Listening out and dealing with otherness. A postcolonial approach to higher education teaching

Abstract

Postcolonial pedagogy invites academic teaching staff to create situations, in which hegemonic modes of knowledge production can be critically reflected and one’s own entanglement as disciplinary socialised member of (western) academia experienced. Such a postcolonial approach has been applied to a seminar in the context of cultural musicology and its impact on teaching and learning analysed. In this paper, the findings of the accompanying research are presented and discussed in relation to the concept of Bildung, theories on individual learning (in higher education) and current processes to internationalise the curricula. Throughout the argumentation, I will demonstrate how postcolonial pedagogy may cause the construction of otherness and why this simultaneously constitutes the biggest challenge as well as the profoundest reward when applying such an approach to university teaching. In addition to that, this paper introduces a definition of postcolonial pedagogy and offers recommendations to foster its implementation in higher education contexts.