Toward an Australian Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: The Power and Possibilities for the Indigenous Good: The Importance of Indigenous Research and Praxis 3

Abstract

In Australia, pedagogical techniques are urgently required that assist teachers to respond to the appalling schooling disparities among Aboriginal students and the increasingly super-diverse student populations. Despite the past decade of international advancement in Critical pedagogies in the form of culturally responsive pedagogy, these are weakly developed in Australia. This article draws on data findings from a three-year research project 'Toward an Australian Culturally Responsive Pedagogy' with fourteen teachers, four Aboriginal education workers across six super-diverse schools. Findings highlight the importance of professional learning communities; connect learning to culture; and that locality plays a significant role in both articulating such differences and in influencing the nature of access and outcomes achieved from education and other services. The project concludes that teachers found difficulty with narrowly scripted, technicised approaches to pedagogy that ignore the contextualised nature of schooling and disregard the intellectual and professional capacities of teachers. This paper examines the five key provocations that emerged from the project that include: strongly connect to students’ life-worlds; recognise cultural difference as an asset; offer high intellectual challenge; foster a critically conscious/activist orientation; employ multimodal sharing of learning. Conclusions and implications for teacher as researcher of their own classroom discussed.

Authors

• Lester Rigney, University of South Australia

• Robert James Hattam, University of South Australia