The Classroom is the Starting Point
Nyashadzashe Mandivenga argues that to decolonise education, we must position students as co-creators of knowledge. This part of a forthcoming Global Policy e-book: 'Decolonial Education and Youth Aspirations'.
What is the purpose of education? It is often celebrated as a foundation for social and economic development (World Bank, 2024). A vehicle for equality, peace, and progress, said to equip learners with the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to navigate and contribute to the world and build better futures for themselves. It is described as a means of fostering critical thinking, creativity, and active citizenship (Dewey, 1916; Reimers, 2006; Giroux, 2014). Ideally, education helps learners understand the world as it was, as it is, and as it might be changed for the better. It cultivates empathy, critical consciousness, and agency, enabling students to shape just societies.
Yet this idealised vision masks the colonial legacies deeply embedded within educational systems. To ask what education is for, and examine it against how education operates is the first step toward decolonising it: to move beyond reforming its surface features and to challenge its underlying purposes, values, and power structures. Schooling has not only been complicit in, but also integral to, producing and reproducing colonial structures of power, embedding hierarchies of race, class, gender, and knowledge within its very foundations (Abebe & Biswas, 2021;Parker, Smith & Dennison, 2017). Consequently, the classroom is more than a place of learning; it is the site where identities, worldviews, and futures are negotiated daily. As such, education becomes an important entry point of decolonising work, particularly because there is a rich literature on the classroom as a space of exclusion and pedagogy as a site for transformation (Freire, 1996; hooks, 2014).
The “empowering” ideals of education often give way to systems that reward compliance over curiosity and performance over understanding (Ball, 2013). Learning becomes synonymous with memorising content, earning grades, and navigating ignored local realities within a market-driven framework that produces sameness in racial, gendered, and class contexts (Essed, P & Goldberg, T, 2002, p. 1067). Essed and Goldberg identify schools and educational spaces as sites of intense socialisation in which students are prepared for systems shaped by neoliberal ideologies and coloniality. Thus, schooling’s potential to build empathy, critical consciousness, and collective agency is lost to the logic of marketisation. Worse, students are treated not as sovereign thinkers or future-makers but as future workers prepared not to imagine new worlds, but to fit into and sustain the capitalist order (Brown, Lauder, & Aston, 2010).
To decolonise education, then, is not simply to diversify curricula or increase access. It is to question the epistemic and structural assumptions that shape education into an instrument of empire. Across the globe, young people are confronting this miseducation. Students expect to step into their classrooms and find a ‘place of sanctuary in "theorizing," in making sense out of what is happening... a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently’ (hooks, 1991, p.2). As we protest that #RhodesmustFall, #Feesmustfall, ask #whyismycurriculumwhite, and demand our universities divest from Israeli companies complicit in genocide, we are demanding rights in education rather than simply rights to education (Abebe & Biswas, 2021). We are refusing to be moulded into the imperialist machinery and asserting that we will think critically, and feel deeply, imagining the world otherwise and creating it. This distinction signals a shift in what justice in learning means. Access alone is insufficient if the experience of education continues to alienate, silence, or marginalise. Education must become a praxis of empowerment that centres justice, multiplicity, and dignity. It challenges dominant practices of schooling and repositions education as a concrete space for developing critical consciousness, particularly among those historically marginalised (Buttaro, 2010).
This chapter positions the classroom as both a colonising space and a site for revolutionary transformation. I write this chapter as a student reflecting on my educational journey and the many times I questioned whether the content was relatable, necessary, incomplete, and whether our collective education was preparing us to lead with vision and justice, or simply to follow the patterns and power structures already in place. While this chapter is grounded in reflections on schooling, the decolonial learner-centred considerations discussed are foundational capacities that must continue to be developed and reinforced throughout higher levels of education. I do this by exploring how we can transform the classroom through relatable content, decolonial reflexivity, and positioning students as co-creators of knowledge and the future.
In the face of injustice that often breeds doubt and pessimism, I am inspired by young people asserting their agency, and grateful for the educators who are listening and, more importantly, responding to the calls of the global youth. We are embodying the change we wish to see, showing us all the transformative potential of education to reshape both the present and the future.
