Global higher education has been transformed over the last ten years with increasing student access and entry into universities, student mobility, diversity of provision, research dynamics and technology. There are now around 254 million students currently enrolled in universities around the world and 6.4 million of these students are studying abroad (UNESCO). The UK student population according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency in 2021–22, is 2,182,560 students studying at UK higher education providers, of those 2,182,560 students: 

• Undergraduate: 1,734,805
• Postgraduate: 444,760
• Full time: 1,630,505
• Part time: 552,060
• Students from the UK: 2,182,560
• Students from the EU: 120,140
• 559,825 students from non-EU countries (HESA, 2024).

The Bologna Process initiated in 1999 enabled the establishing of a European Higher Education Area (EHEA), with the aim to facilitate student mobility, increase employability, and enhance the competitiveness of European higher education globally. The expansion of students also includes an increase in the number of refugee students in European universities (see Jungblut et al 2018), which has led to some universities such as universities in Turkey, to face challenges in ensuring equitable experiences and outcomes for a diverse student body (see Gursoy et al, 2023). 

Thus, the expansion and commercialisation of global higher education has resulted in students experiencing marginalisation and undervaluing in university settings and within their academic experiences (see Ahmet, 2020 and Arday, 2021). The response from universities and education policy makers has been weak, often applying a blanket policy on ‘inclusivity’ and standardisation to HE policies and learning. I therefore make the argument that universities, specifically, Western and Westernised universities need to rethink and rewrite their approaches to education by fully immersing themselves in decolonial praxis.

Decolonial praxis aims to connect personal transformation with teaching methods (pedagogies), resources, and practices. Unlike diversity policies that mainly tackle recruitment challenges, decolonial praxis addresses classroom environment issues, pedagogies, and curricula influenced by Western perspectives.

In a recent piece entitled ‘Struggling for the anti-racist university: learning from an institution-wide response to curriculum decolonisation’ by Hall et al (2021), the authors suggest that the project of decolonising is both a critique of institutions and a critique of knowledge, as it questions the following: 

• The role of the University in reproducing cultures and structures of privilege and power.
• The creation of relationships of inclusion and exclusion between staff and students, institutions and stakeholders, and institutions and society.
• The dominance of white, male views of reality (ontology) and ways of producing knowledge about the world (epistemology).
• The hegemonic (dominant and manufactured) position of knowledge generated in the Global North in addressing crises.
• The value of alternative histories and conceptions of a meaningful education and life.
• The relationship between, first, economic value and value-for-money, and second, humane values and human flourishing.

(Hall, et al, 2021: 903). 

In the UK, external bodies such as the Office for Students (OfS) have forced universities into monitoring their student outcomes and experiences through regulatory commitments such as the Teaching Excellence Framework and the Access and Participation Plan. The rise of managerialism and audit culture in higher education has led to universities implementing what could be understood and experienced as performative and commodified Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies, which only serve to enable universities to ignore decolonising and retain their power. 

Several UK universities have undertaken efforts to review and revise Eurocentric curricula. Others have focused on teaching practices, promoting inclusive pedagogies, and creating welcoming classrooms or focusing on student belonging and/or student partnerships (see Pedler, 2022). Other interventions involve focusing on ‘inclusive’ teaching methods and materials, acknowledging diverse learning styles, and attempting to address biases through ongoing self-reflection (see for example, Kingston University Excellence in the inclusive curriculum initiative, 2017). These efforts are in alignment with the suggestions made by Hall et al (2021), who emphasise the need for universities to critically evaluate their roles in reproducing cultures and structures of privilege and power and to embrace the value of alternative histories and conceptions of meaningful education and life. By addressing these issues, Western universities are gradually moving towards a more equitable and decolonized education system. However, the interventions proposed by universities come with some challenges. I would like to focus on the range of curriculum review tools that two UK universities have developed and which have become central to their teaching and learning resources, specifically the University College London (UCL) Curriculum Health Check, SOAS’s Decolonising Learning and Teaching Toolkit for Programme and Module Convenors and the DeMontford University Leicester Decolonisng DMU toolkit. In the next section, I will outline resources from these three universities that teachers can use for the initial stages of their curriculum reviews. 

