By Owen Frost, who completed a student research experience placement at the Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence (LITE).
Funded by Educational Engagement, I took part in a student research experience placement at LITE aimed at furthering decolonising educational principles at the University of Leeds.
The project — Decolonising Resources for Students in the Arts and Humanities — aimed to provide students with a baseline knowledge of some of the contemporary issues relating to decolonisation, both locally within our university and throughout the wider world.
Supervised by Dr Christina Nick, a school academic lead for inclusive pedagogies, the project created a centralised document for the student handbook for the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures.
Key themes for students
We agreed upon core themes to include in the document, along with headers to help organise the research process. They included:
- a brief history of colonialism,
- the colonial history of the royal family,
- the colonial history of the University of Leeds,
- #RhodesMustFall,
- environmental justice movements
- resources about Black Lives Matter
- a ‘watch, read and listen more’ section.
These themes were adapted, but covered the core ideas we wanted to introduce to students in the handbook.
Christina and I met regularly to discuss the content to and determine if it was appropriate for a student audience.
I scoured the internet for online newspaper articles, podcasts, YouTube videos - anything I thought I would look for if I was a student wanting to understand decolonisation.
At times, this felt quite surface-level. This was an adjustment I had to make to suit this type of document; the breadth and scope of such an assignment meant unearthing more content, so we had to cull certain topics. Christina was a great help in this.