Decolonise curriculum meaning rests on a simple claim: who gets taught, cited, and credited shapes what counts as knowledge. Decolonising the curriculum work rejects erasure and aims for fuller accounts of the past and present. In the UK, staff–student projects frame this as reviewing canons, assessment, and academic culture with epistemic justice in mind. A decolonised curriculum approach moves beyond slogans toward practices that diversify sources and rethink power in classrooms. The curriculum is not subject to a purge; it is a repair and expansion backed by sector toolkits and research.
Decolonising means correcting patterned harms in knowledge-making rather than swapping one orthodoxy for another. Philosophers call these harms epistemic injustice, where bias downgrades credibility, or shared concepts are missing for lived experiences. This frame helps explain why certain voices are sidelined across syllabi and seminars. Bringing that frame into curriculum work makes the goals concrete and teachable. It names the problem and points to remedies inside modules and departments.
Diversifying a list is a start; decolonial pedagogy asks tougher questions about method, authorship, and authority. Simply “adding” marginalised thinkers into an unchanged hierarchy keeps the hierarchy intact. Departments that take this seriously interrogate what counts as core knowledge and who decides. They also reconsider how students produce knowledge, not just what they consume. Guidance from UK universities stresses this distinction again and again.
There is also the hidden curriculum: the unspoken rules, norms, and codes that advantage students who already “speak university.” Naming and unpacking those rules is part of inclusive curriculum reform. Staff guides describe how expectations around office hours, feedback, assessment styles, and “voice” quietly gatekeep progression. Making these explicit widens participation and confidence. It is curriculum work even when no reading list changes.
UK examples show how this looks in practice. UCL’s Liberating the Curriculum programme partners staff and students to redesign modules and decolonise reading lists. Library teams curate “liberated” lists and support auditing authorship and perspective. The work happens in seminars, archives, and assessment briefs, not just policy PDFs. It is sustained, iterative, and public-facing.
Policy frameworks create incentives even when they never use the word “decolonise.” The Teaching Excellence Framework asks providers to evidence high-quality teaching and outcomes for all student groups, which many universities address through inclusive curriculum strategies. Analysts reviewing TEF submissions in 2023–24 note providers citing curriculum redesign, assessment change, and equity goals in their cases. That is a pragmatic route for aligning justice work with regulatory language. It links classroom change to provider-wide planning.
Another driver is the ethnic wage gap. Sector data show large differences in top degree outcomes, including a sizeable gap for Black students in recent cohorts. Bodies warn that the gap will not shrink without structural teaching changes. Curriculum reform is one lever among several, alongside belonging, advising, and assessment redesign. Treating the gap as a teaching problem as well as a systems problem keeps classrooms in scope.
Universities are also reassessing their own histories. Cambridge published its Legacies of Enslavement report and set out actions tied to research, collections, and education. Glasgow mapped historical enrichment from slavery-related wealth and launched a programme of reparative justice. These institutional moves do not replace course change; they create context and resources for it. Syllabi then connect archival truth to current teaching.
Common scare lines claim decolonising means “ban Plato” or “strip Aristotle.” Philosophy educators rebut that charge directly. SOAS’s Decolonising Philosophy Toolkit clarifies that re-centring African, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Indigenous thought does not delete European philosophy; it recalibrates dialogue and questions dominance. That shift is about breadth, method, and critique, not cultural vandalism. Precision matters because myths drain good-faith debate.
Student voice sits at the centre of credible change. Recent UK case studies document students co-researching, co-teaching, and co-writing rubrics with staff. Campaign hubs and resource portals across campuses keep momentum visible and accountable. That partnership model helps courses move from gesture to substance. It also distributes authorship of the curriculum’s future.
Discipline-specific work shows the range of practice. In medicine at UCL, teams have framed change around epistemic pluralism, cultural safety, and critical consciousness, adjusting case studies, assessment, and community links. In law and social sciences, audits of reading lists and case sets have quantified imbalance and redirected core content. Business schools now issue guides that translate principles into assignment briefs and seminar formats. These are not one-off swaps; they are course architectures.
So, what is decolonising education in day-to-day terms? It is building courses that recognise multiple knowledge systems, make tacit rules visible, and link assessment to fairer participation. It is UK-specific where needed, drawing on sector data, archives, and student partnerships. It rejects culture-war scripts in favour of serious teaching craft. It is the groundwork for the sections that follow, where we turn principles into steps, case studies, and checklists.
