Overview

The impact of colonial histories on education are well-known. Issues of mis/under-representation in school curricula, and persistent inequalities of school outcomes, of flourishing, belonging and wellbeing, and of access and achievement at the higher education sector across sociohistorically marginalised and minoritised communities have all been examined by recent educational research. In particular, the fields of Decolonial Studies - with its origins in the global south such as in Latin American, African, South Asian and Middle Eastern scholarship - and of Anti-racist and Indigenous Studies - grounded in scholarship from the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand - have been crucial to develop our collective understanding of the persistent legacies of colonial endeavours and the ongoing impact of neocolonial endeavours on education, both in the former colonised communities and in the former colonial powers, such as the UK.

However, despite some initiatives and studies, mostly emerging from formerly colonised communities (such as Brazil, Canada and the US), little attention has been paid, in particular, to such legacies and implications to the teaching and learning of specific school subjects such as Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and Geography. This is despite growing numbers of studies, such as those emerging from the field of History and Sociology of Science and Technology, which underline the entanglements between these subjects and colonial histories.

• Scientific racism
• Health inequalities and medical mistrust
• Overexploitation of natural resources (e.g. critical minerals)
• Environmental racism
• Unequal and oppressive international development practices
• Data colonialism
• Algorithmic biases and profiling, etc.

In addition, despite some recent studies and initiatives in England and Scotland, very few attention has been also paid to the role of educators themselves in addressing such legacies through their own school practice. Considering that the teaching profession at secondary and post-secondary levels is deeply rooted in the value of teachers’ subject expertise, we propose that investigating these educators' own experiences and views of decolonial practice within their subject teaching is crucial to advancing our understanding and support to such work in the areas of STEM and Geography education.

1. Acknowledging that the disciplinary areas of STEM and geography have particular colonial entanglements and legacies, and that the teaching and learning of such knowledge is crucial to support meaningful experiences of equity, inclusion and anti-racism within and beyond our increasingly socio-culturally, ethnically and racially diverse school communities.

2. Emerging scholarship which underlines the importance of decolonial curriculum-making at school level both in formerly colonised communities and in former colonial powers like the UK.

3. Positioning schoolteachers’ and teacher educators’ agentic experiences of decolonial curriculum-making as central to such decolonial efforts at school level.

This is a collaborative project that seeks to investigate exactly this landscape, involving schoolteachers and teacher educators across England and Scotland, in partnership between the University of Cambridge and the University of Stirling, and funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Research objectives and aims

Through life-history interviews, observations, knowledge-and-practice-exchange workshops, and arts-based co-creation workshop with STEM and geography educators across England and Scotland, this project seeks to contribute to developing scholarship across the UK and internationally around educators’ agentic experiences of decolonial curriculum-making grounded in their own voices and experiences.

In doing so, this project will expand knowledge around what decolonial thinking and practices can mean to STEM and geography education across the UK, and generate a co-created framework to guide decolonial work by educators grounded in the expertise and experiences of this professional community.

This project will also bring together STEM and geography educators in a collaborative community of decolonial practitioners to support theirs and other practitioners’ engagement with this area during and beyond the life of this project.

As such, this project seeks to address, in particular, the following objectives:

O1. Understand educators’ purposes and agentic experiences of subject-specific decolonial curriculum-making.

O2. Explore strategies mobilised and support required for educators’ agentic decolonial subject-specific curriculum-making to be sustained at scale.

O3. Drawing on O1-O2, co-create with participants a framework to enhance STEM and geography educators’ engagement with subject-specific decolonial curriculum-making beyond this project.