Exploring and Testing Anti-Racism and Decolonising Pedagogy in Online-Forum Learning

The purpose of the project is to create spaces to test what an anti-racist pedagogy entails in the context of decolonization. This project proposes to look at decolonization not only in relation to curriculum content (what is taught), but also in relation to modes of teaching (how decolonization is taught). Given the specificity of OU teaching and the importance of learning from students’ perspectives, the use of online forums provides a space for teaching critical thinking in a less hierarchical way and for learning more about how students approach or would like to approach anti-racism. From the discussions on the forum, the questionnaire and the project team’s reflections, the project seeks to distil questions, reflections and best practice guidelines on anti-racist pedagogy that will be applicable to different level 3 modules. 

The objectives can be summarised as follows: 

1. Gaining a set of student voice-informed recommendations for decolonizing OU modules. Conversation topics that can be helpful to the module production teams will include: 

– Choice of archival sources and bias in the curriculum (including questions of examples and chosen literature) 
– What sort of knowledges the students find are disavowed in their study journeys? 

2. Producing a short guide/toolkit defining anti-racist pedagogy for Tutors and Academic staff 

3. Creating a good practice document/report on including anti-racist pedagogy within module design will be drawn up in relation to the Geography module D325 and History. The project leads will meet regularly to learn from the project, set new strategies where needed and discuss how the project links with the questions set out during their module meetings. At the end of the module, knowledge will be shared via a report that will be co-written by the project leads and the tutor and shared with the Director of Teaching.