As the 2016-2017 coordinator
for PETAL (Peer-Enhancement of Teaching and Learning) in Politics, IR and
Sociology, I organised on 17 February 2017 at Oxford Brookes University an
event entitled ‘Uncomfortable Pedagogy: decolonising and diversifying the
curriculum in Politics, IR, and Sociology’. This event was aimed at students
and teaching staff in our subjects and in follow up of some of the conclusions
from the previous PETAL project on ‘The experience of ‘BME’ students at Oxford
Brookes’.
The event was
attended by approximately 30 people, one half made up of academic staff and the
other of students. It was livestreamed on Facebook, with approximately 150
views on the day and currently well over 400. The panel of speakers consisted
of 5 individuals: Claire Vergerio, a past Associate Lecturer at Brookes and
University of Oxford DPhil candidate involved in curriculum reform; Michaela
Opoku-Mensah, a graduate from Brookes and now studying for an MA at the
University of Edinburgh in African Studies; Mend Mariwani, a writer and editor
working in London for media platforms dedicated to writers of colour such as Media Diversified, Skin Deep, and Bare Lit; Dalila Da Silva Lopez, a current Brookes Level 6 BME student and
Politics and IR representative; and myself as a member of our teaching staff.
This blog entry
discusses the context in which the structure of the event emerged, some of its
main discussion points, and some future directions for both the PETAL and
Diversifying the Curriculum projects being pursued at Brookes. Overall, the
event was a successful opportunity to engage the student body on a pressing and
timely subject that unites teachers' pedagogic and institutional concerns with
broader social and community needs. Response from students speaking and
participating from the audience was extremely positive and they had
expectations and demands for more similar events to take place.
Yet the event also
highlighted the complexity, confusions, and broader implications and interpretations
of diversifying and decolonising, for which future initiatives and events
should be attentive to by narrowing down the scope of discussion to specific
areas of implementation. For example, future events could separate discussions
regarding the representative constitution of programmes, modules and staff at
institutional level from discussions regarding content, textbooks, and
disciplinary requirements.
Overall, the aim
that most strongly emerges from my analysis and experience of leading this PETAL
project is to continue improving communication and transparency between
teachers and students on 'what should my curriculum be?' and 'whose job is it
to shape the curriculum?' Networking locally and nationally with student union
officers, staff trade unions and other campaigns and initiatives would seem an
appropriate way to move the project forward and find ways to institutionalise
and protect the gains achieved while avoiding overburdening teaching staff
without sufficient resources and support.
The BME/BAME Staff
Action Group supported by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, which is discussed
below and emerged in parallel with - but independently from - the PETAL event,
is a promising example of how to continue pursuing some of these goals. Other
ideas could be applied to rethinking Brookes's Core Attributes and the Higher Education Academy's UK Professional Standards Framework by including more
diversity and decolonising criteria to their requirements.
Background and Broader Context
The event was
shaped in continuation of the 2015-2016 PETAL project and one of its major
conclusions that 'diverse and alternative perspectives should be included and
integrated more thoroughly into the curriculum'. This project was led by Dr.
Victoria Browne, and assisted by Dr. Tamsin Barber, who conducted focus groups on
‘The experience of ‘BME’ students at Oxford Brookes’. These took place on
Wednesday 13 April 2016 and were attended by 10 students from across Politics,
IR, Sociology, Geography and Psychology. Their aim was 'to find out more about
how ‘BME’ students experience life at Oxford Brookes, and if there are any ways
that we as academic staff can improve their experience and education.'
The
need to diversify the range of social backgrounds and ethnic origins of
students and staff in academic institutions is based on serious discrepancies
in the attainment gap
of BME students.[1] Recent figures
show that 'only 60 per cent of ethnic minority learners at
English universities achieved a first or a 2:1 in 2013-14, compared with 76 per
cent of their white peers.' These national trends
are also observed at Oxford Brookes University.[2]
The fact that some of these students are not performing as well as their
colleagues can be partly attributed to an institutional context in which it is
more difficult for them to reach university and they have less resources to
insure their success. Moreover, the focus groups also revealed the added
negative psychological impact that awareness and pressure from the attainment
gap can produce. One way in which this problem can be remedied, alongside
making more resources available, is to counter the assumption that BME students
cannot perform well by making institutions actively promote universities as
spaces less dominated by white students and staff.
Towards
this end, the event was focused on discussing how such efforts can lead to what
Laura Routley has inspired me to call 'uncomfortable pedagogies'. Routley stresses
the ‘importance of both teachers and students remaining uncomfortable’,
because, with the example of the African context:
‘Teaching Africa
within IR carries a responsibility to engage students with the power relations
that dominate Africa’s global position and ‘western’ knowledge of the
continent… Who is in the class room particularly matters when teaching material
embedded in ongoing colonial relations. Disrupting student’s assumptions, such
as their alignment with Western actors who will ‘solve’ Africa’s problem, may
therefore involve disempowering them. By doing so, it is possible to
potentially establish more productive starting points for learning about Africa
within IR.’[3]
In other words,
uncomfortable pedagogy needs to be understood as the realisation of certain
inequalities and disturbing facts and ideas about one’s position in the world -
and in the classroom – in order to provide an alternative - and arguably more
productive - starting point for teaching and learning.
