�A fair chance for all?� indigenous rights and tertiary education in Australia (original) (raw)
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This paper interrogates discourses of Aboriginality about, and by, early career Aboriginal teachers as they negotiate their emergent professional identity in specific Australian school contexts. These discourses position the respondents via their ethnic and cultural background and intersect with selfpositioning. This relates to the desire to be positioned as teacher rather than (only) as an ‘Aboriginal’ teacher. Consequently, the over-determination of Aboriginality includes such suppositions as the ‘think-look-do’ Aboriginality with a ‘natural’ connection to community, the ‘good’ Aboriginal teacher who fixes Aboriginal ‘problems’, the Aboriginal teacher as ‘Other’, and [the notion that] ‘Aboriginal work’ as easy, not real work and peripheral to core business. Through qualitative methodology, eleven Aboriginal teachers from the University of Sydney were interviewed. They were able to construct stories of early career teaching and the data was analysed to explore how the participants interpreted, accepted and/or resisted various discourses in their efforts to be agentic and resilient and to make a difference for the Aboriginal students they teach.
Education for Assimilation: A Brief History of Aboriginal Education in Western Australia
2019
In this chapter we provide an analysis of the tensions in Aboriginal education in Australia, with a particular focus on Western Australia, where the authors live and work. These tensions have arisen from the government policies enacted on Aboriginal Peoples since colonisation. These policies have left a legacy of marginalisation within the current education system nationally. We provide this discussion in order to answer the question: How have past government policies impacted contemporary Australian schooling for Aboriginal students? Commencing with pre colonisation we acknowledge Aboriginal ways of knowing, being and doing that have existed in Australia for over 60,000 years. We provide a timeline of significant government policies and practices that have shaped the current status of Aboriginal education in Australia. We argue that there is a deeply entrenched racist undertone in curriculum policy and pedagogies that non Aboriginal Australia is yet to address.
Indigenous Rights and Tertiary Education in Australia
1998
This paper examines the discourse on Aboriginal higher education in Australia from the 1960s through the 1990s through an analysis of educational reports and government policy documents on tertiary education. Early in this period, the focus was on education as "welfare," but the emphasis shifted towards equity in higher education policy during the late 1980s and early 1990s. During this latter period, Aboriginal people were considered educationally disadvantaged, and education was seen as a means of providing equal opportunity for all and diminishing indicators of social inequalities. Another competing viewpoint represents Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians as an Indigenous population with Indigenous rights to self-determination and control of its own education. The way in which Indigenous Australians are represented shapes the discussion and funding of Indigenous education. For example, when Indigenous Australians were represented as disadvantaged, improvement in tertiary education was evaluated in terms of the number of Aboriginal students enrolled and the number of "successful" graduates. There was an increase in Aboriginal participation in tertiary education between 1985 and 1996, but assimilationist and ethnocentric institutional structures did not change to increase Aboriginal participation in curriculum development, research, and teaching. Since 1998, a renewed emphasis on a welfare approach to Aboriginal education has been accompanied by a reallocation of resources away from tertiary education and greater emphasis on basic literacy. The recognition and inclusion of Indigenous rights in educational policy depends upon a new phase of politics. (Contains 60 references.) (TD) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
Equity is central to what we as educators do-our ongoing search for ways to support, to create or to enhance the opportunities of all, especially those opportunities that can be enhanced by educational endeavors. Equity involves matters of access, and participation in all areas of life-culture, social, political, educational, economical, vocational, health. It is a concern for local communities, nations and globally especially where inequities are expanding and economic, educational, social, health and overall quality of life diminishing for increasing numbers in relative terms. Solutions to the problem can be challenging especially when they confront different views of social development, entrenched power hierarchies, the privilege of selected groups, the distribution of resources or the currency of certain cultures over others. The accommodation of differences is inextricably tied to the complex dynamics and power struggles that are negotiated at the level of everyday exchanges between one another and in the corridors of power.
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.