On Noticing and Not Noticing Indigenous Students as Learners and Future Citizens

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

Abstract

This paper examines educational provision and ambitions for the education of Indigenous students in Australia during the 1960s, a time of significant educational change marked by renewed interest in progressive and child-centred education. The 1960s was also a period during which the federal and state-level policy of assimilation of Aboriginal people, in place from the 1930s, was officially enacted, via a number of legislative and constitutional changes. These included giving Aboriginal people the right to vote federally, counting them in the national census, and the continued forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families into state care or adoptive white families, where they could be taught how to become white.

Framed by the perspective that Australia has been involved in an ongoing project of settler colonialism, which was undertaken in part through the creation of ‘oppressive spatial categories’ (Banivanua-Mar & Edmonds, 2010), this paper analyses the ways in which this is mediated in the physical space and arrangements of schools, and the production and effects of the classroom as a racialised space. How were assimilationist intentions carried out through a curriculum that valued European ideas about learning and knowledge, and which worked to fit non-white bodies into white spaces? In what ways did the physical environments of school – the inside and outside of classrooms; the spatial and material arrangements of knowledge – recognise or aspire not to notice Aboriginal children? Edward Soja has argued that ‘there is a growing awareness of the simultaneity and interwoven complexity of the social, the historical and the spatial, their inseparability and interdependence’ (Soja, 1996: 3): this injunction guides the ways in which the spaces of schooling for Aboriginal children in mid-twentieth century Australia are examined here. In the case of Indigenous education, however, acknowledging the ‘influence of space’ is not simply a corrective to an over-reliance on temporality in understanding schooling. The form and impact of socio-spatial dynamics have further dimensions, tied up with the history and effects of colonization. In exploring how Aboriginal children were conceptualised as learners and the kind of education that was considered appropriate for them – that is, what sort of citizens it was believed Aboriginal children could or should become – the paper examines how this was reflected and mobilised in the type of school spaces and pedagogies deemed appropriate for these students. The sources for analysis are published debates among teachers and educators in the 1960s (Gunton 1964; Monash University 1967) regarding how best to educate Aboriginal children, many of which pivoted on whether to notice or not notice Aboriginal children as particular kinds of learners; and reports from School Inspectors’ visits to schools situated on or nearby Aboriginal reserves or former missions (School Records 1934-67). These reports described the school environment, teachers’ work and curriculum planning, and the learning and achievements of pupils. As such, they provide powerful insight into the norms of students as learners and citizens and to how problems of Indigenous education were defined and their solutions imagined in pedagogies and policies.

Author

• Julie E. McLeod, University of Melbourne