Tell me why my curriculum is white
[dropcap]E[/dropcap]ngland’s School Minister Nick Gibb recently announced the inclusion of feminism as one of the ‘core ideas’ in A-level Politics, after an outcry over the lack of female thinkers across syllabuses. Yet there’s a long way to go before women and other minorities are fully represented across the curriculum. According to past National Student Survey results, women have reported to be less satisfied than men in areas of academic support and learning resources.
In addition to gender, satisfaction profiles vary greatly amongst races, ethnicities, sexual orientations and disabilities. Curriculums in higher education are often built around the model of a ‘traditional’ student, and the education we receive is largely shaped on colonialism in which we applaud Eurocentric writers and thinkers over others.
According to past National Student Survey results, women have reported to be less satisfied than men in areas of academic support and learning resources.
As a result, the content studied is intrinsically linked to the formation of a dominant culture, which sends signals to the student about who is valued. This raises the issue of an ‘attainment gap’ in higher education.
Coming from a comparably diverse department, it took me a while to realise the truth, or the reality, of this situation. It was only when I ventured into taking an interdisciplinary route with more ‘traditional’ modules on topics such as international development and consumption, that I noticed an inclined perspective on the globalised world.
Content studied is intrinsically linked to the formation of a dominant culture
I struggled to decipher why the essays we read on Japanese consumers were all written by European academics, or why the development theories were based on the historic successes of Western countries. The reason these instances made me uncomfortable was that it felt as if the knowledge being attained was highly misrepresented, and merely based on stereotypes. In recent times, there has been a fair amount of light shed on the issue of the lack of minorities across curriculum.
The ‘Why Is My Curriculum White?’ campaign set up by UCL in 2015 is one response to the lack of diversity found in course content and reading lists. It aims to highlight the importance of reflecting upon academia’s complicity to white-supremacy.
I struggled to decipher why the essays we read on Japanese consumers were all written by European academic
While this is fairly recent, NUS’s liberation campaigns – Black Students’ Campaign, Women’s Campaign, LGBTQ Campaign, Disabled Student’s Campaign – have been making this very same argument to liberate curriculums for many years. While I do not condone the use of diversity as a ‘token’, I strongly suggest a higher representation of minorities across curriculums in all departments. This will positively challenge the thinking process of the students, and prepare them for an increasingly globalised world.
Comments (2)
Hi Archie, thanks for your comment.
1) First of all, I’d like to specify that this article is more concerned with an attainment gap in higher education (i.e. undergrad and beyond). In the past few years, men have been more likely to get a First in their undergrad, while women have been more prone to a High Second. This is despite the fact that there are more women who attend university than men. However, since you brought it up, lets take A-Level results into consideration. If you take a look at the following links, you’ll notice certain trends.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/aug/14/a-level-results-2014-the-full-breakdown
http://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2015/aug/13/a-level-results-2015-gender-gap-pass-rates-subject-popularity-charts
While there is a female domination in subjects such as Sociology, Psychology and the Languages, there’s a clear male domination in Mathematics, IT and other Sciences. Thus, claiming that women outperform men in A-Levels is only acknowledging the partial truth. In fact, employers have traditionally sought after skills in the latter group of subjects, as there is still a stigma attached to typically ‘female’ subjects as lesser.
2) In regards to your second point, this article never commented upon the language in which academic essays are written in, but whom they’re written by. Its intent was to encourage a wider range of authors and contributors to academic study in order to achieve a balanced perspective. Furthermore, to assume that a Japanese academic isn’t proficient enough to write an essay in English is rather ignorant of you. Even so, translation shouldn’t be an issue. Non-English speaking students study translated works across several parts of the world.
3) And finally, colonisation has been told through the Western narrative. Easy access to vast amounts of colonial literature is not a good enough reason to disregard the other perspective. Indeed, we must consider why colonial exploits are portrayed the way they are in the West ( i.e as the ‘golden age’, the glory of empire ). Even today, in our culture which likes to consider itself post-racial, there is little acknowledgement of the damage caused to the colonies. If we only hear from the voices of the colonisers, with only token reference to the colonised, how are we ever to change this perspective?
First of all, if the male domination of the curriculum favours men, why have women continually out-performed men at A-Levels. You mention an attainment gap, but fail to mention this gap is almost universally females over males.
Secondly essays on Japanese consumers are written by English academics because it avoids the need for translation.
Finally, colonial literature dominates because there is simply so much of it. The industrialisation of the west led to an explosion in the number of professionals who could sustain themselves purely on literary and academic work which was unique to the west at the time.