How to decolonise the curriculum in UK universities
This section turns principle into practice for decolonising the curriculum in the UK. Think people, process, and product: build partnerships, redesign teaching, and publish changes so they stick. A clear plan lists phases—baseline audit, co-design, delivery, evaluation, and iteration—with named owners and timelines. The aim is to align classroom change with department strategy and student experience. The goal is not a one-off fix but a living approach to university curriculum decolonisation that students can recognise in week one.
Start with an agreed statement of intent at the department level and anchor it to sector frameworks. The Race Equality Charter gives a whole-institution framework that links curriculum work to representation, progression, and success. Reading’s curriculum framework shows how principles, graduate attributes, and inclusive design travel into programme approval and review cycles. Tie your local plan to these levers so course redesign is rewarded, resourced, and reviewed. That alignment protects the work from being treated as a side project.
Build a formal student–staff partnership and pay student partners for labour. King’s runs targeted funds for race equity and inclusive education projects, and King’s Academy channels small grants into assessment and pedagogy pilots. These schemes are templates for resourcing co-creation inside departments. Set up a micro-grant strand for module teams, with simple reporting and a show-and-tell at the end of the term. Money plus visibility changes the culture around co-authoring curricula.
Run a reading-list audit with your library as co-lead, not a bystander. UCL’s Liberating the Curriculum guidance sets out practical steps for data-gathering, from author geographies to citation balance, and points to librarian support for “liberated” lists. Teams then revise lists alongside assessment briefs so that reading change meets learning outcomes. Publish the audit method, not just the new titles, so others can reuse it. Treat the library catalogue and decolonise reading lists pages as living documentation.
Shift pedagogy as well as content using established decolonial pedagogy toolkits. The SOAS learning and teaching toolkit is direct about methods, power, and positionality, and the Philosophy Toolkit shows what this looks like when a discipline rethinks its centre of gravity. Pair these with an Inclusive Education Framework so seminar formats, assessment modes, and feedback norms change alongside texts. This is where the hidden curriculum gets surfaced and redesigned. Make those tacit rules explicit on every module page.
Redesign assessment so students can evidence learning through multiple forms without lowering standards. Link marking criteria to concept mastery rather than one narrow register of English or a single genre. Reading’s policy on inclusive practice and its curriculum framework gives language for mapping these changes into programme approval paperwork. Add short reflective components on sources and standpoint to make knowledge production visible. Keep exemplars in an open folder so students can calibrate their work.
Case in point—medicine: integrate Mind the Gap across clinical teaching. The handbook documents how symptoms present on darker skin and plugs a long-standing gap in images, language, and diagnostic routines. Teachers embed it into OSCE stations, simulation briefs, and viva prompts so students must apply the knowledge, not only read about it. Departments then track performance on relevant stations and iterate teaching where gaps persist. Clinical accuracy and curriculum equity move together.
Case in point—STEM: translate principles into labs, problem sets, and histories of the field. Edinburgh’s practical guide names theories and turns them into weekly actions that non-specialists can apply. Staff add case studies featuring scientists outside the usual canon, attribute methods accurately, and discuss how measurement standards travelled through the empire. Tutorials then link technique to context without turning sessions into token history lectures. Students see method and politics in the same room.
Case in point—arts and design: connect curriculum to collections and industry. UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute partners with museums and national programmes to reshape acquisitions, commissions, and teaching resources. Module teams draw on these projects to brief critiques, set curatorial exercises, and update core histories. Public-facing outputs raise the stakes: students present to external panels, not just internal markers. The studio becomes a site for knowledge decolonisation as well as craft.
Use school-level hubs to keep momentum and reduce duplication. Edinburgh’s hub convenes practical sessions on access and inclusion and shares ready-to-run activities. Leeds curates readings, podcasts, and support routes so colleagues can find help fast, and it connects curriculum work with research culture. Departments can mirror this with a simple site: templates, brief banks, policy language, and a calendar of peer review. It is easier to act when examples sit one click away.
Back the work with sector toolkits that travel across disciplines. The Brilliant Club’s decolonisation toolkit sets out clear prompts on positionality and ongoing coloniality for humanities and social sciences teaching. Leeds’ reading-list project defines terms, methods, and evaluation steps in a way that module teams can borrow wholesale. Pair these with discipline toolkits from law, maths, and social sciences, collated by universities that have already done the legwork. Your local guide then becomes a remix rather than a blank page.