Concern with the
curriculum also follows from a national campaign by the NUS called ‘Why is my
curriculum white?’ and other campaigns such as 'Why isn't my
professor black?' These occurred in parallel to a series of more local campaigns, led by
students and staff across the UK organising events and societies around the
challenge of decolonising and diversifying curricula, such as notably the
Oxford Rhodes Must Fall campaign and others at LSE, SOAS, Queen Mary, Leeds,
Sussex, UCL, Edinburgh, Warwick, and Goldsmiths. These campaigns all relate to
supporting learning in terms of diversity and explore different pedagogical
approaches to delivering content. They also provide the basis to a potentially
deeply transformative and wide-ranging movement about the structure and values
of higher education. This potential movement has implications at a pedagogical
and political level by ensuring widening participation, and acknowledging that
supporting learning is a dialectical process that must involve teachers and
students.
For example, these
campaigns have led to broader public debates in national and international newspapers and various
blogs (Media Diversified and Verso Books). As Claire
Vergerio, one of the contributors to the event, raised in her talk, attempts such
as Professor Karma Nabulsi's project on the Palestinian Revolution are a prime example of efforts to develop
teaching resources developed by staff and students to remedy the lack of
diversity and discussions of coloniality in politics and IR curricula.[4]
'Uncomfortable Pedagogy': A One Day Event on Diversifying and
Decolonising
As I introduced
the event to a crowd of both students and staff, I outlined three dimensions in
which diversifying and decolonising could be discussed: in terms of topics
listed in our curricula; in terms of the social and ethnic background of the
staff employed to design and deliver curricula; and thirdly, in terms of the
social and ethnic background of authors chosen for the curricula. I used the
contents page of a common North American IR textbook to start a discussion with
the audience of how they would go about diversifying and decolonising its topics.[5]
Questions asked by
myself and by the audience to the speakers included: What is decolonisation in the context of
education? How has it impacted your work and study? Do you think there is a
growing movement across the UK, and elsewhere forming out of it and/or
influencing it? How is it linked to diversifying? What do you think of the
notion of 'uncomfortable pedagogy'? What are the main challenges facing efforts
to decolonise and diversify? What does decolonising mean for non-BME authors and staff, do they get
‘erased’ from the curriculum? What experiences in the classroom have speakers
felt were problematic?
As Claire Vergerio
explained, a crucial aspect of improving curricula is to avoid simply adding
'token' topics, staff, or authors so as to in a sense tick the 'diversity and
decolonial' box. The deeper issue at stake is epistemological, in the sense
that we need to 'change the nature of the questions we're asking' as teachers.
She used examples from her experience as part of committees and fora made up of
students and staff at the University of Oxford to decolonise the IR and
Politics curriculum. She showed on a screen a proposal that has been put
forward for how to reshape the syllabus for an intro to IR module in terms of
concepts and questions e.g. replacing the concept of anarchy with hierarchy so
as to move away from a narrow conception of the history of international
relations based on states, and instead should include more the study of empires
which is the political organisation which has overwhelmingly dominated human
political history.
Students Michaela
Opoku-Mensah and Dalila Da Silva Lopez also shared crucial experiences about
how they felt their BME backgrounds were not represented, e.g. no or too few
modules or topics on African politics, or a lack of library resources. Both
students therefore went on exchange programmes but nevertheless were often the
only black student on a course on African politics. They discussed how this
lack of collective experience was crucial to their pedagogical experience,
speaking directly to the need to improve BME staff and student ratios. For
Michaela, teaching is crucial because it shapes how we behave as individuals in
society. It is not just the opportunity to gain a degree and by extension
employment. This goes against assumptions that all students are primarily
concerned by their employability, and this makes diversifying and decolonising
curricula particularly important, as arguments against these efforts are often
made in relation to what students need to know to compete on the job market.
Discussions during
the event - from speakers and participants in the audience - proved that
students are very mature in their understanding of pedagogy as a social process
shaped by power struggles. For example, Michaela discussed the problem of how
Black history is overwhelmingly portrayed by slavery and the slave trade, in
all the institutions she has been taught at. This is a fundamental way in which
Politics, IR and Sociology need to rethink their teaching of history, and
acknowledge the implications that ignoring thousands of years of Black history
leads to determining the existence of Black people only in relation to that of
white colonisers, and only as a story of domination. It is therefore essential
to teach the diversity of Black societies and their particular political and
social experiences.
Diversifying and Decolonising at Brookes: Future Directions
At Brookes, a BME/BAME
Staff Action Group has been set up in 2016-2017 led by Mariama Sheriff as part
of the PESE2 Inclusive, Multi-Modal Learning Environment Project focused on Diversifying the
Curriculum. My participation in this group, as a representative for the department
of Social Sciences, will take into account students and staff's contributions
to diversifying and decolonising their pedagogical experiences, and will aim to
continue the work of the two PETAL projects presented here.
