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“Education has always been a massive passion of mine. I’ve always loved learning about new things, thinking critically, and challenging the world around me. However, formal education can often curb that love and enthusiasm that we see in so many young people."

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"He threw out any information that wasn’t absolutely necessary, and created a syllabus that looked more like a spread from a comic book than a contract. "

• Decolonising the curriculum, Catherine Manathunga

“Decolonization offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one. Decolonization is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere.”

“I envision a future where we can list the names of indigenous and person of color writers just as fast, if not faster, than white men. Sure, Emerson had some great things to say — “Nature” blew my mind as a teenager. But have you read Leslie Marmon Silko or LeeAnne Howe? How about Jesmyn Ward or Gloria Anzaldúa or Erika Wurth or Kiese Laymon or Tarfia Faizullah? They didn’t just blow my mind — they changed my life. But more than that, what I hope to see with the decolonization of syllabi is a reframing of the American narrative and a return to modes of thinking and knowledge that colonization tried so hard to destroy.” 

"The term culturally sustaining requires that our pedagogies be more than responsive of or relevant to the cultural experiences and practices of young people—it requires that they support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence....That is, culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling." (p. 4) 

• Follow thisfor a growing compilation of ways to support the movement for Black lives and the uprisings, in and out of the classroom

• Revolutionizing My Syllabus: The Process

• Self-Excavation and Syllabi Creation

"The syllabus is an important document both for faculty and for the students. It’s often the first communication you have with the students."

• This resource was created by a group of students through a partnership with the Teaching Learning Initiative.

A survey tool designed for you "to examine a particular syllabus and course design to get a broader perspective on inclusion in your actual teaching practices."

"Many students with and without disabilities have had their agency downplayed throughout their educations. To shift the rhetoric of the syllabus, instructors might explain what students can do as opposed to what they should not do."

“A better method would be to adopt the idea of the ‘promising syllabus,’ a concept developed by Ken Bain…'The promising syllabus,’ Bain wrote to me via e-mail, ‘fundamentally recognizes that people will learn best and most deeply when they have a strong sense of control over their own education rather than feeling manipulated by someone else's demands.’”

• On Course: The Syllabus

"The root of the problem is that the syllabus is really two different documents serving two different purposes. On the one hand, it is the most comprehensive guide that you will prepare detailing how you plan to organize a body of information in such a way as to reach your educational goals while having the greatest impact on student learning. On the other, it is seen as a quasi-legal contract that sets out your responsibilities to the students and what they must do in order to successfully complete the course. The first purpose is most often invisible and implicit; the second needs to be explicit and unambiguous."

• (for more here, see L. Dee Fink's (2013) Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to Designing College Courses)
• The 3 Essential Functions of Your Syllabus, Part 1

"I take issue with the idea that once you’ve assigned a certain number of pages of weekly reading, you’ve accomplished something resembling "academic rigor." Faced with the question — How much reading should we assign? — I think most instructors would agree that the best answer is: 'It depends.'"

"An effective syllabus can stimulate interest in a course, help students see how it develops and coheres, and provide them with the rationale for the decisions we have made about what and how we want them to learn." 

• Teaching and Learning Institute: 

"It can be helpful and interesting for the professor to talk a bit about themselves--it develops the idea that they’re human but also illustrates their approach and how they came to consider and do work in their field." 

• Teaching and Learning Institute: 

"I also appreciate when classes seem organized – moving chronologically, or thematically, through whatever subject we are tackling. This doesn’t have to be a traditional kind of organization, but as long as the professor explains it, it’s great. It just helps me as a student get a handle on why we are studying what we are and in what order, which helps for making connections between different texts and topics. These connections could also be made explicitly in paper or exam questions, where we are asked to link between these texts…"

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Campus Context Resources:

• Religious Holidays, 91��ý

• Professors Chung-Nan Tzou and Tarik Aougab: Linear Algebra
• Professor Joel Schlosser: Power and Resistance 
• Professor Joel Schlosser: People Power 
• Professor Veronica Montes: Mexican American Communities