Close the loop with an evaluation that looks beyond satisfaction scores. Use awarding-gap data, assessment item analysis, attendance in office hours, and progression patterns to test whether changes land for different student groups. Advance HE’s anti-racist curriculum work and the Race Equality Charter provide routes for turning module-level fixes into departmental plans. Share findings in internal seminars and publish short practice notes so the sector can reuse what works. Change becomes documented practice, not only intent.
A quick checklist for steps to decolonise academic disciplines in the UK: write an intent statement tied to frameworks; fund student partnerships; audit and redesign reading lists with libraries; shift pedagogy and assessment with toolkits; run discipline-specific pilots; and evaluate against equity metrics. Name owners and timelines so the plan is trackable. Publish what you change so others can scrutinise and adopt. Keep the work grounded in classroom craft and public accountability, not only values. That is what it means to decolonise a university curriculum when it reaches students week by week.
Examples of decolonised university syllabi in UK universities
Across UK departments, working examples show what it looks like to decolonise university curriculum aims in practice. Philosophy course designers use discipline toolkits to rebalance authorship, method, and assessment while keeping rigorous standards. The history faculty’s ground module change in public reckonings with institutional pasts, linking archival truth to seminar reading. Medicine tutors integrate new clinical resources that correct long-standing representational gaps. These moves anchor decolonising the curriculum UK in day-to-day teaching rather than slogans.
Philosophy is a clear case where staff lean on an evidence-based decolonial pedagogy guide. The SOAS Decolonising Philosophy Toolkit gives prompts on canon formation, knowledge traditions, and seminar power dynamics. It frames change as expansion and critique rather than deletion, and it sets out course-design questions any module team can adopt. Teams can pair these prompts with assessment briefs that reward comparative reasoning across traditions. The result is a syllabus that meets the decolonise curriculum meaning brief without falling into tokenism.
Reading lists are another lever, and libraries are co-authors here. UCL’s Liberating the Curriculum guide shows staff how to audit lists, surface author geographies, and revise selections with librarian support. Best-practice pages translate values into checklist-level actions, from sourcing alternative editions to improving metadata so search actually surfaces diverse texts. The library guide also ties reading-list change to programme approval cycles, which is how reform survives staff turnover. This is where decolonised reading lists stop being a one-off and become infrastructure.
Clinical teaching has moved, too. Mind the Gap—a freely available handbook of clinical signs on Black and brown skin—fills a documented knowledge gap in images, descriptors, and diagnostic routines. Medical schools draw on this text to redesign cases and OSCE scenarios so students must apply knowledge across skin tones. The handbook’s open access has accelerated sector uptake. This curriculum craft is aimed at both accuracy and curriculum equity.
A student’s turning point
Malone Mukwende noticed that core materials rarely showed conditions on darker skin. He worked with staff at St George’s to co-author Mind the Gap, giving peers a resource they could actually use in exams and placements (St George’s, 2020; Black and Brown Skin, 2020– ). OSCE stations began to reflect that reality, and peers reported greater confidence in recognising rashes and cyanosis across skin tones. The change did not lower standards; it raised diagnostic accuracy. One gap was closed because a student named it and built a tool.
History departments have paired module change with sector evidence on exclusion. The Royal Historical Society’s report documented racial and ethnic inequalities in UK History teaching and practice. Departments have used its findings to justify shifts in set texts, seminar prompts, and assessment questions. Public commentary and follow-on roadmaps kept the pressure on for tangible steps. This is knowledge decolonisation that treats evidence as a mandate for course design, not only a critique.
Student-partnered projects at Kent show how co-authorship works. A peer-reviewed study analysed a cross-disciplinary, student-led reading-list project and documented method, outcomes, and staff learning. Alongside that, Kent’s manifesto materials give a snapshot of demands and recommended steps. Together, they form a replicable model for student perspectives on decolonising curricula with publishable outputs. That matters for credibility, funding, and staff workload models.
STEM faculties have published practical guidance that fits lab-based teaching. Edinburgh’s guide lists weekly actions for labs, tutorials, and assessments, from naming overlooked contributors to interrogating how measurement standards travelled through the empire. It steers staff away from box-ticking and towards method-level change. Case prompts keep technical depth intact while widening context. This is what decolonising education is: when you teach circuits, code, or calculus.
