Through the lens of the decolonial imagination

This is the first editorial written by the editorial team recently appointed by BERA to curate the curriculum journal for the next few years, and while most of these papers were put together by the previous team, whose fine stewardship we are as honoured as we are challenged to follow—we are absolutely delighted to be writing this editorial through the lens of our preferred vision. We write at a time of international turbulence. When, one might reasonably ask, were international relationships anything other than turbulent? But that misses the point. We are reminded here of Gramsci's reflection on interregnum—that moment of political in-betweenness, a world order has passed but a new one has not yet crystallized. Penned from a fascist prison “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters” (Muehlebach, 2016). A newly elected presidency in the United States looks set to dismantle alliances that have maintained peace in Europe for the past 80 years. With dreams of a revitalized colonial world order, the struggle for supremacy, raw materials, and markets has placed international relations on an increasingly precarious footing. The International Criminal Court has in November added three more names to its list of defendants (BBC News, 2025). This brings to 22 the number of outstanding arrest warrants in response to war crimes (Statista, 2024). This response, issued in the absence of a global police force, does little to assuage our anxieties. Anxieties deepened by the news that the Paris Agreements 1.5c threshold looks set to be breached earlier than expected (Earth.Org, 2025). The evidence is incontrovertible and conclusive; 2024 was the hottest year on record. The consequences are unevenly devastating. In Europe, 370, 000 hectares of forest have been destroyed by wildfire, and 2 million people were affected by severe flooding. Across southern Africa, countries struggled with drought, a state of emergency being declared in Namibia, which experienced its worst drought in a century. The government was compelled to kill wild animals and distribute meat for people without food. If the political response to these crises is reduced to tariffs, state visits, and denialism, might our curricular response offer more scope for optimism? Integral to our vision for the BERA Curriculum Journal is an impassioned commitment to enhancing the ethical imagination. We will use the epistemic tools of decolonization, anti-racist pedagogies, and the embodiment of equity, diversity, and inclusion to accomplish this. As we review the papers in this edition of the BERA Curriculum Journal, our starting point is the critical embrace of diversity along multiple axes of difference. Nieminen et al. (2025) explore diversity in the context of low-risk assessment practices. Their conclusions are not as fulsomely supportive as we might have intuitively wanted. From the perspective of those who advocate for inclusive assessment, diversity is a fundamental aspect of equity. They imply otherwise. There seemed little correlation between diversity of approaches to assessment and successful student learning. And while Finland's eschewing the ‘culture of compliance’ that defines pedagogy in the UK, low-stakes assessment leading to low-stress amongst students—in their reading at least—is less an indication of diversity being superfluous but more fully grounded the apparent disconnect (by both students and teachers) between assessment and learning. The authors of this paper, quite rightly s suggest repairing the inextricable link between socio-cultural and -political assumptions of what assessment is and what kinds of norms and ideologies guiding what assessment should be in a given context. The authors end on a call to action, the action being a shared responsibility for assessment between students and teachers through shared assessment literacies (see Carless & Winstone, 2022). And more research that explores student–teacher partnerships and dialogues in assessment design may offer valuable practical solutions for calibration assessment practices and perceptions with the multiple stakeholders in assessment. In doing so, they echo another axial line of diversity that the edition exemplifies. Namely, the question of what methodologies are best suited to curriculum research. For some writers, the answer is simple: the orthodox interview with a sizeable population (Shakoury & Boers, 2025) for others, it is more complex: collaborative autoethnography (Chandler et al., 2025) is a less orthodox and wholly unexpected approach to curricular research. There is, however, an intriguing alignment between Chandler et al. and Nieminen and Atjonen. Both pivot on this notion of diversity and dialogue. Chandler et al. point to the importance of collaboration with disciplinary experts, community leaders, and climate activists. This requires those involved in curriculum design to adopt the Freirean stance of the teacher-learner, one where they seek out and appreciate diverse worldviews across disciplinary boundaries (Sandri, 2022). Thus, their curriculum team included a cacophonous meld of educational technologists interacting with disciplinary specialists from language studies, ecology, healthcare, visual art, music, and citizen science. They bring to the ethical imagination that animates our decolonial dreams—a passion for inclusive, equitable, and open educational practices; alongside close-to-practice case study (Vernon & Dunphy, 2025). There is plenty here to stimulate the ethical imagination. While only one paper is explicit in its reference to multiculturalism (Shakoury & Boers, 2025) asking not whether it is best understood through the metaphor of melting pot or mosaic, but rather what the impact of such metaphors might be, their implications and appropriateness. The papers each approach this discussion from diverse perspectives. van Bemmel et al. (2025) remind us of the premise upon which the entire discussion revolves: Curricula are value-driven; the values themselves are subject to change as the context from which they emerge and to which they contribute changes but their partisanship, ethical leanings and moral anchoring are indelible. It was good to see borrowing here—concepts central to vocational education—the responsive curriculum—had a successful excursion into the more generic curricula space based on its capacity to cope with the unexpected, the unwelcome and the complex, a concept which originates from John Keats in 1817. The papers somehow reconcile fluidity and fixity, developing a modular framework designed to enact the unpredictable. Uncertainty is writ large across this edition. And responses to it vary. The scale and nature of contemporary disruptions are unprecedented. They induce anxiety and perplexity. If we are to embody Keats' negative capability, our response to such disruptions—such as the climate emergency– is to refuse the refuge of fixity. We—those who think, research, write, and teach—must be prepared to disrupt our ideas about the university, the role of Higher Education, curricular design, and the relationships between educators, students, and communities (Chandler et al., 2025) for a journal setting its sights on a nomadic exploration of ethical imagination—such an invitation resonates. Challenging hierarchical models of knowledge transfer by working in collaboration is a creative and welcome decolonial move. One that we hope to spend the next few years elaborating upon with enthusiasm. There is no funding information assocoiated with this text. No conflict of interest was sought or required. No ethical approaval was sought or required. Research data are not shared.