20 March 2026 / 09:30–16:30 / University of Glasgow, Advanced Research Centre (ARC) 226AB
This workshop brings together staff and students from across disciplines to share practical approaches to decolonising teaching, learning, and curriculum in higher education. The focus is on how decolonisation happens in practice through funded projects, collaborative course redesign, community-building, and reflective teaching.
The morning sessions explore how decolonisation work is initiated and supported within institutions. The day opens with the development of Strathclyde’s new Community of Practice, shaped through collaboration with existing networks and supported by institutional commitment to sustained engagement. This is followed by discipline-based examples showing how funded student–staff partnerships, curriculum reviews, and national disciplinary initiatives can be used to broaden perspectives in realistic and achievable ways.
After lunch, the programme turns to resourcing and sustaining change. Through meaningful student–staff partnerships, presentations introduce practical tools for evaluating curriculum inclusivity and international relevance, alongside examples of how evidence generated can be used to support staff development and inform longer-term curriculum planning. A short poster spotlight focuses on inclusive culture-building as essential groundwork for successful and sustainable decolonisation.
The final sessions engage more directly with questions of power, language, and knowledge. An interactive learning game invites participants to reflect critically on positionality and power. A provocation challenges the dominance of English in UK higher education and highlights multilingualism as a key but often overlooked dimension of decolonisation. The workshop closes with a creative storytelling session drawing on Indigenous Studies, modelling alternative ways of sharing knowledge and reflecting on how decolonisation can be approached ethically and reflexively, particularly by those working from outside Indigenous communities.
Sign up
You can sign up at the following link.
Full schedule
09:00-9:30: Tea/Coffee
09:30-9:45: Quick Opening
09:45–10:30: ‘Decolonising Together’ – the development of the University of Strathclyde’s new Community of Practice
Invited session | 45 mins
10:40–11:20: Can the Co-Creation of Film-Watching Lists Help Us Decolonise Learning and Teaching?
Collaborative workshop | 40 mins
Sijia Wen, Hannah Thompson, Hsin Cheng Chang, Leyla De Amicis, Michele Vincent
11:30–12:00: Decolonising the Physics Curriculum
Presentation | 30 mins
Sam Skipsey
12:00–13:00 – LUNCH
13:00–13:30: Co-Creating Change: Students and Staff Decolonising a Research Course
Co-creation workshop | 30 mins
Sadia Ali
13:40–14:10: Internationally Relevant Curriculum Scales
Presentation | 30 mins
Julia Bohlmann, Nighet Riaz, Donald Reid, Yufan Chen, Samarth Pinnamaraju, Colette Mair
14:20–14:30: 10 Simple Ways to Create an Inclusive Culture in Your School
Poster spotlight | 10 mins
Zayba Ghazali-Mohammed, Thinh Pham
14:30–14:50 – BREAK
14:50–15:30: Power Shift: An Active Learning Game Exploring Positionality and Power
Interactive workshop | 40 mins
Izah Bowes, Ailsa Foley, Samuel Owusu Achiaw, Laura Sharp
15:40–16:00: Decolonisation Interrupted: English Hegemony and Multilingualism
Provocation | 20 mins
The Multilingualism Across Disciplines lab: Wilhelmiina Toivo, Dobrochna Futro, Angela Gayton and Elisa Segnini
16:10–16:30: This Isn’t My History But I Want To Do Better: Lessons For Settlers From An Indigenous Studies Classroom
Creative storytelling | 20 mins
Judas Kelley
Programme details
‘Decolonising Together’ – the development of the University of Strathclyde’s new Community of Practice
This presentation outlines the development of the University of Strathclyde’s new Community of Practice, ‘Decolonising Together’, an initiative that began without a set path and was shaped by insights from the University of Glasgow’s Community of Practice. Beginning with staff workshops, the project seeks to connect existing expertise, shared challenges, and a clear desire for sustained collaboration across the institution into a meaningful and supportive network.
A central example of work taking place in the institution, is a set of coproduced student zines supervised by Dr Navan Govender, lecturer in applied language and literacy studies at the Strathclyde Institute of Education. The student team pursued two key aims: first, to create a resource that could act as a practical starting point for Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) staff and students engaging with decolonising their practices and curricula; and second, to begin developing a student body survey to help the faculty better understand HaSS students’ perspectives on decolonising the curriculum. This project illustrates the kinds of practices the community seeks to champion, and highlights the institutional conditions needed for such work to take root, grow, and endure.
