Remote Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schools and communities are diverse and complex sites shaped by contrasting geographies, languages, histories and cultures, including historical and ongoing relationships with colonialism, and connected yet contextually unique epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies.

This paper explores the history of Anangu (Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Ngaanyatjarra and Ngaatjatjarra) populations, including the establishment of incorporated communities and schools across the tri-state remote region of central Australia. This study will show that Anangu have a relatively recent contact history with Europeans and Anangu experiences of engagement with colonisation and schooling are diverse and complex.

By describing historical patterns of population centralisation and decentralisation, I argue that schooling and broader education policies need to be contextually responsive to Anangu histories, values, ontologies and epistemologies in order to produce an education approach that resists colonialist social models and assumptions and instead, works more effectively towards a broader aim of social justice. Through assisting educators and policy makers to acquire a clearer understanding of Anangu histories, capacities and struggle, I hope to inform a more nuanced, contextually responsive and socially-just consideration of the provision of Western education in the tri-state region.

This article discusses the concept of Vivir Bien (Living Well) (VB) and its role as a decolonising project in connection with the Political Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia (2009) (BC) and subordinated legislation. This subordinated legislation was enacted to implement in a more specific manner the general legal principles contained within the BC. The paper uses these legal texts within the framework of decolonial thinking to prove that the adoption of the concept of VB represents a legal and an epistemological shift that radically contests the dominant Western paradigm of modernity/coloniality. This shift has many facets; however, this article concentrates on two of them in order to characterise its radicalism: (a) the constitutional acknowledgment of the colonial difference, which is understood here as the pervading and living legacy of European colonialism in social organisations and the production of knowledge, and (b) the constitutional and legislative requirement of engaging in an ongoing intercultural dialogue as a vehicle for the achievement of a society based on the concept of VB. This article concludes that the confluence of these two facets marks the epistemological shift and is important in the advancement of the intercultural and decolonising project represented by the concept of VB.

More than 4000 Indigenous Australian students enrol and take up a placement at boarding school each year. While reasons for attending boarding school vary, the impetus for many remote and very remote-dwelling students is restricted secondary educational opportunities in their home communities. A large multi-site study is being undertaken across Queensland to understand the conditions required for these students to be resilient while studying away from home. This paper reports on levels of student satisfaction with Queensland Department of Education's Transition Support Service (TSS) that provide assistance to remote-dwelling Indigenous students in the transition to boarding schools. A survey instrument administered to students included 22 close-ended questions to elicit levels of student satisfaction with TSS. Data were collected electronically using SurveyMonkey™ and analysed in SPSS v24. Descriptive statistics were calculated for variables assessing service support, student perceptions and experiences. A total of 294 primary, secondary and re-engaging students across 21 sites responded. Nearly all primary students (97%) anticipated that TSS would assist their move to boarding school. All secondary students identified that TSS had assisted their transition to boarding school. All re-engaging students agreed that TSS support had increased their capacity to cope when things go wrong. Lower scores related to students’ ability to access TSS when needed. Very high levels of satisfaction with TSS were countered by constraints of distance between TSS and students, and resources available to support the work of TSS. Findings point to the need for equitable provision of transition services in Queensland that emphasise the importance of relationship between service provider and student, and can inform the design of similar transition services across Australia.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australian schools continue to have poor education and health outcomes, and the introduction of a new national curriculum may assist in redressing this situation. This curriculum emphasises recommendations which have been circulating in the sector over many years, to require teacher education institutions to provide their students with an understanding of past and contemporary experiences of Indigenous Australians, as well as the social, economic and health disadvantages that challenge Indigenous communities, and to equip them to integrate Indigenous issues into their future teaching programs. This article, while focusing on teacher education developments at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) to meet National Standards and Frameworks for preservice teachers, provides some general background, and identifies recently developed resources, including the potential for Indigenous centres within universities to assist educators.

This article explores the Sami philosophy of the gift as a basis for a transformative pedagogical framework. Grounded on the Sami land-based worldview, this philosophy calls for the recognition and reciprocation of gifts, whether gifts of the land, interpersonal gifts or giftedness of an individual. In particular, the article considers two Sami concepts, that of láhi and attáldat and explains how they can serve as a framework for a Sami pedagogy that takes into account the central role of the Sami worldview in contemporary education while simultaneously critically analysing the colonial structures that continue to impact Sami society and education.

