Whose status quo? Race, curriculum, and the students in front of me
On the MA Design for Social Innovation and Sustainable Futures, the demographics of the cohorts are drastically changing, with a majority of students now coming from mainland China. A large part of our curriculum asks students to challenge the status quo of their practice and discipline in the wider world. To critique how society responds to environmental and social crises. To find other ways through understanding, articulating, communicating, and hopefully enacting change in the world. But if you start thinking about it, the status quo we ask them to challenge is one predicated on a Western view of the world: particular assumptions about the state, activism, and individual agency that much of the world may not share. We recruit a majority international cohort, and from where I’m sitting, our teaching hasn’t changed that much.
This has made me rather uncomfortable for a while now. At the time of writing this blog, having been out of teaching for a year on paternity leave, I have been reflecting on how we design the curriculum of the course, from the references to the activities we ask the students to perform. How can we include their worldviews, and tools that will be useful for them in their contexts? How do we continue to relate issues at a global scale while grounding our practice in a fairer representation of our worlds?
We continuously struggle with participation in the classroom, and Bradbury (2020) helps here. As a bilingual child who was deemed late in developing speech, this touched close to home. I am now teaching bilingual students, many of whom are still getting to grips with English, without considering how language intersects with their identities. In the same way that Anglocentric tools of assessment reinforce the results in Bradbury’s case study, we can pepper the reading list with all the indigenous knowledges we want, but if we don’t question the way we are assessing, the tasks we are requiring, and how they reinforce white dominance, we are not much different from large institutions’ grand gestures with no groundwork.
Garrett (2024) sharpens this discomfort in me. And articulates the discomfort in me quite viscerally. Whiteness in universities is not just an optical matter of who is in the room but “an ecology of hostile structures and practices that shape what we consider to be daily norms”: what counts as professional, rigorous, critical. Her participants describe being made visibly diverse while invisible as knowers. And her critique of “cultural(less) diversity” describes issues in my course precisely. For example we rarely include conversations about China in global environmental policy! This made me think of how China’s diversity could be more present in the classroom; we as educators should inform ourselves more.
UAL’s anti-racism action plan (2021) commits to putting decolonisation “at the heart of all curricula.” This makes me feel like if we are to truly engage with this grand gesture we need to be supported in engaging fully with our student cohort. What can be more decolonizing than having a shared space in which common assumptions can be deconstructed?
The ethical question I keep returning to: what does it mean to ask students to cross into our concepts while we make no reciprocal move toward theirs? How can we uphold the anti-racism action plan and ensure the curriculum is decolonised by treating students’ knowledge of their specific contexts as expertise? How can we include those knowledges in the curriculum in a more present way?
References
Bradbury, A. (2020) ‘A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: the case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(2), pp. 241–260.
Garrett, R. (2024) ‘Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, pp. 1–15.
University of the Arts London (2021) UAL Anti-racism action plan summary. London: UAL.
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