In recent years, many faculty have encountered calls to “decolonize the syllabus.  What does it mean to “decolonize the syllabus? How would a faculty member go about accomplishing this? Like other catchphrases, I really don’t know. Is it a matter of eliminating Shakespeare, Milton, Marx, and other white men and replacing them with more “diverse” authors? Or, is it a matter of re-writing the course from scratch? Should faculty start with a clean slate instead of trying to revise what already exists?

To start, decolonizing a reading list isn’t necessarily about removing works by seminal figures in a discipline. Rather it’s a highly intellectual exercise requiring consideration of whose knowledge is privileged and whose voice is excluded. It’s also a matter of considering how power is constructed within a discipline.

Course syllabi serve a multiplicity of purposes. They are administrative records but also constitute intellectual documents that make knowledge in a particular discipline explicit. Syllabisend a variety of messages to students. For example, they can make clear to students the major figures in a discipline, as well as which works are central to a field of study and therefore should be read for a particular course.

It is widely acknowledged in critical pedagogy literature that the act of educating does not simply refer to the act of imparting knowledge, but to the way learners construct knowledge and make sense of it. In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, argued that teaching can reinforce or challenge learners’ existing world views. It follows therefore that the construction of a syllabus for a course is a critical activity requiring careful consideration of how different world views, knowledge sets, and forms of scholarly authority are articulated.

The good news is that many faculty are already engaged in teaching beyond the borders of our present curricula in intellectually sophisticated ways. However, a thorough review and inventory of your reading list with a critical lens is an important exercise to engage in. 

The four steps below offer a practical place to start.

Audit Your Current Reading List

What jumps out for you when you look at your syllabus? After teaching a few courses, instructors often look back over their syllabi and realize they fall into a certain pattern. This can be a surprise if the course was developed on the fly in recent years. Looking at the readings in a syllabus can help surface these patterns. For example, have all of the readings been written by people from the same country, or by people from the same type of institution? Have they all taken the same approach to presenting information? By being more aware of patterns like these, instructors can become more self-reflective about the choices they make.

Conducting a brief audit can help reveal how knowledge is represented in your course. Librarians can also be valuable partners in this process, helping to identify gaps, suggest diverse sources, and support resource selection.

Other questions to consider include:

• Where are most authors geographically or institutionally located?
• Which perspectives appear most frequently?
• For the poorest communities, what is the situation? Do they remain simply the objects of the research or also the co-authors of the conclusions ?

Who are the authors of knowledge in the materials you have assigned to read in the course? As reviewed in the literature on diverse learning environments, materials send clear messages to learners about who the important authors of knowledge are. The questions below can help illustrate and surface some of these patterns.

Examine Epistemological Dominance in Your Discipline

This work does not begin or end with the list of names or topics that go into a syllabus. It begins there but it also continues in the way that we organize the knowledge within our disciplines.

The fact that all these disciplines have come to exist in our time due to the historical and geographical conditions in which they developed. In particular, all were established in European and North American universities. As Walter Mignolo and Boaventura de Sousa Santos among others have pointed out, the coloniality of knowledge has played a very important role in this respect. Modern colonial and neo-colonial systems have imposed their own norms and values and depreciated other forms of knowledge.

For instructors, this reflection might involve questions such as:

• Which theoretical frameworks dominate the syllabus?
• What intellectual traditions are presented as foundational?
• How are alternative perspectives positioned within the course?

It is no longer a question of either replacing or abolishing tradition in the name of another, but on the contrary of recognizing that every science is the product of more than one tradition.

Rethink How Students Engage With Texts

We can always change what texts we teach, but then how will our students respond to those texts?

Rather than teaching the notion that scholarship provides an impartial or neutral statement on a topic, it can be valuable to ask students to think about what time and place the scholar lived. This approach to teaching is an example of critical pedagogy, a teaching style which was popularized by Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and furthered by hooks in Teaching to Transgress (1994). Critical pedagogy is concerned with developing the student’s ability to think critically whilst at the same time developing an understanding of the subject matter for that discipline.

For example, to encourage students to engage critically with texts, instructors might:

• Pair a canonical article with a contemporary critique
• Ask students to compare how different scholars approach the same issue
• Encourage discussion about whose perspectives are present—or missing—in a text

Literature can be an excellent tool to engage students in scholarly discussion. These strategies may help your readers become more active participants in scholarly discussions and critical readers.

Contextualize Canonical Works

Canonical texts are an integral part of the history of a discipline. Decolonizing a course does not mean removing canonical texts. Rather than removing them from their traditional historical context, we need to situate them differently.

Instructors might ask students to consider:

• What historical moment shaped this work?
• What assumptions about knowledge or society inform the author’s argument?
• Which voices were not part of this conversation at the time?

Contextualizing the work helps students to understand that canonical texts were written within particular ways of seeing the world and it is not a universal view. Smith (2012) notes: Acknowledge the history of who produced the knowledge and how it was produced, so students can learn more about the disciplines and how they come to be what they are.

Start Small

For many instructors, the most sustainable approach is incremental change.

Some simple starting strategies include:

• One or two readings per term could be replaced with works that come from other schools of thought or other locations in the world.
• Author background information will give students an idea of who wrote what. By having this background information, students will be able to understand the author’s context and perspective thus enabling them to read the text more effectively.
• Inviting students to identify emerging scholars or new frameworks in the field.
• Designing assignments that compare multiple theoretical approaches.
• Possible activities to broaden the scope of a course.

Even modest adjustments can broaden the intellectual scope of a course over time.

This approach aligns closely with UDL’s Plus-One strategy which emphasizes making one purposeful change at a time to build more inclusive and accessible learning environments.

A syllabus is a powerful statement that signals to students whose ideas count in a field and what is happening in a field. Updating and revising readings is not about getting rid of legitimate scholarly approaches but about including voices representing a more diverse group of scholars whose work is now seen as being more relevant to the scholarship in the field.

It is important to carry out this task with care and in stages so as to enhance mastery of the discipline while at the same time increasing the number of students who identify with the process of learning.

References

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress : Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1995.

Hurtado, Sylvia, et al. “A Model for Diverse Learning Environments: The Scholarship on Creating and Assessing Conditions for Student Success.” Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, edited by John C. Smart and Michael B. Paulsen, Springer Netherlands, 2012, pp. 41–122.

Mignolo, W. D. (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke University Press.