Educating the heart: a journey into teaching First Nations human rights in Australia

Abstract

When Indigenous people teach about Indigenous human rights, something happens. This chapter is about how both the teacher and taught are brought back to the personalised, first person, lived experience of First Nations peoples. In Australia, such cultural quality control where students dive in together with their First Nations teachers provides important and engaging social justice experiences. Teaching Indigenous rights shows that despite current western human rights understandings there is a real need for such innovative pedagogies. They assert that we, as First Nations peoples in Australia, need such spaces to effectively teach culturally safe frameworks. Such learning values reciprocity, the skill of code switching, Indigenous intellectual property rights and other dynamics. It must be about immersion into Aboriginal life as a cultural induction of sorts. Emancipatory and transformative learning of this kind inspire students to go further to take action. It is such action that creates Indigenous allies in human rights.