Unveiling Diversity: Decolonizing and Disrupting First-Year Drawing Education

The literature on decolonizing the curriculum highlights a significant distinction between diversity and decolonization. Diversity involves promoting the inclusion of various individuals in reading lists as well as the staff and student body. At the same time, decolonization goes further by dismantling colonial forms of knowledge, particularly practices that categorize and racialize people. This article presents an ongoing arts-based action research project conducted by the graphic design department of the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) in South Africa (Cromhout, Duffett, & Steenkamp, 2021). The research program aims to revamp the department's historically Eurocentric curriculum using decolonisation and feminist theories. The primary goal is to integrate African design concepts into a predominantly Western pedagogical framework to acknowledge the valuable knowledge our diverse student body possesses. The main issue revealed through the collected data is the curriculum's overwhelming emphasis on a Western perspective, which fails to adequately consider our students' real-life experiences in the field of design in South Africa. Our study utilizes an asset-based approach to drawing (a topic covered in the Visual Communication Design curriculum) as a response, providing a platform for meaningful integration of indigenous knowledge. This study seeks to illuminate the subjective experiences of first-year students in the field, specifically focusing on how their indigenous knowledge is incorporated. Based on its findings, the study proposes embracing diversity and restructuring the education provided to students. It is driven by a commitment to valuing students' real-life experiences as it strives to guide them from the familiar to the unfamiliar in graphic design.