Culturally responsive pedagogies of success: Improving educational outcomes for Australian Aboriginal students (original) (raw)

2016, Unpublished doctoral thesis

When Aboriginal students are spoken of, or heard of, it is frequently within a narrative of deficit, disadvantage and failure. It is rarely recognised that such a destructive and normalised story is borne out of two centuries of colonisation that sought variously to civilise and Christianise; integrate, segregate protect and assimilate; and ultimately to dispossess. My thesis sought instead to reveal and develop a counterstory of Aboriginal education success through an investigation of what successful teaching of Aboriginal high school students in metropolitan Adelaide looks like. The study was framed by insights and approaches drawn from two interconnected theoretical frameworks. Firstly, Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) that emphasises the privileging of student distinct cultural ways of knowing, being and doing in the learning space; the significance and meaning of student education success; and critical cultural awareness. Secondly, the theoretical framework of Critical Race Theory (CRT) was utilised, with its tenets being modified and infused into the former to problematise racism in the investigation. My modified version of CRT, referred to as Colonial Critical Race Theory (ColonialCrit), responded to the distinct Australian story of dispossessing colonisation and racism that were revealed in the investigation as ongoing concerns. Additionally, while the investigation primarily focused on identifying the complex pedagogical practices of successful teachers of Aboriginal high school students, it also revealed what institutional and teacher characteristics contribute to improving Aboriginal educational outcomes and, in turn, what hindered such success. Australia’s problematic history of colonisation, justified through a diversity of raceologies, is shared by settler or colonised nations like Canada, the United States and New Zealand. Like Australia, Indigenous peoples of these three nations continue to be the most disadvantaged in terms of educational outcomes (Cotterell 2010). However, recognising this bleak situation, all three nations have made concerted efforts to redress this injustice. Recent national, state and provincial-level initiatives have repeatedly been informed by the expanding scholarship on cultural responsiveness and then modified to the local, geographical and cultural context. So, to reveal the Australian counterstory of Aboriginal student success, the methodological frameworks of critical ethnography, culturally responsive research and Critical Race Theory methodology are adopted. The use of these three research frameworks enabled me to undertake research ‘proper ways’ (borrowed from Aunty Nangala). This involved, for example, the ‘Aboriginalising’ of established data gathering and data analysis methods utilised in the research project. Additionally, the CRT method of counterstorytelling was instrumental in revealing a counterpedagogy of Aboriginal educational success. Overall, these research strategies disrupt terra nullius styled research and oppose the perpetuation of dispossessing colonisation. Through my analysis a number of arguments were developed. First, that there are three overarching and interacting dimensions to cultural responsive pedagogies of success—the institutional, personal and pedagogical. These three dimensions are referred to in the research as culturally responsive schooling, culturally responsive teachers and, culturally responsive pedagogy. Furthermore, the research supported existing international scholarship which argues that successful teachers of marginalised or minoritised students possess the characteristics and pedagogical practice of being caring-demanders. That is, teachers can make higher demands of Aboriginal students due to their established caring relationships. It is an approach to teaching that privileges an Aboriginal ethic of care and argues that participating teachers have earned the role and responsibility of being ‘classified kin’ within the Aboriginal kinship network (Pattel 2007, p. 3) My research argues that improving Aboriginal education outcomes will involve framing the current situation of Aboriginal education stress as a wicked problem. This is not ‘wicked’ as in evil, but rather wicked in the sense of being complex, difficult to understand and resistant to resolution (Ritter & Webb 1973). Furthermore, the research revealed that normalised narratives of ‘intervention’ and ‘closing achievement gaps’ secretly transmit (Harrison 2007) a racially based destructive narrative that needs to be critiqued and transformed. As a societal and community problem, the research revealed that improving educational outcomes for Aboriginal students will involve the re-culturing of schools, teachers and pedagogy as well as policy approaches. In this way, my research argues that Aboriginal students will then be able to get their education, stay as an Aboriginal person, and represent the Aboriginal peoples of Australia (borrowed from Uncle Pedro).