Designing curriculum at the intersection of language, culture, and coloniality: reflections from primary French textbooks in Mauritius

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