Decolonising the Law School: A Collaborative Staff-Student Journey

The Forum was initiated by Maria Fletcher, Professor of European Law, and Catriona Cannon, Lecturer of Equality Law. This Blog is written by Joséphine Sangaré, PhD student in cybersecurity at CREATe, School of Law, and student member of the staff-student Decolonising the School of Law Forum (DtSLF)

In 2023/24, we established the Decolonising the Law School Forum (DtSLF) at the University of Glasgow’s School of Law – a staff-student partnership with the aim of fostering deep, sustained, and inclusive engagement with decolonisation and anti-racism within legal education (for example discussed by Adebisi (2020)). The Forum was conceived as a dedicated space for collaborative reflection and action, bringing together currently 22 students (across undergraduate and postgraduate levels) and 10 staff members (from both academic and professional services, representing diverse ethnic, gender and national backgrounds).

Unlike project-based initiatives, our commitment is to a long-term journey of continuous learning, unlearning, and community transformation which, as critically reflected by Rigney (2020), is best implemented as a community exercise. Our discussions move beyond curriculum reform to interrogate broader questions of identity, belonging, pedagogy, and institutional culture. We critically examine not just what we teach and how we teach it, but also who we are as a community, and how our law school can more actively acknowledge and support a plurality of knowledge systems, lived experiences, and voices. The Forum can thus enable the progression towards what Bovill and Bulley (2011) describe as a negotiated curriculum where students’ experiences are heard, and student contributions are integrated into the curriculum design.

This initiative draws from pedagogies of collaboration and co-production, and is also informed by broader efforts in England, Wales, and Scotland – including RADLAW and the Scottish Law Schools Decolonising Community of Practice. RADLAW is an informal collective around decolonising legal education which formed out of the vision and leadership of colleagues at Greenwich, Kent and Manchester Metropolitan University. Our work builds on the understanding that law, as a discipline, inherently invites questions about normativity, power, and the relationship between those who make the law and those affected by it (Adebisi, 2023; Gopal 2021). In this context, staff-student partnerships are vital not only for curricular transformation, but for driving sustained culture change in spaces that deal with sensitive and discomforting realities.

The innovation of our approach lies in its non-hierarchical and enabling ethos, that creates a form of ownership for everyone involved (Araneta et al., 2022; Hall et al., 2022). The Forum is a dynamic and inclusive space where discomfort is acknowledged as both inevitable and necessary. Through creative, often non-traditional methods – such as image and collage making, object-led discovery, storytelling, heritage walks, and interdisciplinary field trips – we have cultivated a reflective praxis aligned with decolonial theory. These approaches allow for deeper relational engagement and sustain a more open, community-based pedagogy.

At the heart of our work is a co-created Mission Statement and shared values that emerged over time through collective dialogue and intentional relationship-building. We have undertaken a student-led pilot curriculum review and gathered demographic data to inform actions around diversity and inclusion. These early steps are paving the way for tangible changes to content and classroom practices.

However, our experience also brings critical reflections on the challenges of co-production. This work is necessarily slow, resisting the allure of quick fixes and instead requiring deep thought, consistency, and trust (Hall, 2022; Rigney, 2020). Sustaining momentum in the dynamic environment of learning and teaching requires annual re-setting of expectations, roles, and relationships. Nevertheless, our efforts to re-build and re-energise the Forum as a genuine community of practice underscore the importance of resilience and intentionality in collaborative, justice-oriented education.

We hope our experience will offer valuable insight into how legal education can meaningfully respond to calls for decolonisation and anti-racism, and how staff-student collaboration can serve as both method and goal in the journey toward more inclusive and reflective academic communities. More information about some of our work is available here.

This blog article originally appeared on the UofG Scholarship of Learning and Teaching blog

References

Adebisi, F. (2020) ‘Decolonising the law school: presences, absences, silences… and hope’, The Law Teacher, 54(4), pp. 471–474. doi:10.1080/03069400.2020.1827774.

Adebisi, F.I. (2023) Decolonisation and legal knowledge: reflections on power and possibility. Bristol: Policy Press. doi:10.1332/policypress/9781529219371.001.0001.

Araneta, K., Fraser, J. and Maatwk, F. (2022) Fatima Maatwk: Student-staff partnership in the University and decolonising Business Studies (No. 27) [Podcast]. Pedagogies for Social Justice. University of Westminster. Available at: https://blog.westminster.ac.uk/psj/tools/podcast/ (Accessed: 17 April 2025). doi:10.34737/w12v8.

Bovill, C. and Bulley, C.J. (2011) ‘A model of active student participation in curriculum design: exploring desirability and possibility’, in Rust, C. (ed.) Improving Student Learning (ISL) 18: Global Theories and Local Practices: Institutional, Disciplinary and Cultural Variations. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, pp. 176–188. ISBN: 9781873576809.

Gopal, P. (2021) ‘On decolonisation and the university’, Textual Practice, 35(6), pp. 873–899. doi:10.1080/0950236X.2021.1929561.

Hall, J., MacDonnell, J., McConnell, C. and Jones, J. (2022) ‘Student–staff partnerships for diversifying and decolonising the higher education curriculum’, Equity in Education & Society, 1(3), pp. 327–341. doi:10.1177/27526461221109870.

Rigney, S. (2020) ‘Creating the law school as a meeting place for epistemologies: decolonising the teaching of jurisprudence and human rights’, The Law Teacher, 54(4), pp. 503–516. doi:10.1080/03069400.2020.1827821.