Decolonial Pedagogy

Program Assessment of Critical and Decolonial Pedagogy

William Paul Simmons, Sophie S. Alves, Danlei Chen, Leonard Hammer

University of Arizona, Human Rights Practice Program

williamsimmons@email.arizona.edu

Overview

In a recent assessment of the University of Arizona’s Human Rights Practice program, we realized that our goal was to make our cutting-edge pedagogy  and curriculum more decolonial and transformative.  However, we didn’t have a standard by which to judge such things or even to point to how to make this pedagogy and curriculum more decolonial and transformative.  So, we decided to create our own scale of decolonial pedagogy and curriculum.  Based upon an extensive academic literature review of both theoretical and empirical studies and numerous discussions with key stakeholders we have created a pool of 90+ items from which any academic program could choose a subset of items to evaluate their pedagogy and curriculum.  I will attach the draft pool of items.  It is, as far as we know, the first comprehensive scale on these issues that can be adopted widely.

Instructions

Each program, ideally with input from students and other stakeholders, should choose the items that are most relevant to their context.  We recommend 15-25 items.  Students might even take the lead in this assessment exercise. This assessment can be done in conjunction with other program assessment activities.  We also recommend that follow-up activities be included, such as open-ended questions, qualitative interviews, and focus groups.  This pool of items is worded to evaluate a program as a whole, but most items can be easily rephrased to evaluate an individual course or other activity.

Assessment Items

This project was made possible in part through funding from CUES, the Center for University Education Scholarship at the University of Arizona. Any views, findings, or recommendations hereby expressed are those of the author(s) only.