Decolonizing Education

Definition

Decolonizing education is the project of dismantling colonial legacies in curricula and pedagogy — centering Indigenous and local knowledge systems, languages, epistemologies, and community authority rather than treating Eurocentric knowledge as universal. Its lineage runs through Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), Indigenous scholarship, and movements such as South Africa's #FeesMustFall curriculum debates. In practice it asks: whose knowledge counts, who teaches, in whose language, and toward whose flourishing?

Why It Matters Here

Open-licensed, locally adaptable resources are a quiet but powerful decolonizing lever: a community that can translate a Wikibooks textbook, relabel a curriculum, or reprint a teaching aid controls its own knowledge supply instead of importing it. More pointedly, programs like MALAMA's 'mini ahupua'a' aquaponics and the Menominee Nation's tribal-college system use these technologies to strengthen Indigenous foodways and self-governed education — technology placed in service of cultural continuity rather than assimilation.

Entries That Embody This Principle

• 3D Printing: Additive Manufacturing for Everyone (Wikibooks) — A community-written, CC BY-SA Wikibooks open textbook offering a general introduction to 3D printing technologies, usage, and applications with no prior experience assumed.
• Additive Manufacturing Essentials (OpenStax) — A free, openly licensed (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) OpenStax textbook covering additive manufacturing methods, materials, design, certification, and the business of AM.
• Kurikulum Merdeka (Indonesia Merdeka Curriculum) — Indonesia's national curriculum (Permendikbudristek 12/2024) giving schools flexibility, essential-content focus, and project-based character learning via the Pancasila Student Profile.
• MALAMA Backyard Aquaponics for Native Hawaiian Families — A community-driven Waimānalo, Hawaiʻi program teaching Native Hawaiian families to build backyard aquaponics as a culturally grounded 'mini ahupuaʻa' for food sovereignty and health.
• Menominee Nation Aquaponics (College of Menominee Nation / SUSHI Project) — A tribal-college aquaponics program at College of Menominee Nation, built with Central State University's USDA-funded SUSHI project, advancing Menominee food sovereignty through training, research, and start-up support.
• Open3D-Education — Open educational resource repository (Brazil, UFF) where university students design, document, and openly license 3D-printed teaching aids each semester.