Embedding indigenous perspectives in university teaching and learning: lessons learnt and possibilities of reforming/decolonising curriculum (original) (raw)
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Reducing racism in education: embedding Indigenous perspectives in curriculum
The Australian Educational Researcher
This paper begins with a discussion of a program of work to map and embed Indigenous perspectives at RMIT University, outlines issues relating to the uptake of its guiding principles and actions, and then proposes a rethinking of the work. The authors argue that non-Indigenous educators are often ill equipped to undertake curriculum deconstruction or review. They lack a comprehensive understanding of colonial history, truth telling, racism, and the impact of power dynamics, with its institutional privileging of whiteness. It is often only with this foundational knowledge that staff are positioned to undertake curriculum analysis and ensure that their teaching environments are culturally safe. While this paper is case specific, the original project and the reconsideration of behaviours and actions are relevant to all educational institutions facing similar stumbling blocks when it comes to informing educators in the knowledge and capabilities required to include Indigenous perspectiv...
Rocking the foundations the struggle for effective Indigenous Studies in Australian higher education
Foundation courses that provide knowledge and understanding about the social, cultural and historical factors shaping Indigenous Australians' lives since colonial settlement and their effects are endorsed in Australian higher education policy. Literature highlights the complexity of changing student views and the need for sustained, comprehensive approaches to teaching foundation content. This paper analyses one such course in its capacity to increase knowledge and understanding, and promote positive attitudes, particularly amongst non-Indigenous students. It finds significant shifts in views and knowledge gained from studying the foundation course, and a change in commitment to social justice and reconciliation for Indigenous Australians. Students also significantly changed their view as to whether all Australians should understand this material. Despite these gains, our experiences indicate that foundational courses can be eroded through institutional processes. We argue this suggests the persistence of pervasive and subtle institutional racisms, in the context of global commodification of higher education.
Transformative Strategies in Indigenous Education: Decolonisation and Positive Social Change
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.
The imperative for Indigenous education in Australia is influenced by national political, social and economic discourses as Australian education systems continue to grapple with an agreed aspiration of full participation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. Innovations within and policies guiding our education systems are often driven by agendas of reconciliation, equity, equality in participation and social justice. In this paper, we discuss key themes that emerged from a recent Australian Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) research project which investigated ways in which preservice teachers from one Australian university embedded Indigenous knowledges (IK) on teaching practicum . Using a phenomenological approach, the case involved 25 preservice teacher and 23 practicum supervisor participants, over a 30 month investigation. Attention was directed to the nature of subjective (lived) experiences of participants in these pedagogical negotiations and thus preservice and supervising teacher voice was actively sought in naming and analysing these experiences. Findings revealed that change, knowledge, help and affirmation were key themes for shaping discourses around Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in the Australian curriculum and defined the nature of the pedagogical relationships between novice and experienced teachers. We focus particularly on the need for change and affirmation by preservice teachers and their teaching practicum supervisors as they developed their pedagogical relationships whilst embedding Indigenous knowledges in learning and teaching.
2012
Interest in the participation of Indigenous peoples in higher education has, in recent times, gained momentum with an increasing number of advocates challenging the global history of culturally inept policies and practices imposed within the western higher education system. To address the challenges being presented by Indigenous communities and other groups (often relegated under the banner of disadvantaged or equity) Western Universities are promoting a shift toward inclusive policies and practices. Frustrated with the offerings of the Western Higher Education system, a global movement of Indigenous academics, Elders and knowledge holders are developing strategies to meet the educational needs of their own communities, in order to find a way forward. The mobilization of Elders and Indigenous academics has resulted in the development of a global higher education network which is proving to be a significant force in changing the position of Indigenous participation in higher educatio...
This paper critically examines dominant discourses informing First Year Experience programs delivered for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students participating in higher education. We interrogate traditional ‘deficit models’ through the recognition and acknowledgement of Indigenous knowledge at the cultural interface, the arena in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students encounter university for the first time. In this paper, we demonstrate how the First Year Experience programs for Indigenous students, developed and delivered by the Oodgeroo Unit, are conceptualised by Indigenous knowledges. By recognising Indigenous knowledges and experiences, and valuing these within the Western academy, we provide an alternative to these dominant mainstream discourses and perspectives for Indigenous students navigating their way through university. We argue that Indigenous standpoints provide tools through which Indigenous students can negotiate the cultural interface that exists within the university environment
Indigenous Pedagogy as a Force for Change
IndIgenous academics over the past decade and a half have been focusing strongly, in terms of theory development, on Indigenous' epistemologies and research methodologies. What has not been given equal academic attention is the theoretical articulation of Indigenous pedagogy, not only as a valid system of knowledge and skill transfer, but also as one that conveys meaning, values and identity. In this paper, we want to explore some of the practical aspects of Indigenous pedagogy in a tertiary setting by way of a student-teacher dialogue and also discuss the wider implications of a theoreticaL articulation from our perspective as researchers and academics. We argue that at the intersection of the discourses on transformative pedagogy and Indigenous education in Australia lays an unexplored concept which, properly articulated and implemented, could have great benefits for all learners. Having been afforded attention elsewhere, particularly in North America, it is time to discuss Indigenous pedagogy as a teaching m.ethodology based on Indigenous values and philosophies in Australia today.
The socio-political ideology of ‘assimilationism’ has been prominent in social and political discourse throughout the continuing colonial project of ‘civilising’ and ‘educating’ Indigenous Australian peoples. Assimilationist assumptions posit Indigenous peoples, their knowledges and practices as inferior to Western peoples, knowledges and practices. Indigenous people’s survival is perceived to be dependent on wholesale assimilation into the dominant, ‘superior’ culture and language, where the economic and social dominant culture objectives of education override any Indigenous cultural, linguistic, social or human rights imperatives. Assimilationist ideology remains the most powerful and influential ideological trend in relation to Indigenous peoples’ inequitable socio-political positioning within modern Australian society. Drawing on my own research, workplace practices, experiences and observations over the past ten years teaching Indigenous Studies in a regional Australian university, I explore some of the divergent contextual complexities, contradictions, practical challenges and limitations of engaging critical pedagogical approaches to challenge assimilationism and dominant ideology in Indigenous Studies in the Australian higher education sector. Critical approaches to Indigenous Studies are posited as having the potential to make a significant and valuable contribution to challenging assimilationism and effecting social change but are always inhibited by the dominant ideological, institutional, systemic and disciplinary imperatives of the Academy. The challenges of working with predominantly dominant culture learners, the institutional and systemic imperatives of the Academy and the limited capacity of Indigenous Studies to protect embodied Indigenous knowledges from appropriation by the disciplines of the Academy are explored to reveal that, regardless of these limitations, critical Indigenous Studies pedagogy is a crucial and necessary site of resistance to assimilationism and Indigenous oppression.