This paper examines the idea of embedding Indigenous perspectives drawing upon a metaphor for designing an environment that nurtures Indigenous cultural identity and relationships. This paper constitutes a teacher’s personal story of emerging understandings of Indigenous Standpoint Theory and pedagogy, which began with embedding Indigenous perspectives within a tertiary music and sound curriculum. These understandings were developed into “rules of thumb” that have had transferable implications for research that examines community music-making projects in urban Indigenous and cross-cultural communities. These ideas are explored through case studies that examine them in context. Furthermore, the idea of embedding Indigenous perspectives in my own value systems is explored and a growing awareness of the embodied understanding that stems from an open, continuous and critical discourse with Indigenous people. This reveals a relationship of belonging and welcoming interfaced with obligation and a growing knowledge of people, community and country and its effect on my “white understanding” of relationships. This proposal stems from several successful projects where participants have experienced both nurturing of Indigenous knowledge and a productive tension. This does not advocate an argument for positive discrimination but rather seeks to build the idea that interfaces which simultaneously develop embodied understanding alongside Indigenous pride can lead to compelling and unique learning experiences for students, teachers and communities.

There are still no major assessment and diagnostic tools that educators can use to properly assess our Inuit students’ learning. Cultural safety as it is currently defined in New Zealand educational research (Macfarlane et al., 2007) is necessary in creating a classroom community that encourages the appreciation of culture and worldview, and ultimately enables success as defined by the culture and community of the students. Modern day assessment tools used with Inuit students must also conform to this standard of cultural safety in order to ensure the equity and authenticity of the assessment results. There is a need for ongoing research and development of culturally safe assessment tools. To date, recommendations that include collaboration with local populations, evaluation of the tools presently being used, and the due diligence of ensuring these tools are culturally unbiased are a few guidelines that have the potential of creating culturally safe assessments that portray students’ true learning abilities and assist both teacher and community in the support of their students’ learning and success.

Schooling for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in remote or ‘Red Dirt’ communities has been cast as ‘problematic’, and ‘failing’. The solutions to deficit understandings of remote schooling are often presented as simple. But for those who work in Red Dirt schools, the solutions are not simple, and for education leaders positioned between the local Red Dirt school and upward accountability to departments of education, they are complex. Between 2011 and 2016, the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation's (CRC-REP) Remote Education Systems project explored how education could better meet the needs of those living in remote communities. More than 1000 people with interests in remote education contributed to the research. Education leaders were identified as one stakeholder group. These leaders included school-based leaders, bureaucrats, community-based leaders and teacher educators preparing university graduates for Red Dirt schools. This paper focusses on what Red Dirt education leaders think is important for schooling. The findings show school leaders as ‘caught in the middle’ (Gonzalez & Firestone, 2013) between expectations from communities, and of system stakeholders who drive policy, funding and accountability measures. The paper concludes with some implications for policy and practice that follow on from the findings.

Designed as a “supplementary” tuition scheme, the Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme (hereafter referred to as ITAS) is a strategic initiative of the National Indigenous Education Policy (DEET, 1989). This paper seeks to contribute to the literature of the analysis of the quality and efficacy of ITAS. Currently, the delivery of ITAS to Indigenous students requires enormous administration and commitment by the staff of Indigenous education support centres. In exploring the essential but problematic provision of ITAS to Indigenous university students, this paper provides insights into significant aspects of our program that move beyond assumptions of student deficit, by researching the quality of teaching and learning through ITAS, analysing administrative workload, and sharing innovations to our program as a result of participatory research with important ITAS stakeholders.

This article reflects on issues of Indigenous creativity in Māori arts education, along with what we see as problematic tensions of the assessment of intangible elements. Our writing is motivated by a desire to start a global dialogue on Indigenous/Māori epistemologies, pedagogies and ontologies, and the contradictions and tensions that threaten these through global assessment drives within schools. We argue that current student assessment regimes are being increasingly influenced by international neoliberal agendas, which focus on universal, measurable outcomes. By critically exploring the assessment of creativity in the arts from a Māori perspective, we reflect on several contradictions and tensions in current assessment drives within schools. In particular, the intangible dimensions of being and flow and their connection to creativity are examined, and we conclude with recommendations for further work in this area.