According to the
website, the university-wide project's aims are to:
-
increase the
visibility of BME/BAME representation in Western contexts;
- improve critical
thinking by using taught content to build conceptual frameworks to prevent
unconscious bias and challenge assumptions;
- provide varied
biographic references (spoken, visual and printed) in taught content;
- sustain work to
internationalise reading lists;
- enable all
students to gain further insight into their fields of study by looking at a
subject through a wider range of lenses (e.g. historical, legal, ethical, cultural,
social or political dimensions).
A significant conclusion
from the event was the need for more discussion between teachers and students
at the beginning of modules or in handbooks about the diversity and coloniality
of their module; to discuss what resources are available, and to have more openness
about this availability, so that students are made aware that they might need
to consult other libraries or find different types of resources. Students might
be blaming tutors, who are themselves limited by institutional resources
themselves. Therefore, we need to work towards reducing the gap between
students’ expectations and staff limitations or conflicting pedagogical
considerations.
As participant
Mend Mariwani emphasised, the first sense in which we should diversify is in
the rapport between staff and students. Moreover, in our efforts to diversify
staff, we should avoid relying too much on what we could call 'ghettoising'
teaching and research staff, either through specialised institutions such as
the SOAS, or by expecting staff from specific backgrounds to only teach about
their background. Diversifying should instead be about ensuring that more BAME
and working class staff participate in the general curriculum reforms required,
and that all staff are involved in updating their teaching.
Mend also stressed
that a central problem with initiatives that aim to develop their own work is
unpaid labour. It is therefore crucial to institutionalise the work we do and
as Mend notes, insure 'ownership', inside and outside the academy. His work in
the media sector, for example, is particularly prone to such appropriation.
Work in this sector is essential, as Mend shockingly noted that although 30% of
London's population is constituted of people of colour, only 3% of the media
sector employs people of colour. This concern, he agued, might be more
important than diversification which has tended to not look enough into the
causes and implications of how to diversify. For Anamik Saha, 'one of the most
troubling outcomes of the commodification of diversity, as Leong outlines, is
that it pressures individuals into performing their otherness in a way that
meets with the approval of the dominant culture.’
Participation in
the Staff Action Group at Brookes and in diversifying - and decolonising - the
curriculum is therefore an essential initiative to support and provide with resources.
It will thereby be able to respond to the general and growing concern regarding
persisting inequalities of race, class and gender affecting staff and students,
and do so in a continuous, sustained and reflective way to avoid dangers of
tokenisation and quick-fix diversification. There is an urgent need for our
profession to be more aware of and able to share the various practices it is
engaging in to remedy these issues. This follows from NUS and staff-led
campaigns across UK HE institutions to acknowledge and act on staff gender pay
gaps, BAME student attainment gaps, protect low-paid and immigrant workers on
campuses, resist casualisation of teaching staff, and counter the preponderance
of Eurocentric 'white' curricula in terms of topics, authors read, and teaching
staff.
Finally, these
concerns will also be further pursued by my personal research projects on observing,
analysing and building relationships with students' 'involvement in rewriting
curricula and reworking pedagogic practice'.[6]
My past projects have looked at student
occupations and other forms of resistance to neoliberal education, and future
ones will continue to explore radical and useful ways to produce uncomfortable
pedagogies. Mend Mariwani powerfully visualised this process in his
intervention. For him, being uncomfortable, such as in a crowded space, means
we should 'move aside' and 'make space' for others. Doing so by including more
staff and by engaging more with students will only enrich our own teaching and
research. Finally, as Dalila Da Silva Lopes also related from her experience in
class, it is not sufficient that staff 'don't have time' to cover certain
topics and regions, because 'it makes us feel as if we're not important, not
relevant'. She reminded me that uncomfortable pedagogies is also about
recognising that many students are already 'uncomfortable' everyday, to say the
least, by the narrowness of the dominant curriculum. We owe it to them to raise
these questions and act on them.
[1] Broecke, S. and Nicholls, T. (2007)
Ethnicity and Degree Attainment, Dept. for Education and Skills Research Report
RW92
[2] 'Oxford Brookes' performance against widening participation
milestones', December 2014, by Sudarshana Chaudari (Strategic Planning Analyst
in the Strategic and Business Planning Office)
[3]
Routley, Laura (2016) 'Teaching Africa, Presenting, Representing and the
Importance of Who Is in the Classroom' Politics
36: 482–94
[4] Karma
Nabulsi, professor of politics at the University of Oxford, was recently The
Guardian Higher Education Network’s 2017 Inspiring Leader award winner for her
project on The Palestinian Revolution.
[5]
Grieco J, Ikenberry GJ and Mastanduno M (2015) Introduction to International Relations: Enduring Questions and
Contemporary Perspectives. London and New York: Palgrave.
[6] Louiza
Odysseos and Maïa Pal (2017) 'Towards Critical Pedagogies of the International?
Student Resistance, Other-regardedness and Self-formation in the Neoliberal
University', International Studies
Perspectives, Online
View; Kerem Nisancıoğlu and
Maïa Pal (2016) ‘Counter-Conduct in the University Factory: Locating the Occupy
Sussex Campaign’, Global Society,
Vol. 30, Issue 2, 279-300
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