Box of delight

“For our society to cohere, to find a successful identity in the 21st Century with a vision to carry us all forward, we need to shake off some of the shibboleths of the past. Otherwise our vision will be unbalanced by a false sense of what Britain has been, by omission of the contributions of far too many of our citizens.” Navasha Wray, Greens of Colour Education Officer, discusses the importance of decolonizing the curriculum and re-examining Britain’s colonial past.

When the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was launched into the Bristol harbour last week, it propelled a discussion of how Britain regards its imperial and colonial past right into the mainstream and out of the corridors of academia.

About time too, say many BAME writers, artists and academics. They have been calling for an overhaul of the way in which the British imperial legacy has been taught and presented in British schools. Britain’s role in promoting slavery and as a colonial power has been glossed over, if not airbrushed out of the history taught in schools. Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests have opened up a welcome space for us all to debate and reconsider the era of colonialism and how we want to address it.

We are a group of individuals who teach, study and work in psychology and are trying to move the discipline away from its overwhelmingly White, Western bias (see how its biased here). We are directly influenced by the Why Is My Curriculum White movement.

We work at Leeds Beckett University and received a small grant (£,2,500) from our Centre for Learning and Teaching to highlight this Western*, White bias in our BSc and MSc Psychology courses in September 2016 (and again in September 2017). We know this bias is not exclusive to Leeds Beckett or even the UK, however. Therefore we have set up this website with the aim of signposting BME psychological and anti-racism work to begin to challenge this bias. We try to be mindful of the breadth and depth of racism in higher education and of the overwhelming need to do justice to BME psychological work.We know this website can only be one small step towards this.

The HSS BAME Education Group & CIE have collectively put together a decolonising toolkit for programme leaders and module convenors to conduct an audit of programmes/modules.
The questions below have been adapted from the SOAS Decolonising Learning & Teaching toolkit.

For more information about the toolkit please contact:
Dr Monica Chavez & Dr Tya Asgari
monicach@liverpool.ac.uk
S.Asgari2@liverpool.ac.uk

Something is very wrong when a simple request from a large number of students, that their reading lists be broadened slightly to include some black and minority ethnic writers, becomes the basis of a manufactured racial “row”.