Decolonising higher education: (re)conceptualising knowing and knowledge in pedagogical spaces

Global calls to decolonise higher education increasingly focus on decolonising the curriculum and pedagogy. This project explores how academics and students in two degree programs, at a regional university in Australia, understand and take up this responsibility. To investigate how decolonising practices are constructed and experienced, I undertake a theoretical analysis of epistemic responsibility by drawing on feminist, decolonial, Indigenist and social epistemology theory. Based on focus groups and interviews with 30 participants, my study shifts the gaze to the White post-colonial university by exploring the pedagogical experiences of students and academics. I focus on the pedagogical and curricula issues they consider important and whether these are related to policy, social justice and/or student experience. This qualitative research is attentive to structural and discursive power in knowledge and knowing practices. It draws on Whiteness studies to show how ‘business-as-usual’ pedagogy reinscribes race privilege and the silencing of particular experiences and ways of knowing such as those of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples. My interest centres on how hegemonic (colonial) constructions of knowledge and pedagogy shape student and teacher subjectivities and how these may be disrupted through an ethical praxis of decolonising.