This article describes Indigenous Australian languages as having a history of pejoration dating from colonial times, which has masked the richness and complexity of mother tongues (and more recently developed kriols) of large numbers of Indigenous Australians.The paper rejects deficit theory representations of these languages as being inferior to imported dialects of English and explains how language issues embedded in teaching practices have served to restrict Indigenous Australian access to cultural capital most valued in modern socio-economic systems. We go on to describe ways in which alternative perspectives where acknowledgment of rich, complex and challenging features of Indigenous Australian languages may be used by educators as empowering resources for teacher education and teaching in schools. Our paper stresses the urgency of establishing frameworks for language success within which to develop other successful learning outcomes of Indigenous Australians.

Excessive anxiety and worry can prevent young people from participating fully in school and life opportunities. Anxiety can involve fear of being apart from significant people or being left alone; avoidance of certain situations or activities for fear of embarrassment; worrying about normal life issues; repetitive thoughts and behaviours used as protection against something bad happening; or panic attacks and fears of recurring attacks and their effects. It has been shown that unusual behaviours such as obsessional activities, the need for reassurance, low self-esteem, poor concentration, fatigue, headaches, stomach aches and other reactions from excessive anxiety can hinder a child's academic success at school and affect their social relationships. Furthermore, anxiety is linked to depression that, in some cases, leads to suicide. This is significant for Indigenous youth as suicide rates in this group are significantly higher than the Australian national average.

Not only are there difficulties in the ethical and practical aspects of conducting research with Indigenous youth, mere are also difficulties in assessing mental heakh and anxiety, in particular, with mis group. Nevertheless, it is important to gain a sense of Indigenous understanding about what is constructed as mental health, “wellness” and excessive anxiety and how we come to a shared understanding of these concepts so that meaningful research into areas such as anxiety can be conducted.

Recently, I asked a young teacher who made much use of the computer in her classroom, “Why do Aboriginal children succeed at the computer?”.

She gave these reasons:

1. 1. Racial differences go out the window.

2. 2. Ability groups do not matter - all are happily involved.

3. 3. Concepts, e.g. direction, come early.

4. 4. Hastens sight-word recognition.

5. 5. Adult helpers are well employed.

Whilst some improvements to Indigenous education outcomes have occurred in recent years, there remains considerable inequity in the educational experiences and long-term engagement of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. One of the factors contributing to the challenging environment for Indigenous students is dissonance of social norms, as a result of ethnic and socioeconomic differences between teacher and student. Many hegemonic culture teachers are unaware of Standpoint Theory and the way in which normative beliefs impact on classroom interactions and student outcomes at the cultural interface. This paper draws on the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TBP) to illustrate ways in which schools can identify areas of ethnic and socioeconomic prejudice impacting classroom interactions, and create shared social norms so that Indigenous students are most likely to experience positive educational engagement. Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is then applied to discuss the type of classroom environment that best enables students to internalise positive educational behaviours in an autonomous manner. Such internalisation is necessary to improve long-term outcomes and postschool educational engagement for Indigenous Australians. The theories explored indicate that motivation for behavioural change relies on the individual's self-perceptions of competence, autonomy and normative beliefs regarding the value of education, and that integration of new behaviours requires an emotionally supportive environment and provision of a meaningful rationale. This paper argues that good practice in Indigenous schooling will address these areas specifically.

In 1988 the Aboriginal Education Policy Task Force called for broad equity between Aboriginal people and other Australians in access, participation, and outcomes at all stages of education. Aboriginals are not achieving a comparative level of success at school compared to non-Aboriginals. Symptomatic of problems in our schools are, the over representation of Aboriginals in lower classes, the high drop-out rate of Aboriginal children and their low participation rates in the senior years of high school. Some 17% of Aboriginal youth continue their schooling to year 12 compared to 49% of all students (Department of Employment, Education and Training, 1988, p.7). The failure of Aboriginal children to achieve at school has been widely interpreted as an individual failure on the part of Aboriginal children. Poor attainment has been attributed to lower I.Q. and ability, inadequate home environments, and poor parenting and not to the inadequacies of the education provided, to prejudices Aboriginal children face or to the active resistance by Aboriginal people to the cultural destruction implicit in many educational programs (McConnochie, 1982, p.20). An examination of the determinants of school success shows that Aboriginal children’s cultural values, beliefs and practices and Australian schools are often in conflict. To improve the outcomes for Aboriginal children schools are required to assess whether or not they are catering for the inherent needs and talents of individual Aboriginal children.