Art and design schools connect teaching to collections, commissioning, and public briefs. The University of the Arts London’s Decolonising Arts Institute has positioned course teams alongside curators and cultural partners to reshape resources and projects. Staff then set critiques and assessments that mirror those partnerships, which raises stakes and widens who gets cited and shown. Public-facing outputs turn studio work into civic conversation. That is university curricula decolonisation with audiences beyond the classroom.
Campaigns that started as student media are now reference points for course teams. “Why is My Curriculum White?” began at UCL and circulated across the sector through articles, talks, and a short film. Staff use these materials in staff-development sessions and module-design workshops to frame local audits. The campaign’s language helps staff name the hidden curriculum and address it. Syllabi change faster when the conversation is already public.
Library and consortia hubs have pooled exemplars, so departments do not need to start from zero. SCURL’s EDI resource list gathers case studies on auditing lists and building student curator roles. York’s reading-list guidance points directly to decolonised list collections and gives step-by-step review prompts for convenors. These repositories lower the barrier to action and help staff pick credible models. Centralised resources add velocity to inclusive curriculum reform.
Institutional history projects double as teaching resources. Glasgow’s slavery inquiry and reparative programme and Cambridge’s Legacies of Enslavement report supply documents, data, and research questions for seminars and dissertations. Course leaders can assign primary sources from these portals and ask students to write with institutional accountability in mind. That assignment design turns archival candour into classroom rigour. It also shows why decolonising the curriculum is not about deleting history but telling the uncomfortable truth with sources.
Taken together, these examples show how UK universities are decolonising their curriculum through repeatable patterns. Toolkits shape method, library guides reshape sourcing, and public reports anchor change in evidence. Student partnerships give momentum and test whether changes read as authentic. Discipline-specific guides translate aims into weekly teaching. The pattern is actionable, visible, and auditable across departments.
Strategies for inclusive teaching in UK universities (decolonising teaching in higher education)
A workable strategy links values to timetables, budgets, and quality cycles so decolonised university curriculum goals reach seminars and studios. Treat university curriculum decolonisation as a programme-wide project with module-level actions and public reporting. Tie actions to clear prompts that define what decolonising education is in your context, not just in principle. Publish a short intent statement on every module page so students can see how decolonising the curriculum in the UK looks in week one. Map changes to institutional frameworks, then track them like any other priority.
Anchor governance to recognised levers. The Race Equality Charter sets an institution-wide frame for representation, progression, and success, which curriculum teams can translate into course design tasks. TEF materials show providers framing inclusive curriculum change as part of “features of excellence,” which helps align teaching craft with external review. Link your department plan to both, so that work on the syllabus and curriculum equity has status and funding. This keeps the strategy visible beyond one champion.
Resource student–staff partnership as paid, scoped work. King’s College London’s race equity fund is a model: annual funding tied to inclusive education projects with public lists of awardees. Build a micro-grant strand for module teams, require a student co-lead, and schedule an end-of-term show-and-tell. Put outcomes on a public page so future cohorts can see the arc of change. Visibility changes culture as much as cash.
Audit reading lists with your library as co-lead, not a late add-on. UCL’s Liberating the Curriculum guide gives stepwise prompts for reviewing author geographies, sourcing alternatives, and improving metadata so searches actually surface diverse texts. Pair the audit with assignment tweaks, so new sources are assessed rather than just “added.” Create a tiny schema for recording changes and publish it with the list. Treat decolonise reading lists as infrastructure, not a one-off swap.
Shift method, not only materials. The SOAS Decolonising SOAS Learning and Teaching Toolkit and the 2024 Decolonising Philosophy Toolkit translate decolonial pedagogy into seminar design, lecturer positionality, and assessment formats. These guides rebut the myth that decolonising means deleting European thinkers; they lay out comparative, dialogic ways of teaching across traditions. Use them to write activity banks that any new tutor can run. Make the bank open inside your VLE.
A lecturer’s pivot
Annabel U. Lokugamage and colleagues at UCL describe reframing case-based sessions around three prompts: who is named as authority, which knowledge systems are missing, and what risks follow when those absences persist. Students annotate cases with standpoint notes and compare protocols drawn from different contexts, then justify their clinical reasoning in writing. Staff report sharper discussion and more precise use of evidence, with assessment built to reward conceptual mastery over one narrow academic register (Wong, Gishen, & Lokugamage, 2021). The brief changed the energy in the room. The method travelled to other modules because materials and rubrics were shared.
