Teaching Community Psychology Decolonially: A Pedagogical Journey

Abstract

The decolonial impulse in psychology has manifested across a variety of domains, perhaps most notably psychological theory and approaches to research methodology. In this article, we focus on how decoloniality can reshape approaches to teaching and learning. We present a case study of how we recurriculated, from 1999 to 2020, three community psychology modules using a decolonial lens. We describe three phases in the development of community psychology teaching at a university in South Africa—“Little Oxford in the veld,” “Going walkabout,” and “New voices.” In each case, we detail the “course content,” our pedagogical approach, and how students responded, and try to identify what lessons can be learnt for a more explicitly decolonial mode of teaching and learning. We conclude by asserting that to foster decoloniality among students, we have to be cognizant of the ways in which they have for a long time been taught using Euro-centric lenses and frames of knowing and therefore the process of unlearning may be slow and somewhat painful. However, we see this as a necessary step toward decolonization, as epistemic colonization was and continues to be a violent project.