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Burning Off: Indigenising the Discipline of English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2016

Brooke Collins-Gearing  and
Rosalind Smith
Brooke Collins-Gearing*
Affiliation:
Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, New South Wales, 2308, Australia
Rosalind Smith
Affiliation:
Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, New South Wales, 2308, Australia
*
address for correspondence: Brooke Collins-Gearing, Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, University Drive, Callaghan, New South Wales, 2308, Australia. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

With the push towards ‘Indigenisation’ in Australian tertiary institutes, the discipline of English at the University of Newcastle undertook a pilot project to investigate what this could look like and what it meant for staff and students. This paper reflects our efforts to engage with notions of ‘Indigenisation’, based on national and international exemplars and presents one of our efforts to indigenise our discipline of English. We argue that our shifting and changing understanding of integrating Aboriginal ways of knowing into mainstream English courses is both difficult and essential.

Keywords

Indigenisationliteraturepedagogy
Type
Research Article
Information
The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , December 2016 , pp. 159 - 169
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2016 

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