Transforming the classroom into a site for transformation
The task of decoloniality cannot end at changing the curriculum. It must also entail decolonising the structure of the school, our teaching and learning practices, the world outside the school, and how we view students. Decolonising education means reimagining teaching and learning as a shared, relational journey. Teaching becomes a process of mutual reflection where students and educators alike bring their lived experiences into the room, where their identities, histories, and relationships interact with class content fostering self-recognition and critical inquiry, helping us better understand ourselves and the world we move through.
Relatability to content
“What children very much want to do…is to find out what is happening (in their world) and relate what they have learned to themselves and others” (Coles, 1997, p. 250 as cited by Britt, 2011).
The classroom is not a rigid site that remains static. It is a living space where students arrive carrying their histories, identities, and lived experiences. These realities shape how they listen, question, and interpret what is taught. Yet too often, schooling is treated as if it exists outside the world’s pressing events and injustices, untouched by bias, stereotypes, or collective pain. Student engagement (or lack of it) cannot be understood in isolation from the world beyond the classroom walls (Smyth, 2006). What might be labelled as “good behaviour” or “disruption,” “motivation” or “disinterest,” may in fact be deeply connected to global events and their uneven impact on students’ communities. Racialised students, in particular, carry the weight of ongoing political violence, systemic racism, and cultural marginalisation, realities that can shape how safe, valued, or seen they feel in the learning environment (for more on structural violence, see Lee, 2019).
It is important for teachers to understand and be sensitive to how certain topics and materials may be received and learned by different students in light of how closely they may relate to the content. Students engage with course content in ways shaped by their identities, histories, and lived experiences. The same text can evoke deep personal meaning for one student while appearing abstract or irrelevant to another, and these differences influence how the material is received and how classroom dynamics unfold. This entrenches students’ understandings of their places in society. This raises critical questions: why do we read what we read, and learn what we learn? How do/can educators account for differences in sensitivities when teaching and designing curriculum? The answers are not neutral. They reveal educational institutions' priorities shaped by colonial, neoliberal, and Western-centric principles that continue to determine what counts as legitimate knowledge worth learning.
I recall reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in Year 13. Disengagement with the text landed as a profound insensitivity given my racialised body’s proximity to it. The text should have encouraged us to begin confronting the difficult realities of slavery and racism. Douglass’s pursuit of literacy as liberation was a story of one man’s resistance and a reflection on how knowledge, education, and voice are withheld to maintain systems of power today, inviting us to question who education empowers and excludes, why, and how. Remembering Babylon should have guided us to confront the colonial legacies of exclusion, race, identity, and the entanglement of belonging, not only as historical abstractions, but as forces shaping our sense of self and place today (Cammarota, 2014). Or the reading of Sylvia Plath, whose commentary on the weight of patriarchal and capitalist systems that define women’s roles and limits their autonomy should have asked us to see her not only as an individual struggling against personal domestic expectations, but as a woman part of a collective wrestling the broader cultural machinery that disciplines women through norms of respectability, productivity, and silence.
Unfortunately, these were simply texts to be memorised and analysed through the lens of literary devices, themes, and stylistic features in preparation for examinations. We had not engaged with them as works capable of revealing the similar complexities of human experience across time; both individual and collective. The examples are plentiful, across disciplines and education levels. Buried under the weight of academic credentials and competition, there is no space for us to reflect and seek deeper understanding of what and why we learn. Yet it is precisely in these intersections that education finds its transformative purpose: to help us recognise how the personal is political, how what we learn reflects the world as it is, and how it might inspire us to imagine a world otherwise (Villanueva, 2013; Tejada & Espinoza, 2003).
To truly honour Coles’s insight, educators must create the space and time for students to “find out what is happening in their world” and what has happened, across subjects and disciplines. This transforms the classroom into a space of collective understanding where learning is not detached from life, but a means of engaging critically and compassionately with it.