The UCL Curriculum Health Check is a tool that was co-developed with staff and students at UCL as part of their work on reducing grade inequities between students. The tool is designed to support staff in the review of their curriculums. There are four key areas of the UCL Inclusive Curriculum Health Check that academic staff are expected to engage with: 

1. Curriculum Content: Encouraging the inclusion of diverse perspectives and materials that explore different data, models, and theories related to ethnic diversity, even within historical contexts.
2. Teaching and Learning: Promoting strategies that ensure all students, regardless of background, can engage fully. This includes creating opportunities for discussion, using diverse reading lists, and developing students’ critical thinking and awareness of different perspectives.
3. Assessment: Offering a variety of assessment forms to ensure all students have the chance to practice and succeed. This includes formative assessments, individualised feedback, and opportunities for students to reflect on feedback and marks.
4. Student Engagement: Involving students in the review process of programmes, looking at content and attainment from an ethnic diversity perspective.

Similarly, the SOAS Decolonising Learning and Teaching Toolkit guide aimed at helping programme and module convenors integrate decolonising principles into their teaching and learning practices. The toolkit is designed to make teaching more responsive to issues of colonial and racialised privilege and discrimination. It was developed by the Decolonising SOAS Working Group, which included staff and students from various departments across SOAS. The toolkit focuses on the following key areas: 

1. Curriculum Content: It provides suggestions on ways to diversify the curriculum to include a wider range of perspectives and voices, particularly those that have been historically marginalised.
2. Pedagogical Approaches: The toolkit encourages the use of critical and anti-racist pedagogies, which involves questioning traditional power dynamics in the classroom and fostering an inclusive learning environment.
3. Assessment Methods: It offers recommendations for decolonising assessment practices, such as incorporating diverse forms of evaluation that reflect different ways of knowing and understanding.
4. Case Studies: The toolkit includes practical examples and case studies, such as the transformation of specific modules to reflect decolonising principles.
5. Implementation: Unlike the UCL curriculum health check, the SOAS toolkit provides guidance on how to use the toolkit within departments, encouraging collaborative efforts between staff and students.

The third example is from DeMontford University Leicester, which has developed a range of resources as part of their wider intervention entitled ‘Decolonising DMU’. The different resources/toolkits all target different members of the university from academic staff, professional staff, and students. They have identified and created resources in the following areas:

1. Understanding Decolonising
2. Developing Decolonising
3. Embedding Decolonising in Professional Services
4. Embedding Decolonising in Academic Practice
5. Embedding Decolonising in Academic Practice: Examples of Practice
6. Decolonising research.

The approach taken by DMU is more holistic and considers decolonising across different areas of the university from research to teaching all the way through to administration. This is an innovative example of having a whole university approach to decolonialising. The purpose of praxis is to bridge the gap between theory and practice, ensuring that decolonising efforts are not just theoretical discussions but are actively implemented in daily academic and administrative activities. This ensures that all members of the university community are accountable.

Recent scholarships on inclusive classrooms in higher education often emphasizes incorporating diverse identities into the existing frameworks, rather than redesigning the frameworks themselves. In my role at the university, I am dedicated to supporting academic staff in developing 'inclusive education.' A significant aspect of this endeavour is focused on the centralisation of race and decoloniality in the realm of teaching and learning. It is important to acknowledge that centering race within a predominantly white, Western global university comes with its share of challenges and resistance.

As part of my work and identity, I firmly contend that the process of decolonising should not merely aim to assimilate the marginalised into the existing structures of oppression, but rather to fundamentally transform these structures to ensure the equitable recognition of all knowledge and people. To approach decolonising in a thoughtful and transformative manner, we must transcend the simplistic replacement of one canon with another; it needs a profound examination and critique of the norms historically upheld by systems of whiteness and power, rather than perpetuating the status quo of repressive tolerance (Marcuse, 1969) often seen within academic institutions. 

