Justice-centred curriculum: decolonising educational practices to create lateral learning spaces online

This article interrogates pedagogical practices that seek to decolonise curriculum in the context of online teaching. Calls to recognise how colonial structures continue to be reinforced through higher education has led to significant appeals to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ and better address Indigenous rights. This article responds to these demands by reflecting on our experiences of designing and teaching an online course, Indigenous Peoples of the Contemporary World. We argue that decolonising the pedagogy and the curriculum can, and must, occur across modes of teaching as part of a justice-centred educational practice. Decolonisation is a networked, solidarity-based political practice, which may seem to run counter to the demands of online teaching. As such, we suggest that any attempt to decolonise online pedagogies requires additional pedagogical practices that break with traditional online teaching formats in order to challenge accepted approaches to online learning. In what follows, we reflect on our own positionality in the design of the course content and our ongoing learning as we strive to create lateral online learning spaces that centre justice. We seek to examine how we might best work within the constraints of the neoliberal university to uphold our commitment to provide a justice-centred curriculum in an online-based classroom format.