In the context of the student-led #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests, there has been a renewed call for the decolonisation of the higher education curriculum. This has been underpinned by an often-unexamined assumption that the curriculum is largely an artefact of colonial and/or apartheid education. A range of views emerged: from one arguing that a decolonised curriculum must place at its epistemic centre writers and views from Africa, to those demanding that such a curriculum must expunge all vestiges of ‘Western’ thought. There has been a constant refrain that indigenous knowledge be placed at the core of the curriculum. This chapter examines what these ideas imply for curriculum and pedagogy in higher education, specifically as it relates to initial teacher education (ITE). It assesses multiple and contested scholarly understandings of decolonisation as they relate to the curriculum (Hountondji 1990; Garuba 2015; Mama 2015; Mamdani 2016).

We focus on ITE, which connects the school to the university. The focus in decolonisation debates on disciplines such as philosophy, literature and the sciences in decolonisation of the higher education curriculum ignores the importance of the decolonising agenda to the preparation of teachers, and fails to see the interconnection between higher education in general, teacher education in particular and the education system as a whole (Mamdani 2007). We build upon a meta-analysis of teacher education curricula at five selected universities. The meta-analysis provided a snapshot of the curricula for final-year ITE students in the year following the rise of the South African student movements and the call for the decolonisation of university curricula. We explored the written literature and topics that lecturers formally cover in their modules. In addition, we conducted semi-structured interviews with teacher education lecturers (one black female, two black males, one white female and one white male).

This chapter reveals what a more comprehensive decolonisation of higher education might mean, particularly as it relates to the transformation of an education system marked by historic racial, class and spatial inequalities (Bray et al. 2010; Soudien 2012; Sayed, Motala and Hoffmann 2017). It seeks to shed light on a contemporary education policy debate regarding what a transformed higher education curriculum might entail. In particular, it focuses on initial teacher preparation in higher education, challenging analyses that see school and higher education as disconnected elements.