Torres Strait Islander Histories Research Articles

Two-Ways thinking and Two-Eyed Seeing as ways of implementing Indigenous perspectives in the science education curriculum

A groundswell to include Indigenous Knowledge in the school science curriculum has led to the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures (generally known as Indigenous perspectives) in the overall Australian Curriculum (AC) and the Australian Curriculum: Science (ACS). However, the experiences in other countries, their states and provinces are quite different and diverse, particularly when it comes to incorporating Indigenous Knowledge in resistant disciplines such as science. The AC and ACS are examined and compared with similar curriculum from elsewhere. The causes of resistance to the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives are identified, as well as other structural impediments. Strategies such as the Two-Ways or Two-Eyed Seeing approaches with epistemic insight are seen as a functional way of bridging Indigenous and Western cultures for policy makers, curriculum developers, educators and teachers, and ultimately students.

Music, literature, and community: Reflections on a framework for learning through and from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music

Inspired by a desire to explore ways in which non-Indigenous Australians can meaningfully connect with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, this article reflects on my doctoral studies and the role educators can have in holding space for First Nations peoples to directly contribute toward the creation of mutually rewarding teaching and learning experiences. It specifically evaluates the processes involved in establishing and implementing a project centered on my senior secondary music class as the students engaged in the collaborative reworking of two songs shared by Ngiyampaa composer and dancer, Peter Williams. The article is intentionally reflexive as it interrogates the journey and motivations behind conducting the study. As a non-Indigenous teacher-researcher, I table three foundational pillars behind my personal growth in understanding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures: the music, the academic literature, and most importantly, the local community. The article then discusses the challenges and factors that lead to the success of the musical interactions in the doctoral study—a process understood as co-composition—and critically, the transformative learning experiences gained as reciprocal relationships were forged during various stages of the project. Rather than promoting co-composition as a pedagogical strategy, this article encourages a heuristic approach to increased and effective inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music in secondary music classes. By setting out in autoethnographic form the experience of implementing a considered, decolonial, and ethical approach to learning from and through Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music, I hope to encourage educators to imagine themselves in a narrative of their own, one that includes their students and members of the local First Nations community, leading to rich and rewarding musical collaborations and ongoing fruitful relationships.

Silence is not an option: pre-service teachers embedding First Nation knowledge and practices in primary/middle mathematics and science

ABSTRACT Teachers, pre-service teachers and teacher educators in Australia are predominately European Australian with a small minority of First Nations people. Those with limited first-hand understanding of First Nations ways of knowing can find it difficult to embed these knowledges across learning areas. This is particularly complex for pre-service teachers. We argue that all teacher educators have a responsibility to engage First Nations ways of knowing across learning areas as an ethical and professional commitment to preparing pre-service teachers for negotiating the complexities of Australian histories and living cultures. This paper reports on interventions implemented with final year primary/middle pre-service teachers with an expertise in science and mathematics. Firstly, we discuss pre-service teachers’ confidence (self) ratings in integrating their understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures across the curriculum. Secondly, we present an in-depth exploration of two pre-service teachers’ transdisciplinary units of work which embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges and practices. This study challenges all science and mathematics teacher educators to consider ways a transdisciplinary, culturally responsive approach prepares students to transition into confident and competent early career teachers.

An appreciative inquiry into physical education teachers creating a cultural interface in games and sport teaching

ABSTRACT The Australian Curriculum requires teachers of all learning areas to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ Culture and History where there is opportunity to do so meaningfully. Despite this requirement, there are few studies considering culturally responsive pedagogy for those perspectives in the teaching of Physical Education (PE) in Australian schools. This study investigated a Year 7 PE teaching team in one school’s implementation of a unit of work in the Games and Sport focus area directly incorporating the Cross-curriculum Priority: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures. Four teachers participated in end-of-unit interviews using an appreciative inquiry approach to gain their insights on the work. The results revealed teachers grew in appreciation and awareness of the Cross-curriculum Priority, but experienced cultural and competency barriers during implementation. However, the teachers felt empowered in shaping new ways of student learning. In this study, we demonstrate how rebuilding ways of thinking, knowing and doing provide opportunity for existing games teaching structures to be interrogated, and new ways of knowledge able then to find passage into teachers’ assumptions of PE processes.

