Decolonizing education needs to continue if we expect to see substantive social reform.
If you’ve questioned the significance of your university degree and how much you’re actually learning, you wouldn’t be alone. How often have you crammed for an exam or rushed a final paper to meet a deadline, only for every ounce of information that you were supposed to have ‘learned’ to dissipate from your mind once you submit it?
A full-time university course load is often jam-packed with readings and assignments that have hard deadlines, which oftentimes overlap with those of your other classes. With these strict guidelines, it’s no wonder that students resort to cramming and therefore learn nothing as a result.
If students had an abundance of time, they might more carefully study the material of a course they find interesting, but that’s simply not a reality. Students have lives outside of school – loved ones and certain problems are going to take priority over reading a chapter in a textbook.
Furthermore, many students have exceptionalities that make it difficult to keep up with a crammed course load, or next to impossible to sit through a two- or three-hour lecture.
These traditional, Western methods of running a class are essentially ways to breed professors: do a lot of academic reading, come up with a thesis and write a paper to prove your point. This is all well and good for students who wish to become professors, but that cannot be said for all students at university nowadays.
At the same time, the university degree has become a requirement for many higher-paying jobs that have nothing to do with the prerequisite degrees they ask for, limiting students’ ability to immerse themselves in a degree’s content and instead making the degree a chore—an incentive for a higher income.
This incentive gets students when they’re young too, with societal pressures and academic screening linking ‘high intelligence’ to university and ‘low intelligence’ to college. It is a flawed and untrue system that high schools seem to be doing away with, but further steps need to be taken.
Universities have two main objectives: R&D and education. R&D, or research and development, is an important but problematic Western tradition. Knowledge is generated through these methods, but it is also intrinsically linked with technological domination over nature and economy that goes all the way back to the Age of Enlightenment and a mostly private discourse, but more on that later.
Education needs to be the focus: teaching students so they learn, not just teaching students to teach students. And there are other ways to learn that have existed throughout human history besides the traditional Western methodological practices.
Critical thinking skills can be acquired and learning can happen through the use of Western methodologies in the classroom, but not everyone learns the same. The objective, either way, should be a student-centric pedagogy. Those who argue that students can’t handle the responsibility of directing their own learning should question why students pursue higher education in the first place. Furthermore, they are paying for this education, and so should immediately have a say in what styles of learning are employed in the classroom.
I’m seeing more of this student-centric learning in my classes in recent years; the largest example has been with final projects. Instead of making ten-page final papers mandatory, some professors choose to assign creative projects: students can create anything they want as long as it displays an understanding of the course material. Make a podcast, create a piece of abstract art or write a story; it doesn’t matter what you do as long as it demonstrates a deeper understanding. And isn’t long-term learning the most important part of education?
Papers and essays, as a form, are extremely limited in the scope of their audience. Professors can respond to papers with their own papers, making way for an “academic conversation,” but unless someone is a professor or student, or has access to an academic library or database, this knowledge and conversation remains hidden from the public. The exception to this would be if a paper or study picks up so much traction it is reported on by the media, but this is not the norm.
This Western pedagogy of information-exchange is not and should not be the only way knowledge is transmitted. Many Indigenous cultures share knowledge through storytelling, for example, and it is an effective method of enhancing critical thinking skills.
It’s important to note that if students should choose to write a ten-page paper, they can. The point is not to steamroll the methodologies that already exist –which would just be emulating the same colonial techniques that gate-kept learning in the first place– but rather to expand the way that students are provided the opportunity to learn, and which knowledge is transmitted. This student-centric method of assigning final projects allows students to pursue their passions and develop their skills while learning course material at the same time, and likely make stronger connections to the content as well.
Decolonizing education does not just apply to humanities students either. Computer science or mathematics classes, for example, may have a harder time implementing creative processes into material that is, by nature, very strict and precise. But at the same time, aren’t the laws of physics and mathematics always being updated as more research is done and different methods of study are considered?
Braiding Sweetgrass is a book in which the author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi, studies plants and botany from Western and Indigenous perspectives. In her exploration, she finds that they are both valuable methods of study, actually complementing each other in a lot of cases. Dr. Spearey, a Brock University English professor who implements decolonized methods of learning in her classroom, highly recommends it. It can be found at the Brock library or purchased on Amazon.
Regardless of the discipline, there needs to be a higher level of student-centric learning. Seminar-heavy courses do well at this because seminars are a place where students can provide their own perspectives and interpretations on a given subject. The main point is adaptability. If a student learns in a specific way, that method should be open to them, and alternative methodologies of learning should be available for those who need it – because learning is what’s important, not mindless regurgitation.
When it comes to social and political issues, everybody seems to think “the youth will save us” or “the next generation will fix everything,” but if we keep handing down this responsibility because we’re focused on our individual academic success, eventually there will be no next generation.
If the youth are supposed to be making serious changes in the world, then it is imperative to give us the freedom to fall in love with learning and, therefore, worry about the world instead of just copy-pasting the same assignments like a production line. We are students with passions and desires, not blank canvases to be moulded into researchers and professors.