Credit: Sam Robinson for UCL

27 January 2025

By Gideon Sappor and Eirini Gkouskou

This blog is dedicated to Richard Harrison, who was co-chair of the IOE Department of Leadership and Learning’s decolonising and liberating the curriculum working group, until his untimely death in the spring of 2025.

In higher education, the call to decolonise and liberate the curriculum is not just a trend, it’s a transformative movement aimed at fostering equity, inclusion and critical engagement (Meda, 2020). This is borne out of the principles of fairness, equity and justice in relation to diversity that have long occupied a prominent position within social and political discourse in the UK and beyond, not least within higher education. This sustained engagement reflects an enduring societal aspiration to construct an equitable and inclusive order in which structural inequalities are dismantled and individual life chances are not predetermined by immutable characteristics such as race, socio‑economic background or place of birth (Sappor & Franks, 2025). (more…)

Credit: DC Studio via Adobe Stock.

21 October 2025

By Wilton Lodge

In recognition of Black History Month, this reflection explores what it means to engage in racially just research and scholarship. Drawing on the works of Du Bois, Fanon and Tuhiwai Smith, it considers how power, history and epistemic privilege shape knowledge production. Through three key shifts – adopting racially just epistemologies, practising reflexivity and rejecting deficit models – I invite educators to reimagine scholarship as a space for justice. (more…)

Credit: Sam Balye via Unsplash.

28 January 2025

By Sandra Leaton-Gray and David Scott, with Rita Chawla-Duggan, University of Bath

In many higher education institutions, best practice principles for curriculum design frequently reflect a model that perpetuates colonial assumptions about knowledge, learning, and assessment. These principles, ranging from “cutting-edge content” to “optimised engagement”, prioritise well-recognised measurable benchmarks and notions of corporate efficiency while failing to interrogate the power structures embedded in curricula. A decolonised curriculum, on the other hand, challenges these assumptions and offers a transformative approach to education. In this blog post we analyse what that means and how it might best be achieved, drawing on learning from other, interconnected parts of the education system. (more…)

Mainstream media barely reported the election of Francia Márquez, an Afro-Colombian woman from the bottom of the economic hierarchy, as Colombian vice-president.

4 August 2022

By Leda Kamenopoulou 

If we are serious about decolonising education, we must prioritise research from the South, and fund it properly.

‘Decolonising’ academia means challenging the dominance of knowledge produced by historically privileged contexts and groups, and it is a trend that has taken higher education by storm. In the last year alone, I noticed numerous conferences, workshops, seminars, projects and reading groups, all focused on decolonising education, psychology, curricula and reading lists, research methods and ethics, teaching and learning.

At IOE’s Department of Psychology and Human Development, we have just set up an ‘epistemic justice working group’ to help us address the power imbalances between North and South in knowledge production and sharing, by reflecting on our curricula, teaching practice, and research. It is important to clarify that ‘North’ and ‘South’ do not necessarily denote geographical location. Instead, the ‘South’ is a metaphor for spaces historically characterised by inequality, poverty, and economic, political and cultural disadvantage.

In this post, I argue that these decolonisation-themed activities will remain empty rhetoric until we are prepared to see the South as of equal value (more…)