Learning regenerative cultures: Indigenous nations in higher education renewal in Australia

What is regenerative learning in Australian higher education? This paper addresses the intersecting crises of climate, species loss and injustice; often called a conceptual emergency. We tackle the problem of disciplinary compartmentalisation, preventing integration of important related concepts. The particular case is separation of the Australian Curriculum Cross-curriculum Priorities at school and university for teaching, learning and research purposes. We are concerned with two of the three: sustainability, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. The project generates significant conceptual linkages, which strengthen sustainability with Indigenous histories and cultures. The linked concepts have the potential to re-centre Indigenous knowledge systems and knowledge holders in Australian higher education for sustainability. The interconnectedness facilitates learning of, for and through regenerative cultures, which are healing and wellbeing-oriented. Centring Indigenous histories, concepts and wisdom in sustainability education will reveal deeper meanings such as communicative ways of understanding worlds. These have multiple applications in teaching and learning, and improved outcomes in practice. Each case study presented in this paper utilises a decolonising, regenerative research method for answering research questions. The methods challenge Western, colonising power relationships that continue to act upon Indigenous lived experience; enable communicative relations with more than human worlds and are transformative. Together, they value experience, the collective, being creative, narrative, justice, ways of knowing and responding to sentient, animate places. In this paper, decolonising ways of working towards regenerative futures foreground Indigenous ways of knowing, being, valuing and doing, revealing Indigenous knowledge making for contemporary contexts.

Neoliberal influences on the implementation of intercultural curriculum initiatives: teacher interactions with the Australian Curriculum

ABSTRACT Curriculum initiatives with intercultural educative aims are not uncommon in many schools around the world. This paper argues that these initiatives and their classroom implementation by teachers is strongly impacted and influenced by the prevailing neoliberal context of schooling. The findings of a project working with teachers on implementing the Intercultural Understanding General Capability and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures Cross Curriculum Priority of the Australian Curriculum are used to demonstrate the specific ways in which neoliberalism has shaped and defined teachers’ work. The neoliberal elements of consumption, individual responsibility, individuals being set adrift from values, surveillance and the illusion of autonomy are used to highlight teachers’ approaches to understanding and implementing the curriculum elements in their science classrooms. Teachers in the study saw the potential for enacting social justice in terms of intercultural education in their classrooms but were often hampered in their efforts by prevailing neoliberal discourses influencing their own assumptions and actions, as well as those of the schools they worked in. It is only through interrogation of how neoliberalism impacts on intercultural educative aims that openings for counter-hegemonic activities can be identified.

Affective Response as a Catalyst for Reimagining Curriculum and Pedagogy for Teaching of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures Cross-Curriculum Priority in Christian Education

Affective Response as a Catalyst for Reimagining Curriculum and Pedagogy for Teaching of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures Cross-Curriculum Priority in Christian Education

Education for reconciliation? Understanding and acknowledging the history of teaching First Nations content in Victoria, Australia

ABSTRACT Contemporary Australian curricula require teachers to promote reconciliation through the teaching of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and languages. Engaging with First Nations knowledges and histories in education comes with a very complex and historically layered legacy. This paper examines the role of education in the ongoing process of colonisation by critically analysing historical and contemporary documents prescribing what Victorian students should learn about First Nations peoples, histories and cultures. These documents are discussed in the context of relevant events and policies, from the Terra Nullius ideologies that dominated curricula until the 1960s, through the growing agenda of self-determination in the 1970–1980s, and into the current swinging pendulum of political agendas. It is argued that contemporary curricula and policies promote reconciliation without embracing the necessary social justice and decolonising ideologies.

