Decolonising STEM and geography education in secondary schools: exploring educators’ agency and curriculum-making across England and Scotland

Recently, drawing on the field of Decolonial Studies, scholars and educators have been investigating the impact of colonial histories on curriculum, higher education experiences, and teacher education both in formerly colonised communities and in the former colonial powers, including the UK. However, despite some initiatives linked to teacher education in England and Scotland, fewer studies exist which explore schoolteachers’ and teacher educators’ agentic experiences of decolonial curriculum-making in this former colonial power, particularly in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and geography school-subjects. This is despite increasing scholarship emerging from formerly colonised communities such as the USA and Brazil which underline the importance of decolonial curriculum-making in these subject areas due to their own colonial entanglements and legacies around: scientific racism, health inequalities and medical mistrust, over-exploitation of natural resources, environmental racism, data colonialism, algorithmic biases and profiling, etc. It is therefore vital that a teaching profession rooted in the value of teachers’ subject expertise and located in former colonial powers such as the UK engages and challenges such colonial legacies within the areas of STEM and geography to support meaningful experiences of equity, inclusion and anti-racism within and beyond our increasingly socio-culturally, ethnically and racially diverse school communities.
This study therefore seeks to explore views and experiences of secondary/post-16 schoolteachers and teacher educators around subject-specific decolonial curriculum-making within STEM and geography across England and Scotland. In particular, it will attend to the following objectives:
O1.Understand educators’ purposes and agentic experiences of subject-specific decolonial curriculum-making across England and Scotland.
O2.Explore strategies mobilised and support required for educators’ agentic decolonial subject-specific curriculum-making to be sustained at scale in England and Scotland.
O3.Drawing on O1-O2, co-create with participants a framework to enhance STEM and geography educators’ engagement with subject-specific decolonial curriculum-making beyond this project.
Through life-history interviews, observations, knowledge-and-practice-exchange workshops, and arts-based co-creation workshop with STEM and geography educators across England and Scotland, this project will contribute to developing scholarship across the UK and internationally around educators’ agentic experiences of decolonial curriculum-making grounded in their own voices and experiences. In doing so, this project will expand knowledge around what decolonial thinking and practices can mean to STEM and geography education across the UK, and generate a co-created framework to guide decolonial work by educators grounded in the expertise and experiences of this professional community. This project will also bring together STEM and geography educators in a collaborative community of decolonial practitioners to support theirs and other practitioners’ engagement with this area during and beyond the life of this project, seeking to enhance capacity-building for educational practitioners’ engagement with decolonial curriculum-making which is context and subject-appropriate, sustainable and scalable.