Positioning students as co-creators (of knowledge and the future)
Positioning students as co-creators of knowledge and the future means reimagining education as a collaborative and transformative process rather than a hierarchical one. This shift builds on Freire (1970) call for dialogical education and decolonial pedagogical frameworks that recognize all learners as creators of culture and meaning, with the right to name their worlds. In this view, learning is not the passive absorption of pre-existing knowledge, but a collective act of inquiry, reflection, and transformation. Students become active participants in naming their worlds and reconstructing them, challenging systems that silence or marginalize their experiences (Delpit, 1996).
Moreover, if students have the right to name their worlds, they also have the right to name what they want in education, rather than having all terms dictated to them by curricula, institutions, or experts. This includes the right to participate in decisions about the content that matters to them and their communities, the methods, relationships, and forms of inquiry that feel meaningful and respectfu), and the purposes that connect schooling to their aspirations and struggles. Students also have the right to name the kind of societies they want to live in: to articulate the injustices they experience, envision more just alternatives, and act collectively to move toward those visions.
Co-creation offers a tangible framework for realising this vision. Although much of the literature on co-creation in education has emerged from higher education, its principles apply across all stages of learning (Lubicz-Nawrocka & Bovill, 2023). Lubicz-Nawrocka (2020) describes it as a values-based, ongoing process in which staff and students work together to negotiate and share decisions about learning. In primary and secondary education, inviting students to help design project themes, choose texts, or co-develop classroom guidelines and rules can nurture early agency and confidence. Young learners can meaningfully contribute when educators create structures of shared responsibility that respect children’s perspectives. Such responsiveness encourages authentic learning through culturally and personally relevant practices, fostering belonging and curiosity that grow with students through later stages of schooling. Across these contexts, the principle remains the same: when students are trusted as collaborators, they cultivate the critical consciousness and civic commitment needed to act as co-creators of their learning and of a more equitable social future.
Involving students in shaping what and how they learn, whether through choosing inquiry topics, designing assessments, or co-developing classroom guidelines, fosters a sense of ownership, confidence, and agency (Tinto, 1997). Education shouldn’t only be about acquiring knowledge for knowledge sake, but knowledge to cultivate democracy, social justice, and collective responsibility (Ball, 2015; Moya, 2006). It should also, as Barnett (2004) notes, develop being: the dispositions, values, and sense of purpose that enable meaningful participation in society.
Youth-driven and participatory approaches, such as Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), exemplify how co-creation can empower students to see themselves as capable thinkers and ethical actors who contribute to their communities both within and beyond school (Silva & Las Gatas,2021). In these projects, students collaboratively investigate issues affecting their schools or communities, using research as a tool for social change (Fine, 2008; McIntyre, 2000). Such experiences merge learning with lived experience and students become knowledge producers who analyse systems of oppression, propose solutions, and act collectively to implement them (Caraballo et al, 2017; Cummings, 2025).
Decolonial Reflexivity
Through his theory of decolonial reflexivity, Moosavi (2022) encourages educators to engage in continual self-examination of how their practices, assumptions, and positionalities may inadvertently sustain coloniality through the values, knowledges, and voices their pedagogical choices explicitly or implicitly support. Only through such intentional reflection can they model and pass on ways of thinking that are aware of the most covert coloniality and actively challenge colonial frameworks to enrich students’ learning experiences.
For educators committed to decolonising education, decolonial reflexivity compels them to critically interrogate the content and structure of what is taught and how it is taught. However, given constraints where a fully redesigned curriculum may not be immediately feasible, teachers can still intervene by teaching a colonial curriculum through a decolonial lens.
This includes openly acknowledging the partiality and bias in the curriculum itself. For example, while teaching literary canons, historical narratives, or scientific knowledge rooted in Western traditions, educators can frame these not as universal truths but as situated knowledges with specific origins, limitations, and alternatives. They can introduce students to counter-narratives and marginalized epistemologies alongside mainstream content, encouraging critical comparison rather than passive acceptance. They can also create spaces for students to question and critique curriculum content actively. This might involve dialogic pedagogy where students explore whose perspectives are elevated and whose are silenced and why, thus fostering a critical awareness of knowledge production and the politics embedded within it. By doing so, curriculum design (though structurally colonial) becomes dynamically interrogated and reimagined in the classroom, turning students into active co-investigators of knowledge.
