The racialised educational landscape in Australia: listening to the whispering elephant

Abstract

Recent political and educational policy shifts within Australia have renewed concerns with achievement and engagement ‘gaps' when Indigenous and non-indigenous school students are compared. The position taken for this article however, hopes to demonstrate that this shift is unlikely to result in improved outcomes because of an ongoing failure to account for the racialised underpinnings of the Australian educational setting. To illustrate this, the body of the article offers four ‘Chronicles' that draw attention to the pervasive presence of negative racialised assumptions that contribute to sustaining educational inequities. The Chronicles are based on my experiences as a classroom teacher, and subsequently informed by exposure to ideas from Critical Race Theory as a graduate education researcher. The narrative style adopted here accepts the assertion that Chronicles are a valid, suitable and insightful approach to analyse and learn about racialised discourses and practices. The ambition for this article then, is to demonstrate the salience of CRT as a theoretical, methodological and analytic approach with much to contribute with enhancing understanding of Indigenous schooling and contemporary education research.