Surface the hidden curriculum so students do not need insider codes to succeed. QAA’s guidance names the unwritten rules—office hours, citation norms, seminar etiquette—and offers templates staff can adapt at the subject level. Build a two-page explainer into every module handbook and revisit it mid-term. Translate those pages for international cohorts and first-generation students, and read them aloud in week one. This is curriculum work, even when the reading list stays the same.
Redo the assessment so students can evidence learning through multiple forms without softening standards. Use programme-level policy to shift criteria toward concept mastery and method, not a single academic register. The University of Reading’s policy on inclusive practice and its curriculum framework give language that sits neatly inside approval paperwork. Add brief reflective notes on sources and standpoint to make knowledge production visible. Keep exemplars in an open folder so students can calibrate.
Use discipline-specific case packs to keep lessons concrete. In clinical teaching, Mind the Gap fixes a long-documented absence by showing how conditions present on Black and brown skin; embed it into OSCEs, viva prompts, and simulation briefs. In STEM, Edinburgh’s practical guide lists weekly actions for labs and problem sets that connect method to context without turning sessions into token history lectures. In arts and humanities, toolkit prompts can drive critique formats and curatorial exercises tied to collections. Students see method and context in the same room.
Let data steer iteration rather than sit in dashboards. Ethnicity awarding-gap data shows persistent differences in degree outcomes; combine this with item-level assessment analysis to see where changes land. Use attendance in office hours, VLE engagement, and progression patterns as early indicators for targeted tweaks. Report three numbers each term: a delivery metric, an access metric, and a progression metric. Keep the loop short and public.
Build staff capacity with a regular calendar, not ad-hoc sessions. Edinburgh’s hub and visiting-speaker series model a simple format: practical strategies workshops plus discipline talks that ground ideas in real seminars and labs. Record sessions, host slides, and tag by theme so busy colleagues can find what they need fast. Pair this with department-level reading groups tied to upcoming approvals. Community makes change stick.
Use tech for scale and transparency. Leeds’ recent work suggests using lightweight AI/NLP to track changes in reading lists over time and publish open datasets of module updates. Treat that as a service run by the library and quality office, with governance agreed up-front. Students then see progress and can suggest concrete next steps. The record becomes part of your evidence base for internal and external review.
Counter tired culture-war myths with crisp, on-page notes. The SOAS philosophy guide states plainly that broadening a post-colonial syllabus does not mean erasing Plato, Aristotle, or Kant; it means questioning dominance, method, and selection. Place a one-sentence myth-buster near the top of each module page and link to your local toolkit. Staff can then refer to a shared line when questions arise. Clarity keeps seminars focused on ideas, not rumours.
Close the loop with publishable practice notes. UCL Press case studies, TEF analysis summaries, and local reports show a path for short, citable outputs that colleagues can reuse. Draft two pages: context, change, evidence, next step, and a link to materials. Share across the sector through a simple faculty blog or repository page. Change becomes traceable, teachable, and easy to adopt elsewhere.
Why decolonising the curriculum is not about deleting history
The claim that decolonising the curriculum in the UK means binning the canon misses what the work actually does. Toolkits from SOAS state plainly that widening traditions does not equal excluding Plato, Aristotle, or Kant. The brief is to rebalance authority, question dominance, and put traditions in conversation, not to torch archives. That is the decolonise curriculum meaning in practice: addition, critique, and context. The point is accuracy, not amnesia.
When staff decolonise reading lists, they run audits, rewrite briefings, and add sources that standard searches often bury. UCL’s guidance focuses on method and metadata so tutors can diversify without gutting core texts. The outcome is a list that shows how debates travel across geographies and time, rather than a swap of one orthodoxy for another. Publishing the method makes the change transparent and durable across cohorts. That is curriculum craft, not cultural vandalism.
History faculties illustrate the principle by adding evidence, not removing it. Cambridge’s Legacies of Enslavement inquiry produced a public report and teaching resources that ask tougher questions about the university’s past. Modules then plug those primary sources into seminars and assessments. Students confront uncomfortable facts with documents rather than myths. Telling the full story deepens the study; it does not delete it.
The case for change also sits in sector data. The Office for Students tracks ethnicity awarding gaps in degree outcomes and asks providers to address differential results. Curriculum review is one route inside wider equity work, because what and how we teach shapes who thrives. Linking course design to these metrics keeps the conversation grounded in evidence, not panic. Justice and rigour share the same table here.