In 2008, almost 40% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students enrolled in the Graduate Diploma in Indigenous Health Promotion at The University of Sydney failed to complete the course. Although this was not considered unusual when compared to previous years, the decision was made to investigate why so many students struggled to meet the expectations of a course that was pedagogically progressive, culturally affirming, taught by highly regarded academics and strongly supported by the university and its stakeholders. A qualitative study using in-depth semi-structured interviews was conducted, and many complex and interrelated issues were explored. One issue that was raised both unexpectedly and emphatically by almost half the study participants who completed the course was the unintentional stifling of individual student effort and achievement through the development of co-dependent relationships between academic staff and students. This article presents the data relevant to this particular issue, reflects on the findings, and outlines some of the strategies implemented since this study commenced that have contributed to a healthy completion rate of 98% over the past 3 years.

This paper takes us into the Writing Borderlands, an ambiguous in-between space borrowed from Anzaldúa's concept of Borderlands, where we as PhD students are in a constant state of transition. We argue that theorising from a decolonial position consists of not merely using concepts around coloniality/decoloniality, but also putting its core ideas into practice in the ‘doing’ aspect of research. The writing is a major part of this doing. We enact epistemic disobedience by challenging taken-for-granted conventions of what ‘proper’ academic writing looks like. Writing from a universal standpoint — the type of writing prescribed in theses formats, positivist research methods and ‘proper’ academic writing — has been instrumental in promoting the zero-point epistemologies that prevail through Northern artefacts of knowledge. In other words, we write to de-link from the epistemological assumption of a neutral and detached observational location from which the world is interpreted. In this paper, we discuss the journey we take as PhD students as we attempt to delink and decolonise our writing. Traversing the landscape of the Writing Borderlands, different features arise and fall. Along the way, we come across forks in the road between academic training and the new way we imagine writing decolonially.

In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people score poorly on national mainstream indicators of wellbeing, with the lowest outcomes recorded in remote communities. As part of a ‘shared space’ collaboration between remote Aboriginal communities, government and scientists, the holistic Interplay Wellbeing Framework and accompanying survey were designed bringing together Aboriginal priorities of culture, empowerment and community with government priorities of education, employment and health. Quantitative survey data were collected from a cohort of 841 Aboriginal people aged 15–34 years, from four different Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal community researchers designed and administered the survey. Structural equation modelling was used to identify the strongest interrelating pathways within the framework. Optimal pathways from education to employment were explored with the concept of empowerment playing a key role. Here, education was defined by self-reported English literacy and numeracy and empowerment was defined as identity, self-efficacy and resilience. Empowerment had a strong positive impact on education (β = 0.38, p < .001) and strong correlation with employment (β = 0.19, p < .001). Education has a strong direct effect on employment (β = 0.40, p < .001). This suggests that education and employment strategies that foster and build on a sense of empowerment are mostly likely to succeed, providing guidance for policy and programs.

This paper integrates the findings of two evaluations into the effectiveness of human health workforce training delivery and outcomes. In the period 2012–2015, Wontulp-Bi-Buya College ran the Certificate III in Addictions Management and Community Development and the Certificate IV in Indigenous Mental Health: Suicide Prevention. The key findings are presented under three thematic areas: personal to community wellbeing, enrolment and completion and withdrawal and employment and voluntary sector engagement. The outcomes of both evaluations are combined to build a picture of successful course delivery, satisfaction and completion rates that well exceed the national average. The significant contribution the authors draw from these is the problematisation and theorising of the concept of ‘empowerment’. A term claimed by the College in its mission statement, the term ‘systemic empowerment’ has been co-developed with the College to both reclaim the concept of empowerment and to make sense of the personal and collective empowerment approach that serves as a framework for the trainer's pedagogy and course structures. Systemic empowerment contributes to the Colleges’ theory of change to tackle very important contemporary social and political issues holistically and at their root and serves as an important model of adult vocational education and training for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people

The Wollotuka Institute, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, is the first university or organisation to enter into the accreditation process with the World Indigenous Higher Education Consortium (WINHEC). Part of that process includes identifying the local cultural standards and protocols that drive and shape our work as a cultural entity. As a result of successfully completing these processes, the course ‘Working with Aboriginal Communities’, consciously underwent a process of affirmation recognising and embedding where missing, these cultural protocols within our pedagogy and curriculum. Each intake sees students from all disciplines enrol and all benefit greatly from their cultural learning experiences. In this paper, we discuss how these cultural protocols shaped the course material that both online and face-to-face tertiary students experienced, as well, noting the outcomes of this process. Both authors are long-term educators in higher education and have had our teaching invigorated by this experience of critique and reflection. This paper serves to both be a reflective and documentary process for ourselves as well as an opportunity to share our experiences with our colleagues involved in higher education.

