A decolonial approach to teaching global justice issues (DecoPrax)

Engaging ethically with complex global justice issues, and unpacking how these are framed, studied and solved, takes time and requires a fundamental rethink of education.

How/can decolonial praxis support teachers to navigate the tensions between critical and normative perspectives and a concern with balanced perspectives or plurality of perspectives in the curriculum?

Building from the team’s established expertise in pluralistic and decolonial approaches, our project aims to engage these tensions and to empirically investigate with teachers the possibilities and challenges of incorporating a decolonial praxis in the teaching of global justice issues.

We will develop a novel and collaborative methodology of theoretically grounded workshops with teachers, classroom observations and reflections, and co-creation of an educational framework. The educational framework will provide theoretical and historical perspectives for understanding global justice.

It will also include tools, resources and strategies that can support teachers to apply critical perspectives in their framing and didactic treatment of global justice issues.

Over four years of engagement, new knowledge will be co-created regarding how to mobilise a decolonial praxis for global justice issues in secondary classrooms.

We will investigate the ways such an approach can deal with the tensions between demands for change and pluralism in pedagogically productive ways in direct conversation with teachers’ experiences.