Enacting socially just and transformative education through classroom pedagogy

ABSTRACT In 2018, Australians Together, an organisation committed to promoting reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Australia, commissioned research on a trial programme designed to improve teachers’ confidence teaching the Australian Curriculum’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures cross-curriculum priority. The trial took the form of a two-day professional learning workshop with staff from two independent schools in Victoria, Australia. Both schools have a social justice ethos and are committed to the transformative power of education. The research found that teachers had strong affective responses to the professional learning workshops, which translated into more confident classroom practice. The extent to which increased consciousness translated into more socially just education for the whole school was difficult to ascertain. The authors explore what else is required to build more equitable, just and culturally responsive school cultures, particularly where the voices of First Nations people are rarely heard in the classroom.

You Are Not Alone: Pre-Service Teachers’ Exploration of Ethics and Responsibility in a Compulsory Indigenous Education Subject

Aunty Mary Graham, Kombu-merri elder and philosopher, says: "You are not alone in the world." We have a responsibility to each other, as well as to the land; and violence is the refusal of this relationship that binds us (Rose). In this paper, I use Emannuel Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy and epistemological violence to consider how non-Indigenous educators come to know Indigenous people. In his philosophy, Levinas presents a paradox: that to act as if one is a free being, as first philosophy, is to ignore that one is not alone in the world and that the presence of others evokes responsibility. However, to claim to know another is to bring them into one’s totality, one’s knowledge framework; an act of reducing another to who you think they are. We must find a new relationship to knowledge, one that is not based on possession. For non-Indigenous educators learning about teaching Indigenous students and perspectives in schools, much of the curricular material draws on the corpus of knowledge constructed by non-Indigenous researchers, politicians, and professionals about Indigenous people (Nakata, Cultural Interface). This material is already bound by others' interests and motivations. How can non-Indigenous educators engage with Indigenous peoples, histories and knowledges in a way that foregrounds the responsibility that our entanglement prompts? In this paper, I present data from my research into pre-service teachers undertaking a compulsory university subject in Indigenous education, where the pre-service teachers wrote weekly reflective learning journals. This data is drawn primarily from the end of the semester, where students reflected on what their learning would mean as they moved into future practice. I explore the role of responsibility in regards to the ethical violence that Levinas discusses.

Country as pedagogical: enacting an Australian foundation for culturally responsive pedagogy

ABSTRACTCulturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) has become a driving force for change in North America and New Zealand and is gaining some recognition in Indigenous education in Australia. But as a model of learning and teaching, it cannot be imported unproblematically into Australian schools, wherein the past Indigenous students have had limited success. Given that Country is positioned in the Australian Curriculum as a priority concept, we investigate how it might be leveraged as a foundation of CRP. We conduct a review of the international and Australian literature in order to identify research studies that provide evidence of clear links between Learning from Country as a pedagogical approach in school-based education and improved learning outcomes. Results of the review demonstrate that using Country as a ‘teacher’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures enacts a sense of belonging for students. As intrinsically pedagogical, Country enacts the seasons, the direction of winds, tides, light and sun. Country presents in the review of literature as a solid foundation for thinking beyond the cultural backgrounds of students, and beyond accusations of cultural assimilation, to position both Indigenous and western epistemologies at the centre of the Australian Curriculum.

The intellectual quality and inclusivity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content in the NSW Stage 5 History syllabus

This study compares the intellectual quality and inclusivity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content in the NSW 2003 Stage 5 History syllabus and the NSW 2012 Stage 5 History syllabus. The significance of this analysis lies in the impact of the Australian Curriculum (AC) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cross Curriculum Priority (CCP) introduced into the NSW 2012 Stage 5 History syllabus. The purpose of this priority is to improve student engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures (BOSTES, 2012). This study identifies the level of intellectual quality by coding cognitive processes with knowledge dimensions and the level of inclusivity by coding the CCP themes with the continuum of history concepts for each syllabus. Analysis revealed that the level of intellectual quality and the level of inclusivity of both syllabi are in the lower range thus operating at a surface level of knowledge and understanding. We therefore argue that the paucity of intellectual rigour and in-depth understandings about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and peoples will fail to redress the tokenistic and misinformed understandings of Indigenous cultures that permeate the Australian schooling institution, whilst simultaneously failing to meet the intended requirements of the AC.

