The poor health status of Australia’s Indigenous people is well-documented, as are the links between health and education. Aboriginal communities recognise the utmost importance of improving educational, physical, social and economic well-being in an environment where disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal students fail to complete secondary schooling. The aim of this paper is to highlight the issues of access, participation, retention and outcomes for Indigenous students wishing to study or currently studying health courses at a tertiary level. This project used a qualitative descriptive approach, conducting in-depth interviews with a number of key stakeholders and students in rural Victoria. Sixteen participants were interviewed, 14 of whom were from the Indigenous community.

Participants identified key issues that were linked to the university and broader community environment. Factors in the university environment included lack of Indigenous staff within the mainstream university system, limited support and culturally inappropriate teaching that lead to negative learning experiences and poor motivation to continue with education. In the broader community, the isolating experience of leaving close-knit rural communities and the influence of past experiences on students’ aspirations for tertiary education was highlighted. The importance of community support and liaison with the university and marketing of health courses to the Indigenous communities in the region were key issues that participants identified as needing further attention.

In 2002 the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Technology Sydney began a major initiative to improve the participation of Indigenous Australians in the Information Technology (IT) sector. This followed an initial study which showed that very few Indigenous students undertook studies in IT at university and therefore few found employment as IT professionals. As a result of the new programme, the Faculty’s first Indigenous staff were hired, an Indigenous resource centre was established and the first postgraduate students recruited. In addition, an IT tertiary preparation short course, the Indigenous Pre-IT Program, was launched successfully, the Faculty’s first Indigenous-specific course. With the project, Indigenous student enrolments have increased, mainly as part of the Pre-IT Program and as a result of recruitment of undergraduates from amongst successful Pre-IT Program students. However, retention of undergraduates recruited via special admission provisions has proved difficult despite attempts to secure scholarships and to provide academic support. This paper traces the development of the project and analyses the achievements and challenges in the first three years.

This paper explores Aboriginal perspectives of tertiary education “online” from rural and remote community locations in New South Wales. It does so within a frame of enquiry as to how neo-liberal educational policy reforms are impacting on equity issues in distance education “online”. Accounts from Aboriginal university students in health point to a range of tensions between changes brought about by the reform in relation to student subjectivity and university governance, and culturally preferred ways of learning for many Aboriginal people. The paper offers suggestions for how these forms of educational governance can be reconciled with educational support needs of remote Aboriginal learners.

This article explores an integrative framework for a motivational psychology for the education of Indigenous students. Drawing on and adapting Graham’s (1994) taxonomy for motivational psychology, it is suggested that enhancing the educational outcomes of Indigenous students involves addressing factors relevant to the self (positive identity, academic self-concept, and academic resilience), cognitive and affective factors (that facilitate motivation, engagement, achievement, and enjoyment of school), socialisation and child-rearing antecedents (the role of the family), failure dynamics (fear of failure and shame), the role of significant others and their contexts (peers, community, teachers, schools, and the scope for pastoral pedagogy), and the issue of young people’s pathways and transitions. Values, attitudes, and approaches to school and schoolwork that are common across Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students and the role of positive psychology are also explored as a means of contributing to a better general understanding of human behaviour.

Recent reports on Indigenous education have revealed that high proportions of students have been placed in special classes for intellectual disability or behaviour disorders. This is not an isolated phenomenon. Indigenous students in Canada and Romani children in Europe are also disproportionately represented in special schooling. This paper asks whether systemic racism, which fails to perceive cultural differences between the ethos of Australian educational systems and the experiences and abilities of Indigenous students, is the catalyst for placing many Indigenous students in special schooling, away from the mainstream. The paper applies an analysis based on anti-discrimination law to argue that while allocation on the basis of intellectual disability or behaviour disorders may not be deliberate racism, the criteria developed for the allocation may be measuring conformity to the dominant culture. If the policies underlying this segregation are unreasonable in the circumstances, they could constitute indirect racial discrimination against Indigenous students. Educational authorities could be liable in law, even though the effect on Indigenous students is unintentional and said to be for the students’ “own good”.

