Decolonial practices in higher education:
Student perspectives in Iceland
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v38i1.153081Keywords:
Decolonising higher education, pedagogy, curriculum, race, colonial history, whitenessAbstract
While universities in postcolonial nations like India and South Africa have been engaged in decolonising curricula in higher education for several decades, universities in Europe have largely not progressed beyond integrating postcolonial scholarship into their curricula, to a genuine decolonisation of curricula in the Fanonian sense of ‘[changing] the order of the world’ (Fanon, 1963, p.36). Indigenous scholars, activists and researchers in the Nordic region have analysed the denial of colonial histories and the production of Nordic exceptionalism (Belle, 2019; Kuokkanen, 2019; Loftsdóttir & Jensen, 2021; McEachrane, 2018). Yet, colonial history is often not taught in universities as a mandatory subject (Drugge, 2019; Njau, 2018). This lack puts an enormous gap in the knowledge base of students and knowledge workers in higher education and the broader community’s understanding of knowledge production. Through focus group interviews conducted in 2024 with students from the school of Education, Humanities and Social Sciences and participatory action collaboration, we collected and analysed student perspectives on the place, necessity, and pedagogy of decolonialism at the university of Iceland.
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