Decolonising curriculum knowledge in Europe (Symposium): What’s been happening in teacher education? What’s next for informing policy and practice?

Decolonising the curriculum has been trending as a term in education. This has been given greater attention in academia following the huge waves of Black Lives Matter protests across the world during the summer of 2020. Where has the term come from? How is it being interpreted today in education? What is next for this concept in teacher education policy and practice? This symposium explores all of these questions, through three papers that share evidence-based research for
decolonising curriculum knowledge in Poland, Norway, and the UK. My introduction to this symposium will provide insight to the conceptions of our broader international collaborations from which these samples of papers are drawn, including the theoretical and evidenced based foundations that frame the criticality in our thinking and arguments (Mignolo, 2013; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013; Moncrieffe, 2020, 2022). Each of the papers in this symposium will argue for the
reconceptualization of teacher education policy and the decolonising of curriculum knowledge. The plenary to this symposium will provide discussion opportunity to consider how the reconceptualising of national curricula from narrow ethnic exclusivity to broader ethnic inclusivity can provide sense and meaning to teachers with equitable classroom teaching and learning practices, thus serving to challenge racial inequalities in the systems and structures of European societies.