Is Moodle a Platform to Decolonise the University Curriculum? Lecturers’ Reflections

Abstract

This article presents the results of an interpretive case study of three lecturers teaching a physical science module. The purpose of the study was to explore the lecturers’ reflections on their understanding of the Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (Moodle) as a platform to decolonise the university curriculum. Purposive, with convenience, sampling identified the three most accessible lecturers. An emailed reflective activity, one-on-one semi-structured interviews, and Moodle observations were utilised for data production. Inductive and deductive processes were used to ensure guided analysis of the produced data. The article argues that the Moodle learning management platform (LMP) has the potential to decolonise the university curriculum. The study concluded that the lecturers reflected well in all curriculum signals based on their informal, formal and personal LMPs in order to address all the needs. Consequently, the study recommends that lecturers understand the curriculum signals of each Moodle platform, before teaching and learning take place, in order to to decolonise the university curriculum.     

From Pentecostalism to politics: mass literacy and community development in late colonial Northern Ghana

This article takes as its starting point a strike among African trainee literacy workers in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1952. While the existing literature tends to concentrate on the tensions and contradictions in British colonial education policy, this article uses the strike to investigate how these agendas were experienced by, and engendered opposition from, literacy workers on the ground. It argues that, in their efforts to link mass literacy to community development, and to secure legitimacy for their campaigns, colonial officials depended heavily upon the authority of chiefs. This strategy backfired because it ignored both shorterterm instances of chiefly venality, and the longer history of colonial taxation and labour demands which had been enforced on Northern peoples through chiefs. The African trainees went on strike because they were astute in recognising how different forms of educational provision fitted into the re‐ordering of local, regional and national power relations as the Gold Coast approached Independence.     

Britannia’s children grow up: English education at empire’s end

In 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union: over-65s were more than twice as likely to vote for Brexit as under-25s, amidst campaign rhetoric steeped in colonial nostalgia. This article explores how this generation was taught in many English state schools to imagine Britain’s place in the world during a period of rapid decolonisation from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Drawing on history and geography textbooks, surviving school-work, BBC broadcasts to schools and school wall-maps, it is argued that English schools embellished the idea of a powerful Commonwealth to depict the continuation of Britain’s global might during dramatic imperial decline. Attempts to reconcile decolonisation with the famous red-bespattered ‘imperial’ map are particularly revealing. By presenting decolonisation as the continuation of empire by other means, many educationists attempted to minimise the external changes to Britain’s global status, allowing imperial ideas to survive in schools into the 1970s.     

Designing an Australian Indigenous Studies curriculum for the twenty-first century: Nakata's ‘cultural interface’, standpoints and working beyond binaries

We discuss the recent reworking of Murdoch University's Australian Indigenous Studies major. For the discipline to realise its charter of decolonising knowledges about Indigenous peoples, it is necessary to move Indigenous Studies beyond the standard reversalist and unsustainable tropes that valorise romanticised notions of Indigeneity and Indigenous knowledges and pedagogies over those of a demonised ‘western’ other. Drawing on Martin Nakata's contribution to scholarship on the future of Indigenous Studies, we argue that his problematisation of the cultural interface provides a discipline-based rationale for working beyond the Indigenous–western binary, and that his notion of standpoints encourages the ongoing production of diverse, historically and politically informed scholarship, while preparing students to enter the workforce with a contemporary, ethically sophisticated grasp of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations, which is consistent with the decolonial goals of the discipline.     

Asian internationalism: Bandung’s echo in a colonial metropolis

Abstract

This paper argues that two conflicting discourses of internationalism stood in uneasy counterpoint and contention in the Asian arena of the 1950s, reflected in the legacies of the Bandung conference. The first drew on a language of global citizenship and rights. The second saw the international system as a source of strength and support for state sovereignty, and state‐directed programmes of national development. The remainder of the paper uses the case of late‐colonial Singapore to examine the intersection of these two discourses of internationalism. An Asian internationalism, which spanned to include Africa over the course of the 1950s, became one of a stock of narratives that made Singapore’s ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ possible, in the worlds of the hawkers, the dockworkers and the agriculturalists. The political aspirations of these groups were sacrificed, ultimately, to the goal of disciplined national development, supported by an international order that had closed in to defend the interests of state power.     