In History teaching specifically, public reports document unequal participation and hostile climates. The Royal Historical Society’s audit set out patterns of exclusion and practical routes for course teams to act. Departments used those findings to adjust reading, source work, and assessment without scrubbing the archive. The shift is from single-story syllabi to plural, contested narratives. That is knowledge decolonisation with citations, not slogans.
Clinical education shows how representation gaps harm accuracy. Mind the Gap corrects the near-absence of darker skin in medical imagery and descriptors and is now used in OSCE stations and case teaching. That change makes diagnosis safer while preserving medical rigour. Nothing is “deleted”; necessary knowledge is added and applied. Precision is the north star.
Media flashpoints often frame decolonising as “sidelining Socrates.” A familiar talking point claims toolkits prefer non-Western thinkers to Aristotle, as if teaching were a zero-sum game. The SOAS philosophy guide answers the charge directly: broaden the map, interrogate method, keep dialogue alive. Myth thrives in headlines; clarity lives in course design. The documentation already says the quiet part out loud.
Libraries are co-authors of this work, and their role pushes against the “erasure” story. Reading-list platforms and librarian partnerships make diverse sources easier to find, cite, and assess. Staff publish best-practice pages and exemplar lists so colleagues can adapt rather than guess. That record-keeping preserves contested traditions side by side. The archive grows; it does not shrink.
Regulation also pushes towards inclusion without prescribing content. TEF asks providers to evidence excellence in course content and delivery for all students, which institutions often address through inclusive curriculum strategies. QAA analysis of TEF submissions describes “features of excellence” where providers connect pedagogy, content, and outcomes. The hook is quality, not censorship. Aligning the Teaching Excellence Framework decolonisation work with module changes keeps debate calm and practical.
Call the approach what it is: plural tradition, critical method, transparent standards. Decolonial pedagogy reframes assessment so students can demonstrate mastery through more than one academic register while holding the line on difficulty. It names the hidden curriculum, so insider codes do not decide grades. It tests claims against evidence from multiple knowledge systems and teaches students to argue well across them. That is how university curriculum decolonisation strengthens, not weakens, intellectual muscle.
The fear that debate will be policed fades when work is open. Cambridge’s public repository and UCL’s visible list-guides let anyone check sources, methods, and changes. Departments put audit schemas, exemplars, and rubrics on the record, so critics can argue with specifics rather than rumours. Openness drains heat and supports peer review. Transparency is policy’s best friend.
So, what is decolonising education when the panic subsides? It is telling the whole, uncomfortable truth with better sources, fairer methods, and clearer expectations. It is widening the circle of what counts as knowledge while keeping scrutiny sharp. It is the opposite of deletion, because learning deepens when students test claims across traditions. That is how we decolonise university curriculum without trimming history to fit anyone’s comfort.
Steps to decolonise academic disciplines in UK universities
Start with a shared playbook that links discipline habits to epistemic justice, so decolonise university curriculum work lands in labs, studios, and seminars. Define decolonise curriculum meaning as method plus materials: who is cited, how knowledge is made, and what assessment rewards. Publish a one-page intent on each module, using decolonial pedagogy prompts that staff can apply next week. Pair this with a library-led audit so teams actually decolonise reading lists and fix metadata that hides non-Eurocentric sources. Use UK resources and hubs so your plan reads as decolonising the curriculum UK, not a generic manifesto.
Philosophy: adopt the SOAS Decolonising Philosophy Toolkit as your scaffold. Map each core topic to at least two traditions, then set comparative prompts that test argument across canons. Add assessment options beyond a single register of academic English while holding standards on reasoning and evidence. Include a short positionality note where students explain their interpretive choices. Publish your mapping so that what decolonising education shows up on the page.
History: anchor change in published audits and archives. Use the Royal Historical Society’s reports to justify shifts in survey modules, seminars, and source exercises. Set assessments that pair canonical texts with materials from global and subaltern archives. Build seminars around institutional collections and contested memory, not just secondary reading. Track changes against student outcomes and participation.
Law: create an anti-racist pedagogy plan across the qualifying core, then show it inside briefs and case selections. Use Kent’s resource to redesign torts, public law, and contract seminars. Build reading lists that include Global South jurisprudence and critical traditions alongside dominant casebooks. Add reflective case notes on how legal concepts travelled through the empire and trade. Keep a public reading list to document the shift.