Since 1990, the School of Education at James Cook University has produced and delivered a successful offcampus Bachelor of Education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in their home communities through the Remote Area Teacher Education Program (RATEP):A community-based teacher education program for Indigenous peoples. This paper examines five key areas. One is the intersystemic management structure that has majority representation from Indigenous communities and peak education bodies as well as representation from the other three stakeholders: Education Queensland, the School of Education at James Cook University and the Tropical North Queensland Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE). A second area is RATEP’s innovative use of information and communication technologies in teaching and learning. A third theme is its dynamic evolution from (a) two dedicated RATEP sites in the Torres Strait to 12 sites throughout Queensland; (b) geographically remote sites to a combination of remote, rural, and urban sites; (c) a principle where students gather at a dedicated site with its own teachercoordinator to clusters where a number of students are living in different locations and the coordinator travels between these; (d) movement of sites from location to location depending on need and demand; and (e) a fixed program to a highly flexible one that allows multiple entry and exit points, including honours. A fourth area is the critical insights generated from research into the program by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers. The final theme is the retention of graduates from RATEP within the classroom and their promotion into the administrative and advisory teaching sectors.

This paper reports on experiences of Indigenous students and staff involved in Bond Indigenous Tutoring (BIT). It aimed to gain insight regarding topics including challenges faced by Indigenous students, why some students discontinued their studies, and concepts of success at university. Findings revealed the main challenges included the transition from secondary to tertiary education and not being prepared academically. BIT staff identified family responsibilities and being dislocated from kinship networks as challenges, while students stated these were factors explaining why Indigenous students discontinued their studies. A whole of university approach was found to be required to effectively support Indigenous students. Success was defined as more than Grade Point Average, as it entailed being able to enjoy future endeavours. This paper contributes to the evidence that tuition programmes and Indigenous centres at university are key contributors to success, and it is argued that such success must become the norm as opposed to the exception.

Since 1967, enormous progress has been made by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia in gaining access to, and participating in, tertiary education. National statistics provided by the Department of Employment, Education and Training (DEET, 1992), show that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are enrolling in, and graduating from, a wider variety of courses in ever increasing numbers.

This paper captures an ideological moment in time in which I contemplated the methodological approach I was embarking upon. In my search for a more appropriate approach for conducting research with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tertiary students at the University of Queensland, I chose focus groups set within the qualitative process of grounded theory. This paper explores the meaning, usefulness and persistence of grounded theory, how it juxtaposes with focus groups, and the implications for the reciprocal integrity of the research for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and me. Within this context and the tenets of grounded theory I ask questions such as, “For how long in the process can your research texts (linking data and theory) about field texts (participants’ narratives) remain purely inductive?” And, “How does the movement between inductive theory development and deductive assumptions fit widi issues of power and authority in an Australian Indigenous context?”

I see possibility in the complementary use of grounded theory and focus groups that creates dialogic relationships between the students as both narrators and audience. Through the interaction of retelling, reliving and recreating life experiences in conversations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tertiary students conceptualise their individual subjectivities in a process of self-construction. How perceptive I am in “seeing” developing concepts within the students’ testimonies, and how I interpret those concepts in relation to existing theoretical content, may lead to new theory that influences the ongoing deconstruction of grand narratives often assigned to group identities. Co-research among the participants can provide the opportunity for monitoring the generative process.

The issue of low graduation rates among Indigenous learners transcends borders. Some argue that racism and discrimination in schools and in wider society impede the success of Indigenous learners. Although teachers may not intend to make discriminatory decisions based on a learner's ascribed characteristics, research has demonstrated that teachers are capable of making biased decisions that deny opportunities to Indigenous learners. After reflecting upon current debates regarding effective educational strategies for diversity and Indigenous learners, the author contends that courses directed towards best practices for Indigenous learners in the classroom may be less beneficial than developing teachers' overall critical consciousness-raising and self-awareness abilities. The author presents what the literature reveals regarding various educational methods, practices, and epistemologies that have been successfully shared across disciplines in order to create more effective teachers and more responsive learners.