Dr Tania Dias Fonseca and Dr Danielle Chavrimootoo

Research shows implicit messages relating to knowledge, values, norms of behaviour, and attitudes that students experience in and through educational processes affect their experiences and outcomes (Rabah, 2012). Consequently, Kingston University has developed an inclusive curriculum framework (McDuff and Hughes 2017), and some work on decolonising the curriculum and anti-racist pedagogies have been developed.

 

However, what decolonising means in curriculum design at the university level is still under-theorised (e.g., Le Grange, 2016; Zembylass, 2018). This results from a legacy of complex colonial practices that affect multiple areas such as knowledge construction, disciplinary epistemologies, and ethnocentric approaches to pedagogy. As such, praxis remains dominant across the higher education sector and contributes to the limited collective action to transform teaching and learning practices.

 

The activities we will present will explore the ‘hidden curriculum’, white privilege, positionality, how to mitigate bias, stereotypes when designing curricula and decolonial practices. We will draw on the experiences of implementing activities across the university for academic and professional development in Learning and Teaching, namely in the Introduction to Learning and Teaching Programme for early academics new to teaching in Higher Education and cross-university workshops. From participants’ feedback, these workshops and activities allowed them to understand how the hidden curriculum works in practice and how their positionality informs what and how they teach.

 

The presentation will conclude with our reflections on the opportunities and challenges of attempting to embed such practices across the university in academic and professional development.