Can the Co-Creation of Film-Watching Lists Help Us Decolonise Learning and Teaching?
Sijia Wen, Hannah Thompson, Hsin Cheng Chang, Leyla De Amicis, Michele Vincent
Over the past six months, our Student–Staff Partnership has worked to support the decolonisation of the Individual Differences (ID) course. We began by critically reviewing key terms and concepts within the curriculum, before engaging with relevant literature to identify opportunities to incorporate more diverse cultural perspectives across each theory. Alongside this, we conducted interviews with students who had taken the course in the previous year. These conversations were largely encouraging, while also offering constructive suggestions for how the course could be further developed and improved.
For this TEA event, our team will invite participants to take part in a collaborative workshop based on one of our ID seminars. Together, we will co-create a decolonial film-watching list focused on themes of social isolation and loneliness, highlighting films which are identified as meaningful across diverse identities and populations. We will then reflect collectively on how this activity embodies a decolonial perspective, and discuss how the approach could be adapted for use in other courses.
Decolonising the Physics Curriculum
Sam Skipsey
On 30th July, 2025, the University of Sheffield hosted an Institute of Physics Higher Education Group funded workshop on the topic of Decolonising the Physics Curriculum. 14 delegates from 9 institutions across the UK (including the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde) attended, with the aim to provide actionable strategy and recommendations on this topic.
A report (available from the per-he.org website – a hub for Physics Higher Education in the UK) was produced based on our findings, along with a blog entry from the convener, Matt Mears (Sheffield).
The “cautiously ambitious” stance of the report – recognising that the current curriculum and content is both Eurocentric and incomplete, and that changes will also improve pedagogy in general; but also recognising the issues with both capacity and self-confidence (and self-image) within the field and at institutions to implement this needed change – will be discussed here, along with the resulting recommendations for future work.
Several such recommendations involve the creations of materials, and community outputs (podcasts) to broaden the resources available to Physics curricula UK-wide. Feedback on these initiatives will be a component of this activity.
Co-Creating Change: Students and Staff Decolonising a Research Course
Sadia Ali
In April 2025, three student partners and I were successful in securing a grant from the University of Glasgow’s Learning and Teaching Strategy to ‘decolonise an introduction to research course.’ The student–staff partnership project supports the University’s 2021–2025 L&T Strategy’s commitment to decolonising the curriculum by revising the Introduction to Education & Social Research (IESR) course. The project intends to address Eurocentric biases in IESR’s course content by incorporating historically marginalised perspectives to improve representation and contextual relevance in two main areas of the course – content, and assessment & feedback. Through course content reviews, consultation with experts and resource gathering, the team is producing revised reading lists, inclusive course materials and pedagogical guidelines for assessment. The project responds to student feedback calling for more practical and locally relevant content and aims to empower international students by acknowledging their lived experiences and knowledge systems. Outcomes will include suggestions for revised course materials, a guide to decolonised teaching, and a sustainability plan involving annual reviews.
Internationally Relevant Curriculum Scales
Julia Bohlmann, Nighet Riaz, Donald Reid, Yufan Chen, Samarth Pinnamaraju, Colette Mair
Despite growing awareness of the need to decolonise university teaching, higher education curricula continue to privilege dominant knowledge traditions. Through a SoTL funded project, we developed the Internationally Relevant Curriculum Scales (IRCS) as a structured framework to help educators to assess the international relevance and cultural inclusivity of university courses and programmes, guide curriculum revisions and improve engagement and outcomes for international and racially minoritised students. This presentation introduces IRCS as a tool designed to reduce institutional resistance to decolonial and anti-racist education by generating evidence on student perception that can be used constructively in self-reflection, staff development and institutional benchmarking.
10 Simple Ways to Create an Inclusive Culture in Your School
Zayba Ghazali-Mohammed, Thinh Pham
The School of Psychology and Neuroscience has done a lot to build an inclusive culture within the school and this has also impacted positively on our learning and teaching practices, as well as staff and student experience. The school also recently received the MVLS EDI team award for this impactful work.
