There is a question that has increasingly shaped the way I think about teaching, learning, and my responsibilities as an academic: whose knowledge matters in this room, whose knowledge does not, and how can I make everyone’s knowledge feel equally important? 

For me, this is one of the deeper dimensions of the process of decolonising the curriculum, which we have been striving to do across all disciplines at Leeds Trinity University, and I have seen pioneered within higher education in various forms. 

In many cases, decolonisation is sometimes reduced to the important but limited task of diversifying reading lists. Representation matters, but it is not enough. We must also question why some intellectual traditions, particularly Western or Eurocentric, have been positioned as universal while others are treated as local, cultural or peripheral. This was my experience as a student and has shaped the academic and educator I have sought to become. 

As an African student entering higher education, I became aware that the theories and scholars presented as foundational were rarely accompanied by equal recognition of the knowledge traditions from which I had come. That inequality has stayed with me, because it revealed how education can privilege some perspectives while rendering others invisible.  

We can revise reading lists and module content, but if knowledge continues to be treated as belonging primarily to the person at the front of the room, deeper power structures remain unchanged. This is where the African philosophy of Ubuntu has become central to my thinking and practice. 

Ubuntu is often expressed through the idea that we are all inter-connected, and the welfare of everyone should be above the interests or success of one individual.  

If we take that idea seriously, education cannot simply be about transferring knowledge from those who possess it to those who do not. Learning becomes a relationship in which knowledge is encountered, questioned, shared, and developed among people bringing different histories and perspectives into the room. 

This philosophy has changed my practice in the classroom, which I now strive to transform into a place where students are not simply recipients of knowledge but participants in its exploration.  

I often describe this as bringing everyone into “the circle”. The circle is not about abandoning academic expertise or suggesting that every perspective is equally valid. Rather, it challenges the assumption that expertise must always operate through hierarchy. I remain the lecturer, with responsibilities grounded in disciplinary knowledge and professional experience, but I also recognise that students arrive carrying valuable knowledge of their own. Their experiences of family, culture, work, faith, migration, and inequality shape how they understand the world.  

When those experiences are welcomed, students begin to see themselves not as empty vessels but as contributors to knowledge. This is particularly important in nursing, health, and social care education.  

A nurse may encounter someone whose understanding of illness is shaped by family, spirituality or cultural tradition, or whose experience of disability or mental health cannot be fully understood through a biomedical lens alone.  

If we prepare students only to apply professional knowledge, without helping them listen to the knowledge people bring about their own lives, we risk producing practitioners who are technically competent but unable to fully understand those they serve.  

Achieving this begins in the classroom. Ultimately, my goal is to create a learning environment where students can encounter difference without seeing it as deficiency, question knowledge without fear, and recognise that their experiences may contribute to the learning of others, and lead to a more effective practice in their future careers, based on empathy and openness to other perspectives. 

This is also why I see decolonising education as inseparable from confronting racism. Racism operates not only through individual prejudice but also through assumptions and structures that shape whose knowledge is considered credible and whose experience is treated as marginal. Higher education cannot address racism effectively if it treats it solely as an interpersonal issue.  

Students need opportunities to recognise and challenge these dynamics within the classroom and beyond. 

Perhaps, then, the question is not whether our curricula contain enough diverse voices. The deeper question is whether we have created educational spaces in which those voices genuinely matter. Whose knowledge matters in this room, whose knowledge has historically been left outside it, and what might become possible if we are prepared to widen the circle? 

Dr Chris Dlamini is a Senior Lecturer in Health and Social Care at Leeds Trinity University.