This talk discusses staff-student partnership initiative to decolonise the curriculum (Bhambra et al., 2020; Arday and Mirza 2018) at the University of Brighton. This initiative was in response to student led campaigns such as Why is my curriculum white? and Rhodes Must Fall, University of Cape Town and University of Oxford, which drew attention to the ways in which knowledge is produced and perpetuated through Western cannon and perspective (Hall et al., 2021; Begam and Saini 2018). This talk traces the development of a grassroots initiative to decolonise the curriculum where staff and students actively collaborated (Freire 1996) in designing the curriculum in the School of Humanities and Social Science. Initially tapping into the institution’s initiative ‘Curriculum Advisors Scheme’ to take a modest approach by recruiting students at module level to work in partnership with staff to engage with writers and literature from the Global South to highlight the gap in their curriculum. With the Institution’s and School’s support, this staff- student partnership was extended to other modules and courses in the School as more students were voicing their discontent with their Western centric curriculum. Success of this initiative led to the institution taking an active role in implementing some of the recommendations put forward by the students. However, this also led to a top-down approach to running the initiative. As a result of this approach, decolonisation became diversification where students were recruited as Inclusive Practice Partners to work with staff to ‘diversify’ the curriculum. Diversification ignores the ‘inherent power relations in the production and dissemination of knowledge’ Begam and Saini (2018:198), as a result it undermines the very idea of decolonisation and highlights the lack of commitment to challenge the colonial legacy. This centralised staff-student partnership for diversifying the curriculum initiative seems to have come to an end. However, the grass-roots collaboration between staff and students to decolonise the curriculum continues with the focus moving from reading lists, to assessments and pedagogy.

Arday, J. and Mirza, H.S. (2018) Dismantling race in higher education: racism, whiteness and decolonising the academy. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Begum, N. and Saini, R. (2019) ‘Decolonising the Curriculum’, Political studies review, 17(2), pp. 196– 201.

Bhambra, G.K., Nişancıoğlu, K. and Gebrial, D. (2020) ‘Decolonising the university in 2020’, Identities (Yverdon, Switzerland), 27(4), pp. 509–516.

Freire, P. (1996) Pedagogy of the oppressed. [20th anniversary]. London: Penguin.

Hall, J, Velickovic, V & Rajapillai, V 2021, ‘Students as Partners in Decolonising the Curriculum: Lessons learnt at the University of Brighton, UK’, Journal for Educational Innovation, Partnership and Change, pp. 1-9.