Decolonizing the University: the Challenges and Possibilities of Inclusive Education

Abstract

This article argues for a reframing of the curriculum within the academy in order to make the academy more inclusive and more accessible to a diverse student body. Reframing the curriculum is seen as an aspect of decolonizing the university. Many questions emerge from this argument to include the following: What curriculum informs the education contemporary learners receive and how do they apply this to their academic and work lives? How do educators re-fashion their work as educators and also as learners to create more relevant understandings of what it means to be human and to determine what is human work? What are the limits and possibilities of visions of and counter and anti-visions to contemporary education? How do educators and learners challenge colonizing and imperializing relations within the academy and that influence the academy and its learners? How does curriculum become inclusive through teaching, research and graduate training and how does it make space for Indigeneity and multi-centric ways of knowing? How do we frame an inclusive, anti-racist, and anti-colonial global future and what is the work that is required to collectively arrive at that future? These complex questions, stimulated by my decolonizing curriculum work and experience, are engaged through the body of this article.