Here are some suggestions for decolonizing the curriculum:
• Incorporate more content from indigenous perspectives, histories, experiences, arts, and knowledge systems. Include materials written by indigenous authors and scholars. This helps bring indigenous voices and experiences to the center.
• Teach indigenous histories and histories of colonization from an indigenous perspective. Present events like European contact and colonization as an invasion, not just exploration or settlement. Discuss the impacts from an indigenous view.
• Include contemporary indigenous issues, communities, arts, and activism. This highlights that indigenous cultures are living, thriving cultures. It shows indigenous peoples as agents of change.
• Teach indigenous knowledge systems, beliefs, and practices in authentic and respectful ways. Do not just tokenistically include bits of indigenous culture. Provide deeper understanding.
• Use place-based education that connects learning to local indigenous communities, lands, histories, and experiences. Help students develop relationships with community and place.
• Challenge implicit biases and stereotypes about indigenous peoples. Facilitate critical reflections on colonial ideologies like racism, white supremacy, and the doctrine of discovery.
• Build partnerships with local indigenous communities and incorporate indigenous perspectives at all levels of curriculum planning and evaluation. Promote collaborative and reciprocal relationships.
• Provide professional development for educators to support them in using an intercultural and decolonizing approach. Help educators unpack their own privileges and perspectives.
• Consider indigenous-led schools or programs as models of what a fully decolonized curriculum can look like. There are lessons to be learned from them.
• Make curriculum decolonization an ongoing process of self-reflection, listening, and adjusting. It is not about checking off requirements but transforming practice.
Those are some suggestions for how the curriculum can be decolonized in deeper and more impactful ways. The ultimate goal is building an education system that is centered on indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing.