Decolonising Education in Conflict Areas

The Decolonising Education for Peace in Africa (DEPA) project has broken new ground by providing the first large-scale set of teaching materials and methodologies for decolonised education in 14 countries in Africa and in the UK. Education materials have been co-developed with marginalised communities in order to address local conflict including gender-based violence, access to land, climate change and xenophobia. The project drew on OU’s world-leading open pedagogies, which had been adjusted for use in Africa in an earlier project (IDEAS). The DEPA project rethought, reframed and reconstructed teaching materials incorporating local African knowledges in a variety of settings including formal education in schools and universities and informal education in refugee camps and community centres. The team went on to draw the findings together into a revised decolonial learning design framework using the findings. These are being made available through 3 Open Educational Resources (OERs) hosted by our global South partners. Working with older people has enabled intergenerational sharing of peace and led people to recognise and validate older people’s long held cultural knowledges of peace. The engagement of NGOs and arts-based organisations with communities provided an opportunity for local communities to reflect upon the practices, memoirs and stories of peace and conflict embedded in their everyday lives that was preventing them from accessing education. Their knowledges, practices, rituals and traditions that mitigate and exacerbate conflict is now better recognised and better represented in teaching materials. The project also enabled redistribution of quality education, itself a major cause of conflict.