What does it mean to decolonize education, syllabi, and classrooms?
"Decolonization is understood as an intentional decentering of dominant voices, an interrogation of whiteness, and a move toward pedagogies incorporating Indigenous epistemologies and social justice practices" (Criser & Knot, 2019).
The decolonization of education is the response to how the United States higher education institutions are implicated in the "grounding, validating, and/or marginalizing systems of knowledge production" (Shahkah et al., 2022). The focus of a decolonial curriculum is the centering of indigenous voices, as well as those that have been silenced by systems of oppression (i.e., the Global South). The decolonial curriculum addresses the multifaceted practices within the epistemic knowledge and the hidden curriculum (Shahkah et al., 2022; Boston University, 2020; Alsubaie, 2015.)
Rowena Arshad from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) explains “Decolonizing is not about deleting knowledge or histories that have been developed in the West or colonial nations; rather it is to situate the histories and knowledges that do not originate from the West in the context of imperialism, colonialism and power and to consider why these have been marginalized and decentered.”