Aboriginal people’s aspirations and the Australian Curriculum: a critical analysis

A culturally inclusive curriculum has increasingly been considered beneficial to all students. The national Australian Curriculum set out to be inclusive, containing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures cross-curriculum priority. Some education discourses can assume however that inclusion is an unproblematic good, and a true representation of the ‘reality’ of Aboriginal Peoples’ lived experiences and aspirations. This article presents a study exploring how the aspirations of Aboriginal people are supported in dominant education discourses mobilised within the Australian Curriculum. The study firstly applied Critical Discourse Analysis to the Curriculum policy corpus, to explore the Indigenous education discourses privileged and marginalised within it. It then utilised informant interviews with members of an Aboriginal community, to explore their education aspirations for the community’s children. The results revealed a critical gap between the Curriculum’s positioning of Aboriginal knowledges, histories and cultures; and the Aboriginal community’s aspirations for their children’s education. They highlight the need for the Curriculum to offer critical-oriented learning opportunities whilst remaining flexible, to support localised aspirations and approaches.

The re-creation and resolution of the ‘problem’ of Indigenous education in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cross-curriculum priority

This paper focuses on the ‘problem’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education represented in the Australian Curriculum’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures cross-curriculum priority. Looking beyond particular curriculum content, we uncover the policy discourses that construct (and reconstruct) the cross-curriculum priority. In the years after the Australian Curriculum’s creation, curriculum authors have moulded the priority from an initiative without a clear purpose into a purported solution to the ‘Indigenous problem’ of educational underachievement, student resistance and disengagement. As the cross-curriculum priority was created and subsequently reframed, the ‘problem’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education has thereby been manifested in policy, strategised as curriculum content and precipitated in the cross-curriculum priority. These policy problematisations perpetuate contemporary racialisation and actively construct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, histories and knowledges as deficient.

A comparative analysis on cultural indigenous patrimony and curriculum: Australia, Chile and South Africa.

The purpose of this article is to conduct a comparative analysis of national curriculum regarding the way indigenous culture patrimony is treated in three different contexts; Australia, Chile and South Africa. The following curriculum is analyzed; Australian case Cross-Curriculum Priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures (2015); South African case, National Curriculum Statements: Grades R-12 (2013), and finally for the Chilean case Marco Curricular Lengua Indígena 1º a 6º básico (2009). This study suggests that it is necessary to value indigenous culture patrimony in the curriculum. The challenge for curriculum developers, however, lies within the creation of strategies and orientations for contextualized learning with indigenous and non-indigenous students. The analysis conducted uses a qualitative methodology, comparing the cases along three dimensions: identity, curricular categorization and indigenous content knowledge. The results allow for the development of curriculum projections on an adequate focus of indigenous culture patrimony, considering as a priority, the validation of these communities' knowledge. This study concludes that in all three cases, a monocultural curriculum has been preserved, incorporating a limited vision of indigenous culture patrimony. This option has affected processes of identity building, national integration and cultural differentiation.

Análisis comparado sobre patrimonio cultural indígena y currículo: Australia, Chile y Sudáfrica

The purpose of this article is to conduct a comparative analysis of national curriculum regarding the way indigenous culture patrimony is treated in three different contexts; Australia, Chile and South Africa. The following curriculum is analyzed; Australian case Cross-Curriculum Priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures (2015); South African case, National Curriculum Statements: Grades R-12 (2013), and finally for the Chilean case Marco Curricular Lengua Indigena 1o a 6o basico (2009). This study suggests that it is necessary to value indigenous culture patrimony in the curriculum. The challenge for curriculum developers, however, lies within the creation of strategies and orientations for contextualized learning with indigenous and non-indigenous students. The analysis conducted uses a qualitative methodology, comparing the cases along three dimensions: identity, curricular categorization and indigenous content knowledge. The results allow for the development of curriculum projections on an adequate focus of indigenous culture patrimony, considering as a priority, the validation of these communities’ knowledge. This study concludes that in all three cases, a monocultural curriculum has been preserved, incorporating a limited vision of indigenous culture patrimony. This option has affected processes of identity building, national integration and cultural differentiation.

Using authentic language resources to incorporate Indigenous knowledges across the Australian Curriculum

The promotion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures as a cross-curriculum priority in the new Australian Curriculum provides both a challenge and an opportunity for teachers and teacher educators. The Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages contains authentic language materials which can assist in resourcing and supporting teachers to meet this challenge across all areas of the curriculum, and to encourage connections with Indigenous cultural authorities.

Incorporating Indigenous Students’ Cultural Knowledge More Productively in Mathematics and Science Classrooms: One Focus for Pre-Service Teacher Education Research and Practice

There is widespread agreement that Indigenous students’ cultural knowledge is desirably incorporated into curriculum and pedagogical practice. Classroom research shows Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learners can use the cognitive tools of their cultural community to engage with school science. We looked towards our own practice as teacher educators to investigate the question: how can pre-service teachers explore how Indigenous cultural knowledge can be used more productively in mathematics and science classrooms? Teachers across Australia are now regulated by the National Professional Standards for Teachers (NPST). Teacher education is now regulated by the National Graduate Teacher Standards (AITSL 2011). Standard 1.4 requires that graduating teachers are able to “demonstrate broad knowledge and understanding of the impact of culture, cultural identity and linguistic background on the education of students from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds”. Standard 2.4 requires that graduating teachers “demonstrate broad knowledge and understanding of and respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and languages”. In this paper we present an account of our present understanding of capacity building practises, which are those pedagogies that draw on Indigenous students’ cultural resources: cultural disposition, community knowledge and cultural capital. A key purpose of the presentation is to emphasise the socially negotiated, cultural and embedded nature of meaning-making in science education and how this can be made more apparent given the current focus on implementing the National Professional Standards for Teachers and the new Australian Curriculum.

What's in a Name?: Exploring the Implications of Eurocentric (Re)naming Practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nomenclature in Australian Education Practices

The aim of this article is to provide teachers with knowledge of ways in which Eurocentric (re)naming practices inform contemporary pedagogical approaches, while providing understandings pertinent to the mandatory inclusion of the cross-curriculum priority area: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2015). While we have focused on Eurocentric naming practices, we have also been conscious of names used by Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders to name themselves and others and as non-Indigenous Australians we acknowledge that it is not our place to explore these in detail, or offer alternatives. In this article, we have explored the history of nomenclature as it relates to original inhabitants, the connotations of contemporary (re)naming practices in Australian education and discussed the importance of drawing on cultural protocols and engaging local communities for teaching and learning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. It is anticipated that discussions arising from this article may open up spaces where teachers may think about ways in which they approach Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures.

Teachers’ Attitudes to Including Indigenous Knowledges in the Australian Science Curriculum

With the introduction of the Australian National Curriculum containing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures Cross-Curriculum Priority (CCP) and Intercultural Understanding General Capability, there has been a renewed push to embed Indigenous content into secondary school subjects. This paper considers the attitudes and beliefs of a group of secondary school science teachers to the current imperative to include Indigenous knowledges and perspectives in classroom practice. Through a Participatory Action Research (PAR) cycle, teachers contextualised and conceptualised the CCP in terms of social justice, pedagogy, and student engagement. The PAR process allowed them to develop a personal and intellectual engagement prior to attempting to teach Indigenous knowledges in their classrooms. Teacher attitudes and beliefs are identified in terms of their vision of a science education inclusive of Indigenous content, their hopes for the inclusions and the impediments they perceive to implementation in classroom practice. Allowing teachers the opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue resulted in the articulation of a path forward for their teaching practice that aligned with their political and social justice concerns.