Decolonising schooling practices through relationality and reciprocity: embedding local Aboriginal perspectives in the classroom

ABSTRACT

Indigenous communities share concerns related to power, tokenism, and the reproduction of patterns of privilege and discrimination within formal schooling systems. These are issues that were central to ambitions of the Culture, Community and Curriculum Project (CCCP), the focus of this paper. The CCCP was a three-year ‘pilot’ study that accepted from the outset that Aboriginal parents and community members should have a genuine and meaningful role in education-related decision making and practices. We report on the processes and experiences of community members and teachers as they drew on local expertise to embed contextually responsive perspectives, knowledges, and ways of teaching that met national curriculum requirements, while concurrently fostering learners’ critical social consciousness. We hope to illustrate how and why the embedding of local Aboriginal perspectives has enriched the learning experiences for all involved, whilst highlighting some of the challenges of such an approach being genuinely taken up more widely.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonising
• culturally responsive pedagogy
• relationality
• Indigenous education
• professional learning
• community engagement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Use of ‘Aunty’ or ‘Uncle’ when referring to Aboriginal community members is a sign of respect and recognises their role as an Aboriginal Elder/Knowledge Holder.

2. We use the terms Aboriginal and Indigenous interchangeably throughout this paper with recognition of the colonial legacy these terms carry.

3. NAIDOC stands for the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee, which was formed during the 1950s, however has links to activist and protest groups from the 1920s (see https://www.naidoc.org.au/about/history for more details).

4. Pseudonyms have been used for participants and schools.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ian Potter Foundation [RG152361].