growing BME student body deserves to see more lecturers and teachers like them, where their experiences, and their sense of being, may be reflected more greatly by BME staff interests and positionality. I constantly experience this in the academy with BME students telling me how grateful they are that I, as a minoritised member of staff, teach them as they are able to relate and have greater affinity with me (Housee, Reference Housee2008).

Yes, we need more BME professors, but achieving this means breaking down a number of institutionally racist barriers. I have first-hand experience of being rejected when applying for associate professor posts. At my university, I am seen as an expert on diversity and anti-racist curriculum. I have given talks to the Governors, to staff conferences, head of department meetings and Student Union conferences on curriculum development and student experience. My publications speak for themselves but this was never acknowledged in the application process. Although I have been encouraged and greatly supported by individual academics and colleagues, and built lasting friendships, my career advancement is stifled. I did not achieve the associate professor post third time round, despite being encouraged to apply. I am the only full-time permanent BME academic staff member in the sociology department after almost thirty years. And whilst our BME student body has increased three-fold in thirty years, this is still not reflected in BME staff and senior staff numbers overall.

I remain in my job because I believe in the good anti-racist work in the academy not only for our students, but also for the institution itself. I believe that education remains the bastion for equality. What inspires me as an academic activist in my teaching and research is the desire to transform students/individuals and society. I seek to deploy a critical sociological imagination in my work. I believe that our scholarship has the potential to enable human societies to respond to the challenge of all kinds of inequalities, at local, national and global levels. George Floyd’s murder has given impetus to the BLM movement, presenting us with the opportunity to take stock and to make bigger changes for a better future. We should use this moment to continue the campaign that the Goldsmiths students initiated and make our curriculum more anti-racist, less white and less Eurocentric. As Olanisakin (Reference Olanisakin2020) warns: