The Future of Education

Whose knowledge counts in a graphic design classroom? Despite growing calls to decolonise design education, most curricula have not been systematically examined at the level of their formal documents. Design briefs, seminar slides, assessment rubrics, and prescribed readings carry cultural messages about which designers matter, which histories are legitimate, and which visual traditions define quality. This paper presents a method for making those messages visible. I adapted the Culturally Responsive Curriculum Scorecard (Bryan-Gooden, Hester, and Peoples 2019), originally developed for school-level English Language Arts, for use in higher education graphic design. The adapted instrument was applied to a graphic design unit of study at an Australian university, examining representation, social justice orientation, and teacher materials across the syllabus, seminars, briefs, and readings. The curriculum scored in the Culturally Insufficient range for Representation and Social Justice, and Emerging Awareness for Teacher Materials. Five structural patterns emerged: geographic concentration of exemplars, monolingual typographic normativity, the absence of non-Eurocentric design histories, cultural content present but not named, and assumed rather than designed inclusivity. These findings demonstrate that well-intentioned curricula can reproduce dominance through omission rather than through explicit exclusion. The paper argues that if design education is to move beyond ad hoc diversification, curriculum documents require the same critical scrutiny that scholarship has directed at classroom practice. The adapted scorecard offers a transferable method for any practice-based discipline where canonical knowledge operates through visual and material systems.