Book Chapter: Tensions and Intersections of Self and Subject: A New Settler's Perspective on Teaching a Course in Aboriginal Education. (original) (raw)
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“IT’S NOT THE SUBJECT IT’S THE TEACHER!” WHAT ABORIGINAL STUDENTS SAY ABOUT THEIR EDUCATION
Aboriginal students follow teachers not content. Relationship is one of the key foundations when working with Aboriginal students’. Many Aboriginal pedagogical theorists have highlighted this standpoint since the late 1970s. These educational pedagogical theorists have also argued this understanding about all students. So what is important or different about the relationship between Aboriginal students and their teachers? One key issue is that in Australian schools most Aboriginal students are taught by non-Aboriginal teachers and in many cases there is a cultural divide that can lead to different understandings in what a relationship means for each participant. My PhD research interviewed 50 Aboriginal high school students across a variety of social, cultural, economic and geographically diverse areas. Asking them about how to best engage them to their schools. A common statement across all sites was the relationship between the Aboriginal students and their teachers’. But this relationship from the Aboriginal students standpoint was based on their Aboriginality, so for many of these non-Aboriginal teachers the relationship understanding they presented to the Aboriginal students was culturally foreign.
2019
Reconciliation calls settler-educators to confront coloniality; to take up action that reflects a responsibility to our moral consciousness; and to motivate societal praxis that respects Indigenous peoples' cultures and knowledges. It is time educators take responsibility to answer this call. As a settler-educator working within contexts of Indigenous education I continue to undertake what Paulette Regan (2010) terms, a "journey of unsettling," whereby I am growing to understand my privileged position in Canada's colonial society. Through such, I have searched to understand my role and responsibilities in the contexts I've lived and worked, and what that means for myself and others in Canada's education system moving forward. Using Tribal Critical Race Theory, anti-race theory, and decolonizing pedagogy as theory, my research (autoethnography) examines concepts of reconciliation, sovereignty and self-determination, culturally responsive schooling (CRS), and...
Book Review: Rethinking Indigenous Education: Culturalism, Colonialism and the Politics of Knowing
The Journal of Educational Enquiry, 2009
Cathryn McConaghy argues that Australian Indigenous people and Indigenous education systems have been produced through disciplinary practices that presume social and pedagogical issues are shaped primarily by cultural identity and that educational practice is premised on assumptions about cultural identity that are grounded in "two immutable and oppositional cultures: 'Indigenous' and 'Western'" (p 8). McConaghy's task is to explore how centring assumptions about 'culture' produce a form of culturalism that has profound consequences for Indigenous people. For McConaghy, culturalism is the perception of subjectivity as primarily 'cultural'. It is centrally about identity politics; it privileges 'culture' as an explanatory tool for knowing matters of social difference; and it uses 'culture' indiscriminately to explain issues in colonial contexts (p 43).
Aboriginal educators at the intersection: Intimations of greater nuance in both-ways education
The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education
The Whole of Community Engagement (WCE) initiative sought to identify barriers and enablers in Aboriginal students’ pathways to post-compulsory education, in six remote communities in Arnhem Land and central Australia. It identified known factors like colonial history, low English literacy, job prospects and cultural difference. Responses often focus on “both-ways” curriculum and pedagogy, and teachers’ cultural competence. Another factor found was interculturality, the fact of living and working at the intersections of Aboriginal and other socio-cultural worlds. The initiative found that students’ engagement with school and with pathways into further education were troubled by both cultural difference and intersection. The Aboriginal researchers involved in the initiative, living at the intersections in their own lives, exemplified the challenges of, and the capabilities needed to negotiate, cultural intersection. The authors propose an intercultural perspective as a refinement to ...
Aboriginal Worlds in the Western Academy
In recent years, the issue of how best to support Indigenous students enrolled in undergraduate academic programs has been increasingly directed by practices which promote a ‘success-oriented’ approach (Devlin, 2009; Devlin & McKay, 2017). This paper outlines a critical reflection of two lecturers involved in the delivery of a mainstream Charles Darwin University Academic literacy unit to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSI) students enrolled at Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education. This is a preliminary examination of a later deeper reflective study. In this study we use Brookfield’s (1995, 2009) critical reflection process to examine the curriculum and pedagogical transformations to a standard academic discourse unit in order to make it more conducive to ATSI learning and academic success. Both lecturers have been teaching Indigenous students in the Northern Territory in a variety of contexts over the past three decades and co-teaching this unit provided an opportunity to examine our pedagogical practices that led to ATSI student achievements. This paper firstly presents the context by examining the teaching program. It then explores the student cohort and reflects on specific changes we made in our teaching and learning program to enhance student achievement.
Aboriginal "Ways of Being": Educational Leaders, Students and Traditional Aboriginal Knowledge
2009
We once thought you came to live with us. You still could have that chance. We're still here, and we live on this land. We don't live in your libraries in the pages of your books…. We have a long surviving and sacred tradition and an experiential wisdom that's been passed on for more centuries than you can imagine. This is your chance to benefit from that. All you have to do is to be quiet and listen and quit worrying about proving and believing." Mad Bear Tuscarora Holy Man of the Tuscarora Nation of the Six-Nation Haudenosaunee Confederacy The School System and Aboriginal Students It is well known that students from Indigenous societies around the world overwhelmingly demonstrate a distinct lack of enthusiasm for schooling in its conventional form, most often attributed to an alien institutional culture (Battiste, 2002). The statistics bear this out. In Canada, for example, only 47% of Aboriginal 1 students graduate from high school, compared to 82% of non-Aboriginal students (Mendelson, 2006). 1 In this paper, we use the terms Aboriginal, Indigenous and First Nations somewhat interchangeably. Typically, Indigenous is a global term referring to original inhabitants on the land, and in Canada, Aboriginal refers to three groups of Indigenous peoples-First Nations, Metis, and Inuit. Our discussion in this paper centers on Indigenous peoples, who are Aboriginal and First Nations.
Poster presented at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of Physical Anthropology, London, ON., 2018
Our poster will provide an opportunity to discuss the employment of Indigenous pedagogical practices, and the benefits associated with the integration of social learning and narrative in teaching practice. Given the Truth and Reconciliation commissioner’s call to action with respect to ‘education for reconciliation’, as teachers, we have the responsibility to contribute to the process of decolonizing the academy by ensuring Indigenous perspectives figure prominently in our classrooms1. The holistic nature of Indigenous learning – focused on connectedness, reciprocal relationships and a sense of place, emphasizes the consequences of one’s actions, and gives students’ a sense of generational roles and responsibilities. ANT 340 is a third year osteological theory and methods course at the University of Toronto Mississauga with an enrolment of 25 to 50 students. Students first attend an ethics lecture and read associated materials introducing the importance and relevance of ethical codes, and common ethical issues in bioanthropology. Indigenous educators are then handed over the reigns to the 3-hour class, with no restrictions placed on the topics, or the trajectory of the discussion. Students are required to write a reflective paper on their experience. For three years running, the success of the implementation of Indigenous social learning and a narrative-based approach to convey course curricula is evident in the high level of student engagement, emotional investment apparent in the student reflective papers, and the course evaluation comments. The outcome is an authentic understanding of Indigenous perspectives of bioanthropology, and the promotion of an overarching goal in First Peoples’ culture - the passing of knowledge to the next generation to improve life for future generations. In this way students understand the contribution of the discipline of anthropology, and grasp the relevance their own actions and how they – as individuals – can make a difference in the present.