Review of Decolonizing University Teaching and Learning: An Entry Model for Grappling with Complexities

Tran's new book offers an eminently useful and approachable discussion around student and staff engagement with decolonization in the context of the higher education (HE) sector.In this book, Tran argues that decolonization is not just a historical or theoretical construct but a practical approach that aims to systematically efface the colonial epistemology, and to rethink, reframe, and reconstruct the way people see the world.Students and staff have been leading the call for decolonization of universities and public life.For example, movements like The Rhodes Must Fall at the University of Cape Town in South Africa that aim to challenge the dominating colonial legacies (Bhambra et al., 2018) have brought prominence to the issue of decolonizing universities.This campaign inspired the emergence of allied activities in other parts of the world, for instance, attempts by Harvard Law School's Royall Must Fall movement to reckon with its past ties to slavery (Beeman, 2019).In the UK, the National Union of Students leads the influential campaign, "Why is My Curriculum White?" (Williams & Benjamin, 2022) to question the tendency to favor Eurocentric perspectives and the general lack of diversity in curricula across UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).Many universities have started running their own campaigns to engage in the ongoing process of decolonizing, particularly by addressing students' dissatisfaction with the university curriculum, teaching, and learning environments, such as the Decolonizing School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Learning and Teaching Toolkit (2018).The author of the reviewed book, Dr Danielle Tran, who has worked at various UK HEIs in learning and teaching roles, situates the decolonizing process as an extension of inclusivity work and calls for it to be addressed as a prioritized agenda.