‘If it weren’t for my mum…’: the influence of Australian Indigenous mothers on their children’s aspirations to teach

Abstract

This article draws upon data from semi‐structured interviews with Australian Indigenous teachers to explore the role their mothers played in shaping their decisions to become teachers. The findings suggest that their mothers’ emotional involvement and investment in their sons’ and daughters’ education generated significant reserves of emotional capital upon which the teachers drew. Such capital, expressed by their mothers in a variety of ways, including encouragement, coercion and anger, motivated and inspired them to complete their schooling, to consider teaching as a profession and to take out teaching degrees, often in the face of enormous challenges and barriers. They understood teaching as presenting opportunities for their own upward class mobility as well as the chance for them to bring about social change for Indigenous people in general. I conclude by arguing the need to reconsider the dominant discourses in Australia around the aspirations of Indigenous mothers in regards to their children’s education and I also raise issues for further consideration and research.

Keywords:

• Indigenous teachers
• Indigenous mothers
• emotional capital
• social class
• qualitative interviews

Acknowledgement

I gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the Indigenous teachers who were interviewed for this project and the support of the team members, Laurie Crawford, Jo‐Anne Reid and Lee Simpson.

Notes

1. This research is funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Program (Santoro et al., 2004–2007) and includes Indigenous partner researchers, Laurie Crawford and Lee Simpson.

2. Indigenous people generally foreground their tribal connections when they describe themselves. I have therefore done the same when referring to them for the first time. In order to ensure anonymity, pseudonyms have been used.

3. Officially, the term ‘Indigenous Australians’ refers to Aboriginal peoples from mainland Australia and the Torres Straits, an island territory north of Australia. However, many Indigenous people from mainland Australia do not use the term ‘Indigenous’ when identifying themselves and their communities and prefer to use ‘Aboriginal’.

4. The Freedom Rides, inspired by the Freedom Rides in the USA, began in 1965 in rural New South Wales. They involved a bus ride of over 200,000 kilometres undertaken by Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people who campaigned on the road for civil rights for Aboriginal people and highlighted the discrimination that characterised life for them, including extreme poverty and separatist social practices. The publicity generated by the Freedom Rides has been recognised as significant to the outcome of the 1967 referendum in which Indigenous people were made Australian citizens and given the right to vote.