Introduction

Curricula are critical to student and staff learning, retention and success (Naylor & Mifsud, 2020). The notion of planning, designing and delivering curricula is imperative to HE pedagogy. Increasing conversations and discourses are concerned with decolonising the curriculum and abolishing archaic curricula designs to challenge racism in both the overt and covert curriculum.

In a report by David Batty (2020) in The Guardian newspaper, only 24 out of 128 universities responding to freedom of information (FoI) requests declared a commitment to decolonising the curriculum; and another 84 universities declared a commitment to making their curriculum more diverse, international or inclusive. Despite this, many current efforts to decolonise curricula are targeted specifically to limited disciplines such as History, Art, Drama or English. Of the 24 universities committed to decolonising curricula, just nine have put this in writing, with only two including it in their core strategic plan (Batty, 2020).

To decolonise the curriculum is to critique Eurocentric perspectives that dominate the UK HE and to question how, or which, aspects of curricula (re)produce inequalities. It is not an effort to exclude knowledges or remove British history, but to provide a formal space that openly interrogates the ways that Eurocentric knowledge is positioned in academia (for example, Saini & Begum, 2020). It calls for the inclusion of diverse knowledges, diverse studies and diverse scholars to resist the longstanding omission of worldwide perspectives (for example, Gabriel, 2019). It calls for transparency and for universities to acknowledge the contemporary knowledge positioning is rooted in, and reflective of, colonial legacies (for example, Gyamera & Burke, 2018).

To date, we have seen increasing conversations around decolonising the curriculum across the whole education sector, with HE students proactively requesting for this cause over the last five years (Arshad et al, 2021). Student calls to decolonise curricula have led much of the change we have seen across universities to date. In 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall1 movement started a conversation at the University of Oxford that sought to raise awareness of the colonial legacy of the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oxford. It further encouraged conversations around curriculum representation and discriminatory practices that saw Black, Asian and minority ethnic students under-represented. Also in 2015, Why is my Curriculum so White? was founded at the University College London, where universities were dencouraged to engage in conversations around representation across reading lists and course content.