Designing curriculum at the intersection of language, culture, and coloniality: reflections from primary French textbooks in Mauritius
Evelyn Kee Mew Wan Khin
Mauritius Institute of Education, Mauritius; https://orcid.org/0009-0009-1110-7843
Shameem Oozeerally
Mauritius Institute of Education, Mauritius; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6256-1407
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36534/erlj.2026.04.02
Bibliographic citation: (ISSN 2657-9774) Educational Role of Language Journal. Special Volume 2026-2(3). DECOLONIAL AND SITUATED APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING, pp. 17-32.
Abstract
Curriculum development, specifically textbook conception, in postcolonial contexts like Mauritius is neither a neutral nor a primarily technical undertaking; it remains a deeply situated process shaped by linguistic and cultural diversity, tacit colonial language hierarchies, and underlying ethnic tensions. This paper explores these dynamics as they manifested during the conception of Grades 5 and 6 Primary French textbooks within the Nine Year Continuous Basic Education reform. This study adopts an ecolinguistics-decolonial lens, interweaving autoethnography as decolonial praxis with document analysis, and examines both authors’ autoethnographic accounts and the textbook materials as artefacts. Indeed, as panel coordinator and panel member involved in the writing of these textbooks, the authors analyse their own experiences of navigating the theoretical, ideological, and affective tensions embedded in the design process, as they resist the “epistemic violence” (Mignolo, 2011), i.e. the silencing of non-dominant modes of knowing through absorption by dominant Western research paradigms and practices. Using an eco-critical textbook research (Stibbe, 2015; Oozeerally & Hookoomsing, 2017), to understand how decolonial and situated approaches inform curricular choices in a predominantly Creole-speaking environment and a postcolonial context, the findings discuss how the textbooks negotiate epistemological presence and ecological framing, tensions between linguistic ecology and pluriversality, insularity as epistemic centre, as well as Ecological Social Justice. This study thus puts forth how the curriculum design circumvents layers of tensions between learners’ plurilingual and pluricultural realities and policy frameworks that continue to privilege colonial epistemologies.
Keywords: decolonial curriculum design, plurilingualism, pluriculturalism, Mauritius, textbook development, ecolinguistics
Go to full Special issue 2026-2(3)
Go to Educational Role of Language Journal – main page
Go to International Association for the Educational Role of Language – main page