Team Decolonise (Team Leader:Louisa Shirley)(School of Health Sciences)

Team Decolonise: Louisa Shirley, Anna Hood, Diana Gamboarenteria, Sohini Biswas, Karabo Sibasa

We are working together to develop awareness and resources to help 'decolonise' the psychology curriculum. Our team consists of two core UoM staff: Louisa Shirley and Anna Hood, alongside our team of student partners. The students in the team have had a direct impact on the success of recruiting to student focus groups and to forging links with the Students’ Union decolonising project. Staff members in the team have facilitated meeting other interested members of staff in the Division of Psychology and Mental Health.

Through gaining more understanding of the need for decolonising the curriculum and the barriers to decolonising through our research, we are making inroads into developing a toolkit of resources and processes based on student experience to help other psychology educators at UoM, nationally and internationally feel confident they can decolonise. Our feedback from students through focus groups and through personal contact has shown how valuable this work is. For example,“It’s pretty much exclusively white researchers, it's not presented in like a ‘this is one side of history’. It’s kind of presented as if that’s the only side of psychological history” .

We currently have 3 projects ongoing to inform the development of a toolkit of resources:

• decolonising at UoM – the views of students are lacking in the decolonising literature. We are conducting a series of student focus groups to ask about student experience of the ‘traditional’ (colonised) curriculum.

• scoping review in a quest for “best practices” – how are other institutions decolonising the psychology curriculum?

• development of the ‘BME Psychology’ website, previously hosted by the Psychology of Women and Equality section of the British Psychology Society (BPS) with BPS funding of £8000.