We are very pleased to bring you Volume 42.1 of the Australian Journal of Indigenous Education. The articles in this Volume collectively address the urgent need to disrupt ‘business as usual’ in Indigenous education in national and global contexts, and in doing so, engage in new ways of thinking and framing policy and pedagogy. Currently in Australia, discussions around what ‘counts’ as ‘good’ policy and pedagogy in Indigenous education are increasingly placed in conversation with one of three agendas: Noel Pearson's ‘radical vision’ for contemporary schooling for Indigenous students, with a renewed emphasis and return to direct instruction; Chris Sarra's ‘stronger and smarter’ strategy, which promotes a commitment to a high-expectation, high-performance and a relational approach to Indigenous education; and initiatives driven by the ‘Closing the Gap’ reform agenda. Indeed, situated within the present climate of neo-liberalism orchestrating policy by numbers, there is ‘serious stuff’ happening at the moment that impacts in very real ways on the experiences and outcomes of our Indigenous children at all levels of schooling, the capacity of teachers to work within an Indigenous Australian education space for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, and the positioning of education as a location of possibility for ‘doing business differently’. The time for us as educators and researchers has never been more urgent — we have to be the ones to talk loud and to talk strong against colonial and neo-colonial moves to silence and exclude the counter stories we have to tell. In conversation as Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators working towards social justice in education, the articles in this Volume bring us these narratives.
The article by Geoff Munns, Virginia O'Rourke and Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews reports on a large mixed methods research project conducted in New South Wales, which aimed to explore what schools can now do to make education work equitably for Aboriginal students. Munns reports on the community, school and classroom conditions that ‘seeded success’ for Aboriginal students and suggests that key indicators of success for Aboriginal students are linked to strong school-community relationships, culturally inclusive curricula, the participation of Aboriginal people in the work of schools, the prioritising and embedding of Aboriginal perspectives and values in school and classroom curriculum, culturally differentiated qualitative teaching from Aboriginal perspectives, developing a learning community mindset, targeted support for Indigenous students, and relational approaches to teaching and learning. Shifting to a different school context, Elizabeth Warrren and Janine Quine take us behind the scenes into a remote school in Queensland to look explicitly at the ways in which schools in these locations can enhance student learning and build teacher capacity by adopting a relational, collaborative and dialogic approaches to community-school partnerships and pedagogy.
We then take our discussions across the Tasman to the context of Maori education. Adreanne Ormond and Les Williams focus on the development of Indigenous research capability in Aotearoa through a theoretical and practical lens in order to better understand its transformative potential. Concepts such as knowledge generation are explored with reference to the activities, initiatives and outcomes of the Capability Building program of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga. The next article, by Aue Te Ava, Christine Rubie-Davis, Airini and Alan Ovens, brings us to secondary schooling in the Cook Islands and the centrality of culturally responsive pedagogy. Their research highlights that despite the good intentions and good will to frame education from an Indigenous perspective, implementing Cook Island cultural values in teaching and learning is a difficult and challenging process.
In a similar vein, the article by Andrea Isogai et al. explores ways to use technology to impart First Nations perspectives and knowledges to the next generation of First Nations. Specifically, this discussion highlights the centrality of place, land and environmental knowledge to both traditional and contemporary First Nations people and how technology such as the collaborative-geomatics tool can potentially assist in fostering and sustaining such intergenerational knowledge transfer. Shalini Watson explores the possibilities that digital technologies offer to Indigenous people in high school in South Australia to access tertiary studies. With reference to current trends in digital technologies and tertiary instructional practices, Watson considers the potential of digital learning environments to produce positive learning outcomes and pathways for Indigenous people into higher education. The final article in this Volume keeps our discussion within higher education in Australia, and here Catherine Howlett, Jo-Anne Ferreria, Monica Seini, and Christopher Matthews also considers the necessity of embedding Indigenous knowledge systems and ways of knowing in an environmental curriculum, to attract and retain Indigenous students in science-related disciplines. Their paper is located in the higher education setting of Griffith University in Queensland, and presents an example of the way that universities in Australia are currently addressing the call to embed Indigenous perspectives in tertiary curricula.
We hope you enjoy reading the papers in this Volume and that they inspire us all to continue working towards ‘doing business differently’ in Indigenous education.