Medicine: correct representational gaps and shift clinical method. Embed Mind the Gap into OSCEs, simulation briefs, and viva prompts so students can diagnose across skin tones. Use UCL’s framework—epistemic pluralism, cultural safety, critical consciousness—to refresh case design and feedback. Require brief reflective notes on standpoint in clinical write-ups. Measure gains at the item level, not just satisfaction.
STEM & Engineering: make context routine without watering down technical depth. Edinburgh’s practical guide lists weekly actions for labs, problem sets, and tutorials. Attribute methods accurately, name overlooked contributors, and discuss how standards travelled through the empire and industry. Use short “method + context” prompts in lab books. Keep a living examples bank inside your VLE.
Architecture & Built Environment: link studio critique to urban histories of race and space. Use the open-access Race, Space and Architecture curriculum to frame briefs that read the city through colonial and postcolonial movements. Pair site analysis with archival material on planning, dispossession, and design codes. Bring Bartlett resources and seminars into studio calendars. Publish pin-up rubrics that reward historical accountability alongside form and function.
Geography & Earth/Environmental Sciences: move from extractive fieldwork to reciprocal practice. The Royal Geographical Society’s HE resources curate methods and departmental culture shifts that teams can lift and run. Combine those with scholarship on decolonising geographical knowledges to set field briefs with community partners and shared outputs. Teach students to name data politics in GIS and remote sensing exercises. Audit who gets cited in methods lectures.
Psychology: pair BPS-aligned materials with peer-reviewed guidance so theory and assessment change together. Use discipline perspectives to map decolonising aims onto topics like development, cognition, and mental health. Add culturally situated case studies, expand measures beyond WEIRD samples, and diversify assessment genres. Keep a seminar on the discipline’s colonial histories and methods. Publish a reading list addendum that explains each inclusion.
Economics & Business/Management: change the models you teach, not just the authors you assign. A sector guide sets out questions, examples, and course-level redesign prompts for business schools. In economics, use the Economics Network hub and D-Econ resources to widen methods, cases, and histories. Ask students to track how theories travelled via empire, finance, and trade, then test them against non-OECD data. Show your alternative sources in a public repository.
English Literature: treat canon as a conversation rather than a boundary wall. A recent Cambridge collection gives staff a research-led map for rebuilding survey and period modules. Department pages at Liverpool and elsewhere translate that stance into course statements students can actually see. Set assignments that trace how English as a category formed through empire, translation, and resistance. Keep comparative rubrics that reward method and close reading across traditions.
Art, Design & Fashion: connect teaching to collections, commissioning, and public briefs that widen who gets shown and cited. The UAL Decolonising Arts Institute is a ready partner: use its programmes and archives to brief critiques and curatorial exercises. Publish student work in open showcases with reflective notes on sourcing, influence, and method. Build an assessment that values community engagement and citation repair alongside craft. Keep industry panels diverse and brief them on your framework.
Close with visibility, data, and iteration so university curriculum decolonisation stays accountable. Share change logs per module, with reading-list diffs, assessment tweaks, and student co-author roles. Use discipline-specific KPIs that go beyond satisfaction and track progression, attainment, and participation. Keep a public methods page so colleagues can reuse your templates. Those are the steps to decolonise academic disciplines written as practice, not posture.
How students are leading curriculum reform — student perspectives on decolonising curriculum
Students keep this work honest, and their message is consistent: decolonising the curriculum in the UK should be co-created, not handed down. Partnership frameworks already describe what that looks like in practice, with shared decision-making and visible roles. When students help set aims, design audits, and present findings, change lands faster in seminars and studios. This is where epistemic justice shifts from slogan to timetable. Sector guidance on partnership gives departments a working blueprint to start today.
A recurring theme is credibility. Students say they can spot the difference between a token reading swap and a genuine plan that changes assessment, feedback norms, and tacit rules in the hidden curriculum. They want clear ownership, paid roles, and public timelines they can track. When that happens, the climate in seminars changes because standards are transparent and shared. Partnership stops being a buzzword and becomes a teaching craft.
Awarding-gap data frames these conversations with stakes. Students point to the ethnicity awarding gap and ask departments to show how course design responds, not just welfare services. University and sector reports give hard numbers and case studies that course teams can act on. Teaching then links content, method, and outcomes for different groups, rather than hoping culture will fix itself. The call is simple: show the evidence, then show the change.
