The decolonisation of learning raises significant questions in its turn, as the previous chapter has already suggested. Whose culture is defined as being more significant than others? Whose knowledge actually counts? And whose knowledge is being correspondingly devalued as a result?

This chapter moves on to focus on decolonisation and racial inequalities more specifically. Whose knowledges have been predominant and whose knowledges have been devalued as a result of slavery and colonialism in the past, along with the impacts of neo-colonialism and imperialism in more recent times? What can be learnt from strategies to decolonise the curricula in other disciplines? What might be the pedagogical implications, the ways in which a decolonised curriculum is offered to learners (Morreira et al, 2021)? And what might be the lessons to be applied to decolonising the curricula in community education and development studies in contemporary contexts? These questions will be explored more fully in subsequent chapters. While there is much to learn from the experiences of other disciplines, pioneering work of potential wider relevance has already been undertaken in adult community education and development too. This has been especially significant in relation to the development of participatory action research (PAR).

Having summarised the contributions of PAR, the chapter will conclude by revisiting the starting point: whose knowledge counts? How might different forms of knowledge – including Indigenous forms of knowledge and experiential knowledge – be valued? And how might they be critically evaluated and most appropriately employed through processes of reflexive dialogue?

Decolonising curricula and pedagogy

Decolonisation has been envisaged in a variety of ways, as previous chapters have already outlined, from decolonisation as formal independence from colonial rule through to calls for more fundamental challenges to the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and continuing structural inequalities internationally, starting from the bottom up. Morreira et al refer back to the contributions of Du Bois, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Ngugi and Fanon in this regard, emphasising the importance of calling into question both the systems of power and the systems of knowledge that have served to perpetuate oppression (Morreira et al, 2021). According to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’, in fact, imperialism's biggest weapon has been the cultural bomb, which served to ‘annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves’ (Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 2005: 3).