Transformative Strategies in Indigenous Education: Decolonisation and Positive Social Change (original) (raw)

This thesis is located within the social and political context of Indigenous education within Australia. It is an area fraught with competing readings of education, as either an instrument for the further colonisation and oppression or the emancipation and empowerment of Indigenous Australians. While intellectuals contest theories, representations and standpoints, appropriate curriculum approaches and pedagogy, and while policymakers debate the reasons for persistent poor academic outcomes (DETYA 1999; Encel 2000) Indigenous people continue to experience unacceptable levels of disadvantage and social marginalisation. The struggle for Indigenous students individually and collectively lies in being able to determine a direction which is productive and non-assimilationist which offers possibilities of social and economic transformation, equal opportunities and cultural integrity and self-determination. The challenge for teachers within the constraints of the academy is to develop strategies that are genuinely transformative, empowering and contribute to decolonisation and positive social change. From the micro level of an Indigenous Centre, situated in a specific university with a particular group of individuals developing a particular transformative curriculum project and pedagogy, this thesis brings everyday life to bear on the diverse knowledge systems and theories regarding emancipatory education, individual agency, race, class and gender relations and their interplay with various levels and spheres of the institutional state apparatus. This thesis explores how the construction of two theoretical propositions — the Indigenous Community Management and Development (ICMD) practitioner and the Indigenous/non-Indigenous Interface — are decolonising and transformative strategies. The interface is revealed as the site of turbulence, negotiation and possibility, in which the ICMD practitioner works to provide/mediate the space to incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing in highly productive and transformative ways. It investigates how these theoretical constructs and associated discourses are incorporated into the Centre’s policy processes, curriculum, and pedagogy to influence and interact with the everyday lives of students in their work and communities and the wider social institutions. It charts how a group of Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff interact with these propositions and different ideas and discourses interrupting, re-visioning, reformulating and integrating these to form the basis for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous futures in Australia.