Curriculum Transformation for Social Justice and Diversity

Abstract

This chapter reviews curriculum transformation as an important process of developing social justice, epistemic inclusion, and responsiveness to diversity in education. It theorises curriculum as a point of power in which the choice of knowledge, cultural hegemony, and Eurocentrism may reproduce inequality and marginalisation. Drawing on worldviews of the Global North and the Global South, the chapter brings out multicultural, anti-racist, and inclusive models of curriculum and investigates the contradictions in standardisation and localisation. Based on the central case of South Africa, it examines the legacies during the era of apartheid, reforms post 1994 and modern forms of decolonisation movements towards epistemic justice. The chapter incorporates perspectives on Critical Theory, social justice, and decolonial theories to suggest the plans for changing the content, teaching methods, and assessment of the curriculum. It concludes by highlighting principles and system-level recommendations for the design of socially equitable, inclusive, and context-based transformative curricula.