Making Space for Knowledge Intersections in Remote Teacher Education Research – Ways of Being and Tools for Doing

ABSTRACT

The doctoral research that this paper is based on focused on the low number of young Aboriginal teachers currently undertaking and completing teacher education in remote communities in central Australia. What became clear from the research was that the biggest barrier to Aboriginal people becoming qualified teachers is the legacy of settler colonialism and the ongoing neocolonial structures of education and knowledge systems. What also emerged is that there are powerful possibilities for co-creation of knowledge if participants and researchers are willing to engage in a process of decolonising the knowledge work done in intercultural spaces. In addition to the findings of the research the thesis also became a documentation of how the teacher participants and I intentionally inhabited this decolonising way of working. Through this process we were able to discover ways of working together in what Helen Verran calls ‘good faith’. This paper explores the knowledge intersections that are possible if we intentionally work in decolonising ways. It offers a number of ways of ‘being’ and a number of ‘tools’ that help researchers and participants to work together in ways that allow knowledge systems to co-exist and co-create new knowledge without one blocking or erasing the other.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• settler colonialism
• decolonising education
• Aboriginal teachers
• remote communities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Although she grew up north of Melbourne, Lisa was lured to the blue skies and red dirt of central Australia over 18 years ago and has lived and worked in remote communities throughout the desert ever since. She has worked as a teacher, a curriculum advisor and a teacher-lecturer across a number of remote Indigenous schools and is currently working for Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education as a Lecturer in the Preparation for Tertiary Success (PTS) course. She also recently completed her PhD ‘Moving Deeper into Difference – Developing meaningful and effective pathways into teacher education for Indigenous adults from remote communities’ through Charles Darwin University.