Remote Aboriginal culture(s) and Western culture(s) are two of the most diverse culture groups on earth. In the context of these two fundamentally different world views, Aboriginal formal schooling is facing a major dilemma. Simply put this dilemma is that while most Aboriginal parents have a deep desire for their children to ‘grow up Aboriginal’, they also want their children to succeed in Western schooling and to perform successfully in some aspects of white culture, thereby reducing dependency on white expertise in their communities.

In this article we will consider one Aboriginal child’s literacy learning in her first year of formal schooling. The data were collected in 1985. Sharon was then a student in an Aboriginal Transition class in an urban school in the Northern Territory. The children in Sharon’s class consisted of Kriol, Warlpiri and Aboriginal English speakers. The program they were placed in was an English-only one. This report considers one case study and discusses Sharon’s learning in the classroom context (for a full report see Walton, 1986).

The aim of this document is to provide some direction and support to new non-Aboriginal teachers in remote Aboriginal community schools in the Northern Territory. It is intended to accompany the school-based induction, and will hopefully lead to the development of more relevant school-based documents. Many are not only new to Aboriginal community life, but may be in their first position in a classroom after graduating. I have found through my experiences as a teacher in the same situation and then as a mentor to new teachers, that the feeling of being totally overwhelmed, followed closely by distress and panic, is very common. These feelings may be acknowledged by other staff, but are frequently not put into perspective, identified and dealt with as a part of culture shock.

Teaching in and of itself is a difficult task fraught with obstacles to classroom success. For those who teach Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students these obstacles are compounded by a political atmosphere that colours every decision made within the school and indeed within education departments.

As classroom teachers it is easy to say that politics has nothing to do with teaching and pretend that it is not an issue. As convenient as this attitude may be, it is denying the facts. Indeed all teachers involved in Indigenous education must accept that their role is political. They must see that part of their task is to overcome years of institutional policy and attitude that have contributed significantly to poor educational performances for Indigenous students in Australia.

There is growing interest and respect in the world regarding the knowledge and experience of Indigenous peoples. This is particularly so in industrialised ‘post-colonial’ societies such as Australia, which see themselves as committed to principles of equity and social justice.

There is a new political, economic and social context in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural knowledge is widely recognised and valued, even if not properly understood. In the search for a more precisely articulated national identity, Indigenous identity is claimed by many as integral to Australian identity. Coupled with this is a revised sense of coming to terms with the past, a recognition of what has been left out of histories taught from non-Indigenous perspectives. The cold war of invasion and resistance goes on but there are signs of an end in view.

In a climate of self-determination it is essential to clarify what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people themselves feel about their cultural identity and future. These voices exist in a context of the great potential in Aboriginal culture and by contrast the severe problems which Aboriginal people face.

Lippman (1994) argues that, although there is some evidence of Aboriginal status becoming more equitable, education being one instance to avail self-determination, data continue to reveal that Aboriginal mortality and morbidity rates lie in stark contrast to those of the general population of Australia. The death rate for Aboriginal men and women of 35 to 44 years is eight times higher than for the average non-Aboriginal (Ferrari, 1997). Queensland Health (1996) recently reported that Cape York has yet to experience the mortality gains seen by Indigenous populations in New Zealand and North America.

Aboriginal Studies has now been a part of the South Australian curriculum for many years and most of the writing about teaching Aboriginal Studies has focused on appropriate content and pedagogues with little critical appraisal of the actual implementation of Aboriginal Studies curricula. A research project carried out in an inner city Adelaide secondary school suggests that it is crucial for those of us engaged in the teaching of Aboriginal Studies and Aboriginal students, to turn attention to the taken-for-granted presuppositions and ideologies that inform teacher understandings and practices in Aboriginal Studies.

Since first coming to the Northern Territory in 1982 I have spent much time in Aboriginal Education in many different roles. Remote school Principal. Batchelor College lecturer and Centre of Aboriginal and Islander Studies Maths lecturer to name a few. I would like to share with you some of my findings over this time.