Building an inclusive environment is necessary in order to begin decolonisation work that is effective and sustainable. The poster will highlight 10 key practices that we have implemented with examples and open access to said resources, that can be transferred to other schools to promote a similar inclusive environment, benefitting both staff and students, and allowing the decolonisation journey to flourish.
Power Shift: An Active Learning Game Exploring Positionality and Power
Izah Bowes, Ailsa Foley, Samuel Owusu Achiaw, Laura Sharp
This session will be led by Izah Bowes, a 2024-25 Global Mental Health Masters alumni. Izah has worked with the teaching team and their peers throughout and beyond their degree programme to target inclusion, belonging, and decolonisation.
Positionality refers to the unique lens through which each individual views the world, shaped by personal experiences, social identities, values, and biases, all of which influence how they interpret information, ask questions, and engage in discussions. Exploring positionality allows an individual to recognise how their position affects their perspectives and relationships within the university environment. However, the emergent practice of providing positionality statements has been widely criticised for adopting an identity-centric approach. This process of saying, rather than doing, can ultimately lead colleagues to fail to engage with positionality as contextual, relational, and connected to wider historical and social processes.
We argue that without a critically reflexive framing of positionality, staff’s inclusion efforts are at risk of presenting as tokenistic, reinforcing power dynamics, and failing to reflect on truly redressing injustices.
Our game facilitates critical reflexivity within positionality by focusing on power through a sociocultural lens. Participants are encouraged to think about power as inherently flexible, with an individual’s power being dependent on the setting and person(s) present.
Exploring positionality in this way is a valuable component of inclusion work. All staff within the university should be actively engaging with this process to deliver the decolonisation commitments made by the university.
Additionally, the game design process has championed a decolonial approach by working to create a truly collaborative student-staff project, to minimise hierarchy. Feedback from current and previous students, along with colleagues from other schools and colleges, has been embedded in each iteration of the game. We hope this session is a valuable opportunity for staff to enjoy learning and reflecting, whilst creating opportunities to offer feedback to further refine the game’s design.
Decolonisation Interrupted: English Hegemony and Multilingualism
The Multilingualism Across Disciplines lab: Wilhelmiina Toivo, Dobrochna Futro, Angela Gayton and Elisa Segnini
English is a colonial language with a legacy of oppression and power inequality. Despite this, decolonisation attempts often overlook the fact that UK Higher Education fundamentally operates under Anglocentric, monolingual assumptions. The status of English is routinely accepted without critical examination. This short provocation argues that by doing this, we perpetuate linguistic, cultural and epistemological ideologies rooted in colonialism, such as monolingualism and Western exceptionalism. In order to achieve meaningful decolonisation, educators in the UK Higher Education must challenge the role of English (and indeed the dominance of its standardised varieties) and critically appraise their attitudes to multilingualism in the classroom. To facilitate this, we will draw from the current ideological stances and practices in interdisciplinary multilingualism research (such as translanguaging, native-speakerism and inclusive terminology). We will call into question a series of common misconceptions and norms around language use in the UK Higher Education and provoke the participants to examine their pedagogical practice.
This Isn’t My History But I Want To Do Better: Lessons For Settlers From An Indigenous Studies Classroom
Judas Kelley
I am a non-Indigenous settler from Canada who studied Indigenous Studies at York University during my undergraduate degree. I did my master’s in Media, Culture, and Society at UofG, and now I work as a research assistant. The lessons shared with me during my time in Indigenous Studies remain influential on how I navigate research to this day, engage with marginalised communities, hold myself as a researcher, and engage with other forms of knowledge.
One of the most influential lessons I learned during my undergraduate degree was the use of artistic expression to share valuable knowledge. I’d like to propose making a zine featuring 10 lessons I learned as an Indigenous Studies student, and engaging in oral storytelling to share how these lessons guide my research practices today. I argue that this creative form of sharing knowledge seeks to dismantle and challenge the colonial structures of academia that value certain forms of knowledge (largely written, disconnected from personal histories, and excluding art in some disciplines).
As someone non-Indigenous, I think that this is an opportunity to discuss navigating practising decolonisation and engaging with Indigenous communities/spaces as ‘an outsider’. This would also allow me to share how the lessons I’ve learned from postcolonial theory and decolonising education guide my research approach (such as community trust-building, listening to their needs, collaboration, and understanding my positionality).