The purpose

The Toolkit aims to help you embrace marginalised thought certainly to not just challenge the hegemony of western philosophy, but also to enable rich and transformative conversations between intellectual systems. The toolkit provides teachers and learners with effective ways of redirecting the flow of epistemic power away from the Anglo-European world that is ideologically positioned at the ‘centre’ to a horizontal, comparative, and dialogical model in which no geolocation occupies a privileged position.

Thematic sections

§1: Focusing on the epistemology of decoloniality, we propose developing alternatives to modernity (rather than alternative modernities). Developing alternatives to modernity is in the business of transmodern and pluriversal thinking, which are epistemically disobedient sense-making activities that aim to accomplish, what Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh have called, ‘epistemic reconstitution’.

§2: Fostering active learning’s three dimensions – 1. behavioural (students’ engagement in class activities), 2. cognitive (students’ critical thinking and decision-making during the activities), and 3. social (students interact with other students in a small group) – is particularly effective for challenging white normativity and making the classroom a critical, engaging, and safe environment.

§3: Decolonising assessment involves moving to a culturally inclusive assessment model constituted by justice-as-content, justice-as-process, and justice-as-pedagogy. These three dimensions themselves ultimately involve developing cultures of co-creating summative authentic assessment briefs with students such as essay questions, reflective pieces, or academic blogs, or exhibitions, or documentaries, or case-studies, or interviews, or podcasts, or multimedia presentations, or infographics.

§4: Our example of a decolonial epistemology module puts into concrete action relevant parts of §§1, 2, and 3.

Find out more

You can find and download the full Toolkit from the project website. There, you will also find an outline of its purpose as well as a handbook which provides its theoretical underpinnings and a list of references and additional sources to assist teachers and students in engaging with its recommendations.