Reflexive educators interrogate whether their classroom validates certain perspectives over others, privileges particular ways of expression, writing, or speaking, or enforces uniformity in how students are expected to articulate ideas and critique. This includes examining whether dominant voices, often those of students from privileged backgrounds or aligned with mainstream viewpoints, receive greater legitimacy and encouragement, while marginalized or alternative perspectives are dismissed, minimized, or discouraged (Omodan, 2023). Teachers should reflect on whether certain forms of critique are welcomed while others are discouraged, and whether the ways students communicate their thinking through academic writing, oral presentation, creative expression, or other modes are equally valued or whether some modes are constructed as more "legitimate" than others (Bacon, 2013).
This means creating classroom norms that protect and value dissenting or critical perspectives, while particularly affirming minority students as credible knowledge holders whose experiences and insights are valued sources of understanding. As Haslanger (2014) argues, credibility in the classroom is not merely epistemic but relational; it depends on the interpersonal dynamics that can either sustain or dismantle inequality through everyday pedagogical practices. In this sense, credibility is co-constructed when teachers listen, validate, and integrate students’ lived experiences into the learning process, thereby signalling that knowledge emerges through dialogue rather than authority. Therefore, decolonial pedagogy attends to the emotional and psychological dimensions of learning (Iversen, 2019), recognising that safety and validation are prerequisites for authentic intellectual engagement.
Moreover, decolonial education requires vulnerability from educators who share their own learning journeys, errors, and adaptations in real-time. This openness invites students into a shared process of decolonial inquiry rather than positioning knowledge as a fixed commodity delivered by an expert. When teachers are uncertain, admit gaps in their knowledge, and openly reconsider their prior assumptions, they communicate that learning is collaborative and ongoing and encourage students to do the same (Moya, 2006). Such transparency further creates psychological safety for students to voice alternative perspectives without fear of being marked as "wrong" (Bacon, 2013).
Conclusion
Decolonising education is a vast and ongoing project achievable only through deliberate and conscious teaching, learning, and thinking. Much has been written on the subject from a wide range of perspectives, including curriculum design, epistemology, staffing, and recruitment These structural and institutional dimensions are undeniably important. However, decolonisation also takes place in the smallest and most immediate of spaces. It happens in the classroom, from creche to higher education. While multi-level change is necessary, students are demonstrating through protest, organising, and everyday forms of resistance that there is no time to wait. If we wait for colonial structures to grant permission for their own deconstructing, we will wait forever with delay, deflection, and inertia.
Decoloniality cannot be bound by structures that constrain when and how change is permitted to occur. On the contrary, it is unbound. It is free, and it is freeing. A curriculum need not be formally decolonised for educators to teach decolonially. What is required is a decolonial mind and heart, grounded in commitment, reflexivity, and relationality.
Position students as co-creators of knowledge. Treat students as active participants in their own learning: involve them in shaping what and how they learn, invite them to name what is missing or misrepresented, and bring in the perspectives and stories that dominant curricula have erased or marginalised. Help them learn not what to think, but how to think critically and reflexively, nurturing the dispositions needed to navigate a pluriverse of knowledges and possibilities. Ask what is happening in their worlds and encourage them to connect content with their lived experiences and wider social, cultural, and political realities. Teach by learning from them, allowing your practice to be reshaped by their questions, critiques, and insights.
Decolonising education requires collective action from all involved parties. Therefore the classroom, where students and educators meet, is the starting point. Let it be a shared, everyday practice done in partnership with students, and certainly not only when, or in the ways that colonially saturated institutions decide it is appropriate.
Nyashadzashe Mandivenga is an International Development researcher with a particular interest in decolonial education, ethical development, and endogenous knowledge production. She has a MSc in Development Management from the London School of Economics & Political Science. LinkedIn Substack
Image: Colleen via Flickr
