It is crucial to question the methods and practices within the classrooms that have been embedded within the educational system. Colonial frameworks such as assessments are biased and have been proven to be not a great tool to fully assess a student’s growth and comprehension of the material. Yet, we still use such practices within the rigid frameworks of the curriculum. By not reimagining curricula and the classroom, we limit students’ potential to learn and master content to their highest capacity of understanding. Decolonizing curriculum means reimagining the way students engage with the material. Allowing students the expressive freedom to demonstrate their knowledge in a way that’s constructive toward the way they process and retain the material. Allowing students the creative ability to engage with the content outside the confines of standardized testing. Standardized testing doesn’t allow for students to engage and master the content, but forces students to memorize and regurgitate information that won’t stick with them long term.
The standard way of testing, teaching, and learning discluded marginalized groups. The studies and history demonstrate these non-inclusive practices yet we still implement them every semester.
Are open note exams too radical? I raise the question, in what profession are you not able to refer to your notes or colleagues?
Alternative Ways to Assess Students:
- Build a website
- Podcast
- Creating a lesson plan/curriculum for the unit
- Students teach the class in groups the material
- Presentation
- Digital essay
- Short film
- Song
- Poetry
- Art
- Cultivating quiz questions to be applicable to the student, practicing Socratic dialogue.
Educator, Steven Mintz, a professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin, discusses how to reimagine curriculum and syllabi. His article, Decolonizing the Academy offers the following insights and questions:
“A decolonized curriculum is not only more inclusive, it also problematizes established paradigms; engages with issues of power, hierarchy and equity; traces ideas’ origins; and shows how key concepts have been used for good and ill.
- How do I transform my class into a community of inquiry?
- How should I structure, sequence and pace readings and assignments?
- What is the readings’ purpose — to provide essential background and reference information, supplements to lectures, models to emulate, or texts to explicate?
- What kinds of activities and assignments are most likely to help students attain the skills and knowledge that I want them to master and how can I best assess whether they have met the course’s objectives?
Decolonizing the syllabus requires something more than the token inclusion of a number of non-Western or nonwhite authors. It’s about how to engage and motivate students and encourage them to participate actively in their own learning. Equally important, it’s about how to expose them to a wide variety of voices, perspectives and analytical frameworks; foster debate and discussion; and construct their own understanding of the subject matter.
A decolonization approach begins with a recognition that classrooms are sites of power, privilege, hierarchy, inclusion, exclusion and implicit norms about appropriate forms of argumentation and behavior that themselves reflect certain cultural presumptions about gender, race and other variables.
Among the challenges an instructor faces are how to maximize student participation, how to make every student feel a sense of belonging and how to orchestrate lively, dynamic discussions that are open and civil, where students feel able to express diverse (but grounded) opinions without fear of embarrassment or ridicule.”
Calls to decolonize the classroom make many instructors feel uncomfortable, fearing that this will contribute to a more toxic campus culture and divert attention from essential content and skills and result, instead, in an undue emphasis on systemic racism, white privilege, intersectionality, implicit bias, microaggressions and language policing, turning the classroom into a T-group.
But the problems that decolonization identifies involving bias and racial and gender equity in the classroom are real and should be openly acknowledged and addressed.
In its essence, the demand that we decolonize our curriculum, syllabi, classroom cultures, pedagogy and assessments reflects values that almost all of us favor.
- That we should subject our courses, assignments, teaching methods and assessment techniques to close, critical scrutiny to ensure that they aren’t biased or exclusionary.
- That we should purposefully integrate alternative voices, opinions and perspectives into our classes.
- That advancing equity and inclusion requires instructors to be empathetic and culturally and emotional literate and responsive, and that their courses should give students flexible ways to demonstrate mastery of class material and that their grading policies should offer students opportunities to grow.
- That instructors need to cultivate class cultures where all students feel accepted, respected, engaged, empowered, validated and well supported.” (Steven Mintz).
Additional Reading:
Andrea Williams, University of Toronto: A Review of Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything
Let’s teach for mastery — not test scores | Sal Khan
Reimagining Spaces for Learning in Higher Education | Andrew Middleton
Socratic Dialogue | University of Illinois Springfield