Towards Decolonizing Psychology in the Caribbean: Pedagogical Practices and Epistemological Barriers

The decolonization of psychology necessitates a paradigm shift in the behavioural sciences. Lecturers are the vanguard of this change as they are at the forefront of educating future scholars in psychology, determining the future research and publication priorities in psychology. By using reflective pedagogy and engaging in self-reflexive practices, educators can facilitate new ways of problematizing topics, theorizing constructs and analysing data when conducting psychological research. In this col-laborative autoethnographic study, we – the authors (i.e., psychology lec-turers) – share the types of reflective activities that we employ with our undergraduate students to encourage epistemological decolonization and how they are facilitated in the classroom, in addition to the intended role that such activities play in fostering students’ interrogation of estab-lished theories and practices in psychology. We also discuss the mindsets that we bring to bear within the context of our pedagogical practices that can hinder the interrogation of established psychological scholarship in our courses. The findings revealed that journaling, questioning (e.g., Socratic, open-ended), discussions and demonstrations were the most common reflective activities used in our classrooms. Six themes emerged from our collaborative narratives. They included the following: (a) the importance of cultivating positive learning environments for students and that the reflective activities employed are designed to (b) develop students’ capacity for self-interrogation and (c) build students’ confidence to question the external. The final three themes included our (d) tendency to hold on to established doctrines in psychology, (e) conflictedness to challenge and deconstruct known theory and (f) struggle to balance facilitating versus leading reflective classroom discourse.