Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemUnveiling Country and Improving Culturally Responsive Pedagogy: A Traditional Owner Approach( 2023-06)In Australia, teacher education—and the current teaching profession—is underprepared to adequately teach Indigenous knowledge. Additionally, The National Curriculum and the Australian Professional Teaching Standards offer little guidance and assurance into how this knowledge should be embedded in schools, curriculum and pedagogical practice. This research seeks to increase our understanding of how cultural responsiveness and the embedding of Indigenous knowledges of non-Indigenous educators can be improved through participation in Learning on Country professional development sessions in an urban setting. The professional development sessions were developed with the assistance of Wurundjeri Traditional Owners, who shared their insights into what Country means to them and how teachers can embed these understandings in their classrooms. As teachers progressed through the project, they shared where they believe the opportunities lie to embed Indigenous knowledge in their classrooms and teaching practices despite limited opportunities and mandates from school leadership. Data collection occurred by forming a Traditional Owners focus group, compiling field notes from professional development sites, and asking teachers to participate in three separate interviews. Using a critical lens of land-based and culturally responsive pedagogy shows that professional development guided by Traditional Owners can improve the way non-Indigenous teachers embed Indigenous knowledge into their work. I argue that respectfully embedding Indigenous knowledge and increasing cultural responsiveness in classrooms is reliant on teachers’ willingness to regularly reflect on how they contribute to the maintenance of settler colonialism. The research makes an original contribution to Indigenous education in secondary schools by focusing on professional development being delivered by Traditional Owners on Country, which deepens teachers’ understanding of the relationship between Eurocentric interpretations of land and its contributions to colonialism. The research demonstrates that Learning on Country initiatives are possible in urbanised areas and that they can disrupt settler colonialism’s ‘logic of elimination’; such initiatives facilitate teacher participation in opportunities that increase the visibility of Indigenous histories, languages and cultures.
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ItemToward a land-based curriculum: An Australian Indigenous discourse analysis( 2019)Since its conception, Australia’s national education curriculum has heeded little progress toward embedding Indigenous cultures and experiences as an essential foundation of learning for Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and educators. Historically, Australia’s education curriculum and its associated policy writers continue to promote biases of low expectations by primarily locating Indigenous students within a deficit framework. This thesis shares the findings of a research project focused on understanding how Indigenous cultures and perspectives are embedded in curriculum. The use of critical discourse analysis to explore historical and current curriculum literature reveals that the use and positionality of language have privileged ‘settler thought’ which marginalises and silences the perceived other (i.e. Indigenous). The research also examines Australian and Alaska approaches, using a critical discourse analysis to highlight the way in which Native Alaskan people are practicing their educational sovereignty. This examination includes understanding the way the Alaskan context has strengthened the quality of Native Alaskan education and the Indigenous content being taught in schools by embedding a Culturally responsive standards framework. In Australia, the accountability and quality of teaching Indigenous knowledges relies on teacher’s discretion of using the cross-curricula priorities. The findings of this research are presented within a sovereignty lens relating to article 14 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2008) which calls for local Indigenous control of education and pedagogy. Additionally, Foucault’s power/knowledge theory has been used to demonstrate how ‘settler colonial mandates’ remain a core tenet of Australia’s education system which promotes biases of low expectations by primarily locating Indigenous students within a deficit framework.