Sea Country: navigating Indigenous and colonial ontologies in Australian environmental education

In this paper, we contribute to land education research by focusing on the Torres Strait Islands in the Coral Sea at the far north of tip of Cape York, Australia. We describe the Torres Strait Islander concept of Sea Country and Torres Strait Ailan Kastom (translated as ‘Island Custom’). We then analyse some of the ways in which settler colonisation has challenged these ways of knowing and being. Our inquiry looks at how Sea Country is positioned within two contemporary Australian examples of environmental education: firstly, within the new Australian Curriculum cross-curriculum priorities that mandate that special attention be given to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures and also to the concept of sustainability; and secondly, within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s Sea Country Guardians programme This analysis of environmental education curriculum and practice identifies the ways in which the concept of Sea Country and the Indigenous cosmology it represents are simultaneously supported and ignored in the current Australian environmental education context.     

Art‐Based Action Research for Art Education in the North

This article introduces the art‐based action research (ABAR) methodology as part of the international discussion of art‐based educational research (ABER). The participatory and dialogical approach of ABAR was inspired by a consideration of the pressure for change in art education stemming from the practices of relational and dialogical contemporary art. The need for ABAR as a tool of culturally decolonising, sustainable art education research was identified in multidisciplinary collaboration with the University of Lapland's (UoL) northern and circumpolar network. The methodology was developed collaboratively by a group of art educators and researchers at UoL to support the artist/teacher/researcher with professional skills for seeking solutions to recognised problems and to promote future actions and aspirations in the changing North and Arctic. This article describes how ABAR has been used in school projects, in doctoral theses and finally in a development project with an impact on regional development in the North. These examples show how art education developed through the ABAR method has supported decolonisation, revitalisation and cultural sustainability in schools, communities and businesses.     

Decolonising the curriculum: using graduate qualities to embed Indigenous knowledges at the academic cultural interface

The context of this paper is a strategy at a large Australian university that involves embedding a new graduate quality ‘cultural competence’ and lifting the profile of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, experiences and histories. It has been argued that the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges is essential for the decolonisation of our higher education institutions. Decolonisation involves removing the barriers that have silenced non-Western voices in our ‘multi-cultural’ higher education system and combatting the epistemic injustices of a system dominated by Western thought. In this paper, we suggest that our university’s suite of graduate qualities can provide a locus for work at the cultural interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges. While these qualities may be firmly embedded within Western ways of knowing, being and doing, they can nonetheless be used to interrogate and revisit Western disciplinary knowledge construction and pedagogy so as to help bring about institutional change.     

Child as method: implications for decolonising educational research

This paper advances an approach, ‘child as method’, as a resource for interrogating models of development in childhood and education. Kuan-Hsing Chen’s (2010) book Asia as method has generated interest across childhood and educational studies. Here ‘child as method’ is presented as a related intervention. Just as Asia as method (re)considers the status of the national and transnational, so ‘child as method’ helps explicate the ways ‘child’ and ‘development’ are linked across economic, sociocultural and individual trajectories. The example of translation is discussed in relation to sociocultural approaches and how together these might inform childhood and educational studies debates. The notion of ‘method’ at work (as framework, technique or narrative) is also clarified as informed by feminist and decolonisation approaches. It is argued that ‘child as method’ offers strategies for resisting abstraction and remaining attentive to forces and relations of (re)production at issue within adult–child and child-state-development relations.     

Indigenous learners: what university educators need to know

Abstract

Canadian citizens of Indigenous ancestry have statistically lower than national averages with respect to secondary and postsecondary completion rates. In an attempt to understand and assist Indigenous university students in Ontario, the purpose of the study was to identify teaching and learning strategies and support systems for Indigenous students that will result in increased academic success and retention among Indigenous youth and adults attending university. The results were summarised in an introductory handbook for faculty and staff at Nipissing University, a destination of choice for many Indigenous students pursuing undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees. The specific purpose of the handbook was to provide an introduction to the diversity of cultures and their related perspectives amongst our Indigenous students. The literature and the results provide specific pathways for educators to begin to decolonise their pedagogy to support success for Indigenous university learners.