As a child I lived at a place called Angatja. My father, mother, grandmother, older brothers, aunts, and uncles taught me there and I learned from them. My mother taught me about her bush foods. She collected the plant foods and prepared them and I learned by watching her. I learned also from my father. He taught about meat foods, cooking the meat, making spears, joining parts of the spears tightly with sinew and going out hunting for meat. My mother would take me out with her. We two went out together to collect small animals and plant foods, hitting sand goannas, and sometimes collecting bush honey. I watched her and gathered some foods and when we all came together in camp we ate the meat and plant foods. My mother gathered various plant foods, native millet seeds, pigweed, roots which grew in the rocks and other seeds. These foods were available in autumn. Other foods were found on trees in spring. These fruits included mistletoe berries, mulga apples, native plums and quandongs. Also the native fig trees grew on small rocky hills.

In the bi-cultural context of Aotearoa (New Zealand), engagement with stakeholders that is transparent and culturally responsive is a priority for educational research. More common research approaches in New Zealand have followed a Western euro-centric model of engagement with research participants resulting in interventions and initiatives that have not necessarily served the needs of the education sector. The authors critically analyse the researcher relationship with research participants to provide a Māori perspective to guide the engagement process as researchers enter educational communities to conduct research. Embedded with Māori ideology and knowledge, the Hei Korowai ethical research framework is a platform for insider positionality that acknowledges partnership between the researcher and the researched for the benefit of knowledge development and the educational sector.

Health research remains a vital activity of Indigenous health workforces. This paper reports on the main findings of yarning interviews with 14 Indigenous researchers, that was central to a project analysing the role of research training infrastructures in strengthening the Indigenous health research workforce in Australia. The findings highlighted Indigenous researcher peers as core sources of inspiration, moral support and sustenance in academia and in life. Peer generative power arising from peer groups provide a unique enriching to the educational and research experience. Indigenous researcher peers have a strong shared aspiration to champion change to health research and higher education as a key pathway to widespread positive impacting on health and well-being. We suggest the (revived) development at a collective level of a strategic and planned approach to capitalising on the positive outcomes of peer generated leadership and support.

This brief report highlights an apparently inflated suspension and exclusion rate for Aboriginal students in Western Australian government schools. The elevated rates for both suspension and exclusion, but especially for the more serious step of exclusion, should be reason for concern for all educators.

In a large urban centre in North Queensland, a young five year old Aboriginal boy enters the classroom, wide-eyed and silent. Behind him come his mother and grandmother, seemingly reluctant to enter the classroom. The school year commenced two weeks earlier, so the other children have developed some routine. Having not been to pre-school, Joseph takes his place at the desk assigned by the teacher and silently watches the other children talk, laugh and skilfully use the available equipment.

Since leaving ‘the bush’ I have been continually surprised at the ignorance that still exists about Aboriginal people and their languages. When people chat to me, and it is revealed that I used to work in Aboriginal schools in the Northern Territory, they say things like “Do you speak Aboriginal then?… Maybe you could make a sign for us saying ‘Welcome to our Kindergarten’ in Aboriginal?” I then have to explain that there are many, many different Aboriginal languages, not just one, and to say or write such things in any one of these languages requires a lot more than a mere literal translation. When I began doing research on the topic of writing in Aboriginal languages. I was again surprised at the sorts of comments people made to me. Comments like “How can you do research on writing in Aboriginal languages; I thought the Aborigines didn't even have an alphabet!”

All children, black or white, learn a lot more outside the classroom than inside it. All normal children, by the time they go to school for the first time, have already learnt to speak their mother tongue, have learnt who they are and where they fit into their family or community, and have learnt a vast range of behaviours which are appropriate (and inappropriate) for members of their culture. They have learnt all these through the informal process of socialization which affects all members of every culture throughout their lives. In traditional Aboriginal society, for example, hunting and food preparation skills, the traditional law, patterns of land ownership and important stories from the past, were all learnt informally in the daily life of the family. Only some sacred knowledge would be transmitted formally in a ceremonial context.