Resistance, Reform, and Reimagination: Responding to Coloniality Through Secondary English Curricula

In settler colonial contexts, education remains entangled with the imperial project. Grappling with the work of reconciliation and redress, education authorities have begun rewriting curricula to respond to the colonial inheritance in subject English. In this paper, we read three official secondary English curricula – from Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and Ontario, Canada – asking how each has responded to coloniality. Across these documents we identify three approaches to redress: resistance to erasure, reformation of curricular structures, and reimagination of what constitutes subject English. Each pathway opens possibilities for anticolonial practice while simultaneously leaving in place structures through which English continues to reinscribe colonial norms. We offer this reading as a model teachers can apply to the institutional curriculum documents of their own context. Prompts throughout the paper guide that reading and support the movement towards anticolonial practice.