Abstract
This paper looks at the experiences associated with teaching Indigenous studies in an Australian university. It employs the concept of racialized assemblages in relation to Indigenous academics and pre-service teachers when teaching about Indigenous students. It also investigates the university’s ethical obligation of teaching in this complex space. In the lecturing and tutoring, the Indigenous educator’s body is ‘raced’ and ‘othered’ within the dominant Western discourses of knowledge production. This paper challenges and disrupts Western epistemic knowledge practices of racializing Indigenous body and supports a praxis of Indigenous humanness for the Indigenous educator.
Highlights
Teaching Indigenous studies in the higher education sector is important for understanding some of the critical features that impact upon the lives of Indigenous communities and their children within schooling. Herbert (2012, 36) provides some insight into teaching pre-service teachers Indigenous studies as an “opportunity to deliver quality education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students”
Considering that teaching can be transgressive and transformative, I want to go beyond the boundaries of expectations within the classroom when teaching Indigenous studies, driving the convergence of race, racialization and white race privilege to centre an attempt to unpack colonialism and how it is exercised both within schooling and Australian society (Moreton-Robinson et al 2012)
I want to journey through the ways that Weheliye theorizes racialized assemblages to further develop my understanding of my Indigenous/black body and the racialized assemblages that it carries into teaching spaces
Summary
Teaching Indigenous studies in the higher education sector is important for understanding some of the critical features that impact upon the lives of Indigenous communities and their children within schooling. Herbert (2012, 36) provides some insight into teaching pre-service teachers Indigenous studies as an “opportunity to deliver quality education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students”. Considering that teaching can be transgressive and transformative, I want to go beyond the boundaries of expectations within the classroom when teaching Indigenous studies, driving the convergence of race, racialization and white race privilege to centre an attempt to unpack colonialism and how it is exercised both within schooling and Australian society (Moreton-Robinson et al 2012). I am aware that such spaces can be sites of possibilities and third spaces (Blanch 2009a; hooks (sic) 1994; Worby, Rigney & Tur 2000) that allow for new understandings where the intersections of race, whiteness and racialization provide opportunity for pre-service teacher students to demonstrate selfawareness in their roles as learners and educators
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