Student campaigns built much of the early language. “Why Is My Curriculum White?” spread across campuses because it named a pattern and offered a public archive of talks, articles, and film. Staff now use that bank to open workshops and frame local audits. It helps teams move from defensive debates to practical checks. The conversation becomes: what do we teach, why, and who decides.
A cohort takes the mic
At Brighton, a small student group co-led a decolonising project with staff, wrote up methods, and published reflections in a peer-reviewed journal (Hall et al., 2021). They documented reading-list diffs, rewrote assessment briefs to reward the comparative method, and presented changes in a public forum. The process made timelines visible and created a template that new cohorts could lift. Staff credit the model with shifting seminar tone and assessment outcomes. The vignette reads like a manual because the group published everything.
Students also warn about dilution. They see the risk of glossy statements that never reach seminars, and they ask for concrete steps, timelines, and open repositories of changes. Scholarship flags the same concern and argues for clear concepts, positionality, and conduct — all visible to students. Publishing your schema, diffs, and sample assignment answers that call. Sunlight beats spin.
Partnership is not just humanities-led. In clinical teaching, students want OSCE stations and cases that require application across skin tones, backed by open resources they can study. Embedding Mind the Gap into assessment rubrics shows respect for patient safety and learner accuracy. Students then see fairness and rigour move together. The signal is accuracy first, with inclusivity as a method, not garnish.
Students’ unions and charities have kept the agenda alive between terms. NUS and SOS-UK push for student leadership and co-creation in curriculum work, often tying it to sustainability and justice. Their surveys and toolkits give unions and course reps language to bring into committees. Departments gain ready-made prompts for consultations and pilots. The pipeline from motion to module becomes shorter.
Where students meet resistance, they ask for process clarity. They want to know who signs off on changes, how pilots become policy, and where feedback loops live. Partnership frameworks help translate those questions into templates and meeting formats. Staff can then publish a simple flow: propose, trial, evaluate, adopt. The map reduces friction and builds trust.
Students also ask for proof that change affects outcomes, not only optics. They point to sector reviews showing the gap has not closed and, in places, has widened. Data-literate conversations follow: which items in assessments show differential performance, and which teaching moves help. Teams that publish item-level reviews and next steps keep students at the table as co-analysts. Numbers meet pedagogy in public.
The research base backs these instincts. Reviews of UK work find that successful initiatives pair reading-list diversification with pedagogy, assessment reform, and student engagement. Projects led by small staff–student groups can scale when institutions give them time and infrastructure. That is exactly the partnership model students ask for in boards and forums. Alignment beats heroics.
Students close with the same ask everywhere: treat student perspectives on decolonising curricula as evidence, not PR. Bring them into governance, pay them for labour, and show the change log. The prize is better teaching, sharper assessment, and a curriculum that prepares graduates to work across knowledge systems. That is what it means to decolonise a university curriculum when students co-author the brief. It is pedagogy you can see, not a promise you can’t.
From pledge to practice + CTA
Change sticks when it is visible, funded, and assessed against outcomes that matter. Departments can publish a one-page intent for each module, a living change log, and an open folder of exemplars that show decolonise curriculum meaning in action. Libraries should co-own audits, quality teams should wire updates into approval cycles, and students should be paid co-authors with named roles. Tie these moves to awarding-gap data and publish item-level reviews so everyone can see where teaching is landing. Then keep iterating against a calendar that treats university curriculum decolonisation as core business, not an extra.
Call to action
- If you lead a programme: Post your module-by-module change log this term, name owners and dates, and link to your assessment exemplars.
- If you teach a module: Run a reading-list audit with your library, add a short positionality note to your brief, and publish two new exemplars.
- If you’re in a library or quality team: Stand up a simple “liberated lists + diffs” page and fold it into programme review paperwork.
- If you’re a student: Ask to join the course team as a paid partner, push for public timelines, and bring a short case pack to the table.
- If you sit in senior leadership: Ring-fence micro-grants, set three termly metrics (delivery, access, progression), and require public reporting across schools.
The next week can look different to the last. Start with a one-page intent per module, a paid student partnership, and a library-led audit. Then set a date to publish your first diffs, your first exemplars, and your first item-level review. Keep the record open so students can see themselves in the story and critics can argue with specifics. That is decolonising the curriculum in the UK, turning it into work you can actually read, run, and refine.
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