How whiteness dominates education

In the third episode of our series on Shakespeare and Race, we look at our education system and the way that we’re teaching the next generation. The way we teach and the way we learn shapes the way we understand the world. If that education is permeated with this idea that whiteness is the norm, and everything else is the other, that is what we take out into the world. And when it comes to Shakespeare, it means generations are brought up with a narrow set of ideas about what Shakespeare’s plays mean, who they are for and why they matter. More and more, across schools, universities and drama schools, we are hearing calls to decolonise the curriculum. In this episode, we’ll be exploring what that means and what a decolonised curriculum might look like. And of course, we’ll be asking what that means for the way we learn the works of Shakespeare. We chat to playwright and founder of the Diversity School, Steven Kavuma, about his experiences of drama school education. And we talk to Dr Shona Hunter about how whiteness dominates the educational context.