Toward a Decolonizing Australian Culturally Responsive Pedagogy?

• In Event: Toward Decolonizing and Culturally Responsive Pedagogies

Abstract

The huge discrepancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous student success at school, by any measure, is an urgent international problem. There has been decades of policy action in this area, but there is no comprehensive review of the take up of these policy ideas, especially the ways schools are organized and how curriculum and pedagogy in schools are enacted. Given that most Indigenous students attend government schools in Australian cities and or large regional centres, we can infer important findings from large pedagogy studies conducted recently. For example, Lingard (2007) refers to the dominant pedagogies as pedagogies of indifference or pedagogies of the same, summarised as being strong in care for students, but mostly ‘fail to work with and across differences’ (p. 246).
Yet globally there is growing body of evidence that ‘culturally responsive pedagogies’ do improve academic success for First Nations peoples (Castagno & Brayboy 2008). Culturally responsive pedagogies for Indigenous students are now accepted as a hopeful strategy for improving academic achievement of First Peoples in settler colonial countries such as the USA, Canada, and New Zealand (Castagno & Brayboy 2008; Dick, Estell, & McCarty, 1994; Smith1999; Bishop et al 2007).
In Australia, in the past decade there have been many schooling initiatives all with varied and uneven effects. Research into the experiences of Indigenous students has too often focused on the problems, barriers and challenges teachers face and the need to improve teacher quality and pre-service teacher education. Despite these initiatives, little attention has been given to culturally responsive pedagogies in Australian public school classrooms. The field of Indigenist epistemological theory has emerged over the past decades and has made gains in education policy. Unfortunately the theory and practice of culturally responsive pedagogies in Australia is only weakly developed. There is presently no substantial theoretically informed and empirically substantiated Australian version of culturally responsive pedagogy available to Australian educators working in schools, or those preparing new teachers.
This paper will report on research that examines how teachers enact culturally responsive pedagogy in Australian mainstream middle school classrooms. Specifically this will entails a multi-sited action research project in 7 mainstream schools, augmented by analysis of policy texts, and additional evidence about school structures, and school culture. Theoretically the project is also working with decolonising methodologies and reconciliation pedagogy frameworks. Our approach borrows from conceptual frameworks from the fields of: Indigenist epistemologies (Rigney 2006; 2011); and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (Moreton-Robinson et.al 2012) that engages and supports local Indigenous students, their identities, knowledges and epistemologies; school-wide strategies that improve teacher quality to work and maintain student engagement and improve learning outcomes; strategies to empower Indigenous students while unsettling deficit and victim constructions; and engaging in a ‘negotiated approach’ where reflexivity is required that is sensitive to a politics of knowledge. On reconciliation pedagogy, we borrow from Hattam and Matthews (2012) framing that includes these elements: dialogic, counter-memory, decolonising praxis, utopian imaginary, and rethinking the relationship between self and society.

Authors

• Lester Rigney, University of South Australia

• Robert James Hattam, University of South Australia