Dr Shah contributed a chapter entitled Decolonising the Creative Arts Curriculum in White Spaces, to the book Progress in Education in 2018. In an attempt to connect the macro to the micro, which is characteristic of her work, the chapter offers an autoethnographic discussion, which places lived experience at the very heart of broader social discourse, Dr Shah critically reflects on examples from her own decolonising pedagogic practice to consider broader implications of decolonising movements at classroom level.

Abstract

In recent years, the UK Higher Education (HE) sector has encountered a growing voice of dissatisfaction at the lack of Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) representation amongst student bodies, academics, and in management and leadership. In among this discourse, disparate BAME voices have called for a decolonization of the curriculum as a starting point to spurring true equality in the HE classroom. 

The chapter connects this discourse to the author’s pedagogic journey of decolonizing the Creative Arts curriculum across a fifteen-year teaching career in the English Further and Higher Education sectors. Drawing on practice-based examples of decolonizing teaching, the author considers the dynamics of decolonisation processes, in white liberal teaching spaces. 

Reference: Shah, J. (2018) ‘Decolonising the Creative Arts Curriculum in White Spaces’, in Progress in Education, (NSP, NY)