Critical Analysis of the Achievement “Gap” Attributed to Australian Indigenous Students: Insights, Tensions, and Dilemmas

• In Event: Indigenous Educational Inequalities and Promised Solutions: Historical, Policy, and Transnational Perspectives on “Closing the Gap”

Abstract

The ‘problem’ of Indigenous educational achievement in Australia has recently become widely known and largely unquestioned as a ‘gap’. This discursive construction can be seen in national policies designed to address Indigenous disadvantage (e.g. Australian Government, 2012; Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs, 2010) and educational research focused towards closing the ‘gap’ (e.g. Freeman and Bochner, 2008:9; Faulkner et al., 2010:98).

This paper critically examines the notion of the ‘achievement gap’, the ways in which settler-colonial history continues to shape Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in Australia and the possibilities provided by critical policy methodologies for conceptualizing this problem. Drawing on Foucauldian traditions of discourse analysis (Graham, 2011, O'Farrell, 2005) and guided by critical policy studies methodology (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010) I investigate the ways in which both contemporary and historical constructions of Indigenous educational capacity contribute towards producing particular effects. In doing this I point towards the potential of this approach for understanding enduring problems in different ways and I also raise some dilemmas and tensions that arise through this work. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to both unsettle and question commonly held understandings of Indigenous educational disadvantage and also to critically examine the capacity for the methodological approaches outlined to contribute innovative ways of approaching educational policy and practice.

The objects of research drawn on in this paper include official documents related to Indigenous education in Australia. These consist of contemporary policy (Australian Government, 2012; Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs, 2010) as well as historical documents (Keesing, 1938; Monash University, 1967). These documents are analyzed to develop a history of the present. The historical periods used as points of contrast with the present are the late 1930s and the late 1960s. Both of these periods were characterized by significant events in race relations in Australia, which are used as moments of rupture to provide windows for understanding current dilemmas in Indigenous education. This paper is also, however, concerned with analyzing the usefulness of this methodological approach for addressing Indigenous educational inequalities.

This work aims to contribute both empirically and conceptually to scholarly debates concerning Indigenous educational inequalities. The insights gained through the development of a history of the present ‘achievement gap’ contribute to the small but growing historiography of Indigenous education in Australia. This in turn encourages a re-examination of the contours of Indigenous educational disadvantage and the ways in which policy may respond to or address such disadvantage. I argue that conceptual shifts are required that take greater account of the past and in particular enduring legacies of settler-colonial histories so as to address more thoroughly the educational injustices Indigenous students face.

Author

• Sophie Rudolph, University of Melbourne