Decolonising curriculum practice: developing the indigenous cultural capability of university graduates

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Decolonising curriculum practice: developing the indigenous cultural capability of university graduates Neil Harrison1 · Ivan Clarke1 Accepted: 16 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract The pedagogical urge to decolonise student thinking has been at the heart of the drive to embed Indigenous knowledge in universities throughout the western world. Despite ongoing efforts in the Pacific, North America and South Africa, there is little in the way of explicit curriculum scholarship informing approaches to the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in higher education. Some universities are currently developing policy directed at embedding an Indigenous cultural capability in curriculum. The capability is commonly conceptualised in terms of three main pedagogical approaches: teaching knowledge about Indigenous people, promoting empathy with others and decolonising one’s own knowledge and values through reflexivity. The paper highlights how higher education curriculum as representational practice remains largely unproblematised in the application of these three approaches. Two key contributions are presented. The first proposes an understanding of reflexivity as an unconscious enactment of a common world. The second lies in the proposition that narrative is more than a practice of knowing about others, it is a means of bringing people together through the creation of an interdependent life. We draw specifically on Butler’s understanding of the performativity of face-to-face narrative as a means of understanding how narrative can be leveraged in university curriculum to support a vision of enhanced social cohesion. Keywords  Reflexivity · Curriculum practice · Narrative · Cultural capability · Indigenous · Decolonisation

Introduction Decolonisation has been at the heart of the drive to include Indigenous knowledge in universities throughout the western world, with Page, Trudgett, and Bodkin-Andrews (2019b, 391) observing that the current global push to include Indigenous knowledge in university curriculum marks “a pivotal juncture in Indigenous higher education”. The focus, according to Nakata, Nakata, Keech, & Bolt (2012, p.132) is on “decolonising knowledge in the disciplines as a method for emancipating colonised peoples and reinstating Indigenous * Neil Harrison [email protected]; [email protected] 1



Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

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Higher Education

worldviews”. Universities in New Zealand (Te Pokai Tara Universities New Zealand 2015), for example, have attempted to embed knowledge in the curriculum for both Māori students and staff, as well as for non-Indigenous students, while in Canada (Universities Canada 2015, p. 1), universities have sought a “transformative experience” for Indigenous graduates, their communities and Canada as a whole. The “pedagogical urge” according to Nakata et al. (2012, p. 121) is to transform student thinking, while the bigger social purpose of the drive to include Indigenous knowledge is to produce graduates who are capable of pro