‘I really want to make a difference for these kids but it’s just too hard’: one Aboriginal teacher’s experiences of moving away, moving on and moving up

Abstract

This paper draws on longitudinal data to examine the changing professional identity of one beginning teacher over a three-year period. Using a post-structuralist framework and theories of social class and capital, I highlight the complexities, contradictions and impossibilities of new graduate, Luke, sustaining an identity as ‘Aboriginal teacher’ in Australian schools. I trace the shift in his commitment to working with underachieving Aboriginal boys in challenging school contexts at the beginning of his career, to his move into a middle-class white girls’ school towards the end of his third year of teaching. I suggest this was a result of the ongoing stress associated with the expectation that he take sole responsibility for the education of the school’s Aboriginal students, as well as his own upward social class mobility. The paper concludes by raising a number of concerns for education systems, including the retention of Aboriginal teachers in Australian schools.

Keywords:

• social class
• Aboriginal teachers
• longitudinal research

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the Indigenous teacher who was interviewed for this project and the support of the research team members, Laurie Crawford, Jo-Anne Reid and Lee Simpson.

Notes

1. Indigenous Australians are First Nations people from mainland Australia and the Torres Straits, an island territory north of Australia. They have a history predating European settlement in Australia by more than 40,000 years.

2. In order to protect the participants’ privacy, pseudonyms have been used for all people and places.

3. Many Indigenous people do not use the term ‘Indigenous’ when identifying themselves and their communities and prefer to use ‘Aboriginal’. Throughout this article, ‘Aboriginal’ is used from this point on whenever I refer to the participants who prefer this practice, when I refer to their experiences or when I quote them.

4. This research is funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Programme (N. Santoro, J.-A. Reid, and C. McConaghy, and includes Indigenous researchers, Laurie Crawford and Lee Simpson).

5. The Wiradjuri nation extends over much of the Australian state of New South Wales and has one of the largest populations of Indigenous people in Australia. Wiradjuri people, like all Indigenous peoples, have a distinct language and culture.