Decolonizing the Curriculum: African Epistemologies in Practice
An intermediate mini-course equipping African higher-education faculty, lecturers, curriculum designers, and institutional leaders with the conceptual grounding and practical tools to decolonize their curricula. Moving from the critique of colonial epistemic legacies to actionable frameworks for curriculum design and institutional transformation, the course centres African epistemological traditions — Ubuntu, Afrocentricity, endogeneity, and indigenous knowledge systems — as legitimate and generative sources of knowledge. Participants leave with a practical toolkit they can apply immediately to learning outcomes, content selection, assessment, and institutional practice. Across six lessons spread over two modules, they move from understanding what decolonization truly means, to diagnosing colonial legacies and epistemic violence, to applying transformative frameworks, to designing decolonized curricula and driving whole-institution knowledge sovereignty.
This 12-credit intermediate mini-course equips African higher-education faculty, lecturers, curriculum designers, and institutional leaders to decolonize their curricula. It pairs theoretical critique of colonial epistemic legacies with practical frameworks and tools for curriculum design, assessment redesign, and institutional transformation. Centring African epistemological traditions — Ubuntu, Afrocentricity, endogeneity, and indigenous knowledge systems — the course treats them not as folklore to be appended but as legitimate, generative sources of knowledge. Two modules move the participant from the 'why' (foundations and critique) to the 'how' (epistemologies, design toolkits, and institutional change).
Instruction & Evaluation
Online / Asynchronous (Self-Paced with Faculty Mentorship)
Self-paced modular instruction with continuous continental access via the CAA Member Portal, supplemented by faculty moderation.
Continuous Assessment & Practical Portfolio
Each lesson contains interactive knowledge checks (quizzes, matching, sorting, fill-in-the-blank, flashcards) and reflective/essay prompts for formative self-assessment. Participants complete a portfolio-style redesign task across the course: by Lesson 2.2 they draft a decolonized blueprint for one of their own modules, and by Lesson 2.3 they map an institutional transformation plan. Summative assessment uses a rubric against the course's learning outcomes for the final blueprint and institutional plan.
What You Will Master
- Define decolonization, decoloniality, indigenization, and Africanization, and distinguish them precisely
- Explain epistemic violence and coloniality of power/knowledge/being and identify their concrete manifestations in African universities
- Apply diagnostic frameworks (Chilisa's stages, DECA, decolonisation matrix, Six Ls) to assess a programme's position on the colonized-to-decolonized continuum
- Articulate Ubuntu, Afrocentricity, endogeneity, and IKS as coherent epistemological frameworks and critique their risks (essentialism, romanticism)
- Redesign learning outcomes, content selection, reading lists, and assessment using a decolonized curriculum blueprint
- Propose institutional strategies for knowledge sovereignty, multilingual pedagogy, and redefining quality/excellence in partnership with QA bodies
2 Modules
Foundations of Decolonization in Higher Education
This module builds the conceptual and historical foundations. It clarifies what decolonization really means (and does not mean), traces the colonial legacies and epistemic violence that persist in African universities, and introduces practical frameworks that convert critique into actionable transformation.
3 Lessons
African Epistemologies and Transformative Practice
This module turns from diagnosing the problem to building the solution. It explores key African epistemological frameworks (Ubuntu, Afrocentricity, endogeneity, indigenous knowledge systems), equips participants with a practical toolkit for decolonized curriculum and assessment design, and concludes with strategies for whole-institution transformation and knowledge sovereignty.
3 Lessons
Weekly Topics
Ready to enrol in DECOL101?
Access this course, study modular pedagogical frameworks, and earn verified CPD credits through the CAA member portal.
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