Historical Discourses Underpinning “Closing the Gap”: Perspectives for Opening Debate on Australian Indigenous Educational Inequalities

• In Event: Genealogy and the Production of Subjects Across Cultural and Disciplinary Contexts

Abstract

Education policy is increasingly becoming characterised by notions of measurement and comparison and performance in international tests is driving educational reform and government ambitions (Gillard et al, 2013). This paper examines the focus on measurement in relation to an Australian federal policy ‘Closing the Gap on Indigenous Disadvantage’. Employing a Foucauldian history of the present I analyse discourses of measurement and comparison in documents from the 1930s and 1960s – key periods of debate regarding educability of Indigenous peoples. This forms the beginnings of a genealogy of the ‘achievement gap’ as an explanation of the ‘problem’ of Indigenous disadvantage. I argue that this approach assists in opening spaces to reconceptualise dominant understandings of the ‘problem’ of Indigenous education and imagine alternatives.

Author

• Sophie Rudolph, University of Melbourne