Neither this nor that: the challenge of social justice for non-indigenous English teachers in First Nations Australian education contexts

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines and critiques gap-based education policies that are based on statistical and reductive conceptualisations of success for First Nations students in Australia. The policy desire to achieve social justice underpinned by parity of outcomes across a range of life indicators (including standardised English literacy) between First Nations Australians and non-Indigenous Australians is embedded in programmatic approaches to pedagogy such as Accelerated Literacy (AL). We examine the experiences of Bruce, a teacher teaching English in the middle years of school in a school that mandated AL as a whole-of-school approach to English and literacy instruction. We show how intersecting notions of social justice can collide in the English classroom and how teachers in these contexts are in danger of re-colonising through English teaching practices that neither produce statistical improvement nor advance culturally responsive teaching based on giving primacy to Indigenous-authored texts in subject English.