Education Queensland’s Remote Area Incentives Scheme (RAIS) is intended to provide financial and other benefits to teachers who choose to accept employment in undesirable locations in the state. On paper, this scheme claims that remoteness from an urban centre is the foremost measure of a school’s undesirability. However, the percentage of Indigenous students in a school has a strong influence on the assignment of transfer ratings to Queensland state schools. This paper provides the details of a statistical analysis that shows that there is a strong relationship between the Indigenity of a school and its institutionalised perception of undesirability. It also includes a survey of urban schools in southeast Queensland that are categorised as less desirable than surrounding schools in the region primarily because there is a higher percentage of Indigenous students enrolled in those schools.

Australian children’s literature has a history of excluding Indigenous child readers and positioning non-Indigenous readers as the subject. Rather than portray such literature, particularly before the 1950s, as simply racist or stereotypical, I argue that it is important for teachers, of all students, to help readers understand how nationalist or white Australian myths were constructed on Indigenous land and knowledges.

This paper draws on findings from a major research project conducted between 1998 and 2000 on meanings of reconciliation in the school education sector. Using data collected from surveys and drawing from the community context in which schools exist, it explores and analyses meanings of reconciliation within school communities when the discourse of what constitutes reconciliation was at its peak. Survey responses were used to map the level of support for reconciliation and to identify what barriers existed to the teaching of reconciliation in schools. Responses were categorised into various themes which defined the type of meaning respondents had accrued to reconciliation. The overwhelming impression from this research is that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people aspire to a level of harmonious co-existence; what is less clear is the direction on how this can be achieved. There is a great level of support for reconciliation within the education community with almost no responses being overtly negative. Many of the comments can be seen as reflecting “soft” reconciliation perspectives. A prevailing theme of this research is that the harder issues of reconciliation are being ignored in favour of symbolic representations. What perhaps best distinguished the survey comments from the responses from the general community was the greater desire amongst the education sector for equitybased solutions and the need to redress past injustices through social justice action. There was a greater understanding of the link between past dispossession and current disadvantage and this required action through specific programmes, and education was seen as a major part of this. Given the current sociopolitical context, anecdotal indications suggest that reconciliation may reflect wider community attitudes and may be “off the agenda” in schools, except within the narrow parameters of Department of Education requirements for activities or celebrations during NAIDOC or Reconciliation weeks.

Indigenous academic researchers are involved in Indigenist, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, all of which present problems and opportunities for Indigenous knowledge traditions. Transdisciplinary research is different from interdisciplinary research because it moves beyond the disciplinarity of the university and takes into account knowledge practices which the university will never fully understand. Indigenous knowledge traditions resist definition from a Western academic perspective - there are Indigenous knowledge practices which will never engage with the academy, just as there are some branches of the academy which will never acknowledge Indigenous knowledge practices. In this paper I present the story of my own non-Indigenous perspective on Indigenous research and what happens to it in a university. I am not concerned here with the knowledge production work Aboriginal people do in their own ways and contexts for their own purposes, but rather turn my attention to some of the issues which emerge when transdisciplinary research practice involves Australian Indigenous communities.

In July 2003 an important one-volume text, Forget about Flinders: A Yanyuwa atlas of the south west gulf of Carpentaria (Yanyuwa Families, Bradley & Cameron, 2003) produced in a limited edition of 14 copies, returned to Yanyuwa country and to the families who collaborated with John Bradley and artist Nona Cameron on the project. Subsequently, a second edition of 20 copies has been released, mainly to institutions. It is the most comprehensive attempt yet to restore Yanyuwa names to country and to produce a multilayered, dynamic, history-rich, and bilingual representation of how country is known in this community, and how the central song cycle texts intersect with Yanyuwa tradition. What follows is a condensed and edited interview with Frances Devlin-Glass, in which John Bradley discusses the motivations, the hybridised methodologies employed, the innovations of this new genre, and the pedagogical ends served by this latest iteration of Yanyuwa song cycles.