My approach to inclusive education strives to encourage the university to centralise alternative and critical perspectives, rather than 'othering' them. This objective is pursued through the following mechanisms: 

1. Decolonising from the top: balancing grassroots with institutional leadership - whilst grassroots work is an important part of decolonising, it is essential that the leadership/institutional governance are also leading in the dismantling of colonial legacies through policies and change.
2. Centering and valuing - at the core of any work on decolonising should be the centering and amplifying of those whose voices and histories have been silenced and marginalised.
3. Rethinking and rewriting education - to decolonise knowledge, the university must first begin with acknowledging that it is a product of colonisation and that knowledge and ways of teaching and learning are linked to the practices and works of Western and Westernised knowledge.
4. Acknowledging the relationship between decolonising and racialisation – the process of racialisation and creation of racial hierarchies is a product of colonialism, and this has of course had an impact on those inside and outside the western university.
5. Representing beyond tokenism - as I have argued previously, universities often point to the existence of diversity policies, equality and diversity committees as evidence that they could not possibly be racist. However, to actively centre the voices and bodies of racialised knowledge and individuals, western universities must go beyond tokenism and decentre Eurocentric powers and knowledge.

I have developed the Inclusive Education Mapping Exercise after a comprehensive review of tools such as those developed and actioned at UCL and SOAS. The purpose of the inclusive education mapping exercise is like that of the DMU decolonising strategy in that it separates out diversification, inclusive pedagogies, assessment, and decolonising to support teachers in their work and learning on decolonial praxis and asks teachers to also reflect on their own positionality. The focus of the mapping exercise is on three key areas: curriculum enhancement, inclusive pedagogies, and assessment. 

1. Curriculum Enhancement: refers to the ways in which course content, aims and outcomes can be enhanced. This can partly be achieved through diversification and decolonising.

1.1 Diversification refers to including global and varied perspectives in course content. The purpose is to make visible the perspectives and identities often marginalised. It also involves learning and developing the canon further. 

1.2 Decolonial praxis refers to a process of critical reflection and challenging Eurocentric modes of thinking which are linked to colonialism. The focus on epistemologies as part of this mapping exercise is to acknowledge that knowledge itself has been colonised. 

 2. Inclusive Pedagogies: the focus of inclusive pedagogies should not be on embedding students into a system which excludes them from the outset but rather on transforming and democratising our pedagogies. Inclusive pedagogy recognises the need for transparency and fluency in various academic protocols, environments, and confidence in one’s entitlement to be there cannot be taken for granted but needs to be cultivated. 

3. Assessment: in designing inclusive assessment for our students, we need to think about the choice of assessment (s), the timing of the assessments in relation to their learning on our course and on other courses on the programme, about how we prepare students for their assessments as well as approaches to marking and feedback. While ensuring that assessment procedures are valid, rigorous and uphold academic standards, we should also ensure that individual students are neither disadvantaged nor advantaged. 

Purpose of the Mapping Exercise 

We wanted to encourage educators to reflect on their practice through a focus on curriculum enhancement, inclusive pedagogies and assessment. This exercise has been designed to motivate discussion and action around inclusive education, and we suggested that colleagues discuss their narratives in the following sessions and highlight the importance of conversation and dialogue: 

• Departmental meetings
• Programme team meetings
• Teaching away days
• Discussion with a peer in your department or another department

This intervention is an attempt to engage teachers in self-reflection of both their identities and curriculums. The innovative approach of mapping education allows teachers to focus on targeted areas, enabling a staged approach, which is what most teachers and educators struggle with. Alongside the mapping exercise, we also offer workshops to support staff in the exercise and facilitate away days based on the narratives from the exercise. This work requires a multi-layer approach in stages and, ultimately, fosters a reflective and adaptive educational approach to empower teachers to enhance their practice and value their students better.