Finding Our Way Cross-Culturally: Educators Walking With and Working With and for Indigenous Communities

• In Event: Doing “Epistemologies of the South”: Criticality, Reflexivity, and Praxis Across Cultures

Abstract

Shifting the culture and educational futures of Australian indigenous students requires a seismic shift across multiple layers (institutionalized policies, historic practices, cultural mores and professional as well as personal and sometimes familiar relationships with community members, school administrators, educators, parents and students). This paper explores educational developments in Australia for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders drawing from engagements in selected higher educational and K-12 settings. It details aboriginal initiatives within two Australian universities over the last five years as well as preliminary engagements within two K-12 settings in remote regions of Australia serving predominately indigenous students. The case studies detail the monitoring and advancement of Aboriginal education in these settings including contextual and other factors-- government mandates, institutional support, aboriginal community engagement, professional personnel (e.g, Australian Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education, 2012, Patton, Hong, Lee, Lampert, Burnett, Anderson, 2012; University of Sydney, 2010). The researchers describe first-hand how educators and administrators wrestled with inaction, resistance and the possibility of change. Drawing from the case studies, the authors explore the difficulties that are confronted in efforts to disrupt historical privilege and building educational experiences anchored in culture which challenge the guest paradigm (Morgan, in press). They discuss the need for a shared moral purpose and the role of individuals, institutions and systems in challenging oppression of one group over another as well as the pathology of displacement. They explore the various roles of various participants and stakeholders and how they may benefit as collaborators, participants, bystanders, dissenters and observers. In addition, the case studies bring to the fore:
• Issues involved in transforming institutions and shaping practices which builds upon rather than displaces indigenous identities, culture, knowledge and practices in a transformative fashion (Smith, 2011);
• The beliefs, practices and policy dispositions that can obstruct progress –for example, constructions of cultural identity and practices in ways that reflect assimilation and inclusive models overriding eclecticism and accommodation. (See Gale, 2011, 2012; Rigney, 2011; Fordham and Schwab’s, 2007);
• The rationalization of the social reproduction of privilege and power and the perpetuation of a pathology of difference;
• Gatekeeping operations, entrenched practices and attitudes that maintain the status quo;
• Inequities at play and the circumstances that they perpetuate that interfere with change (Berliner, 2009; Airini & Prescott, 2012).:
• The commitment to a false hope of prepackaged standardized solutions where educational authorities assume that success in one site can be transferred (e.g., Sarra, 2005,2011; Luke et al., 2013);;
• The problems of fit with national curriculum and the mandated testing programs which have become prominent in Australia
The case studies are also used to explore insider-outsider roles especially the “tricky ground” (Smith, 2005) of working across borders as change occurs including how roles and views shift (Apple ,2004, 2011). They discuss the systemic difficulty, but importance of participatory approaches to educational change grounded in community engagement (Goodwin, 2012).

Authors

• Robert V. Morgan, Wollotuka -Aboriginal Studies

• Robert J. Tierney, The University of British Columbia, The University of Sydney, Beijing Normal University