Decolonising the curriculum is a complex, although not elusive phenomenon in initial teacher education (ITE). It is, however, to be actively and persistently pursued in order to enable anti-racist pedagogies and agendas to embed within student teachers’ schema. Calls across higher education for humanising and epistemically liberating pedagogies (Carmichael-Murphy & Gabi, 2021) challenge ITE educators to reconceptualise the ontological and epistemic foundations of their praxis.
However, prevailing policies of standardisation in ITE often serve to sever links between culture and education for those deemed as Other, leading to accusations of a lack of commitment to decolonial and anti-racist practices (Arshad, 2020). Indeed Domínguez (2019) believes we are poised at a static zero point where the training of teachers requires specific and uncompromising intervention to avoid the reification of colonial practices.
