This special issue of The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education presents a second volume of papers which specifically address the issue of remote education for Indigenous Australians. ‘Red Dirt Revisited’, edited by John Guenther, presents findings from his team working on the Remote Education Systems (RES) project within the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP). Focusing on a number of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educational sites in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia, the RES project is now in its final stages and the main intention behind this special issue is to share significant findings from this important research. Much of the work presented here is by postgraduate students and AJIE is very pleased to be able to provide a voice and forum to support and ‘grow’ early career researchers in our field.

In 2013, the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation's (CRC-REP) Remote Education Systems (RES) project team brought together a collection of papers built around a central theme of ‘red dirt thinking’. This theme reflected a view the authors had, that education and schooling in remote communities should be relevant to the context (that is, the ‘red dirt’) in which it is provided. We proposed this as a conceptual framework in which to challenge conventional wisdom about success, disadvantage and aspiration in remote schools.

Remote Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schools and communities are diverse and complex sites shaped by contrasting geographies, languages, histories and cultures, including historical and ongoing relationships with colonialism, and connected yet contextually unique epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies.

This paper explores the history of Anangu (Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Ngaanyatjarra and Ngaatjatjarra) populations, including the establishment of incorporated communities and schools across the tri-state remote region of central Australia. This study will show that Anangu have a relatively recent contact history with Europeans and Anangu experiences of engagement with colonisation and schooling are diverse and complex.

By describing historical patterns of population centralisation and decentralisation, I argue that schooling and broader education policies need to be contextually responsive to Anangu histories, values, ontologies and epistemologies in order to produce an education approach that resists colonialist social models and assumptions and instead, works more effectively towards a broader aim of social justice. Through assisting educators and policy makers to acquire a clearer understanding of Anangu histories, capacities and struggle, I hope to inform a more nuanced, contextually responsive and socially-just consideration of the provision of Western education in the tri-state region.

This paper outlines PhD research which suggests mobile learning fits the cultural philosophies and roles of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who are preservice teachers in the very remote Australian communities where the research was conducted. The problem which the research addresses is the low completion rates for two community-based Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs in South Australia (SA) and Queensland (Qld). Over the past decade, the national completion rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in teacher training was 36 per cent, and in these two community-based programs it was less than 15 per cent. This paper identifies the perceptions of the benefits of using mobile devices by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who are preservice teachers in very remote communities. They report ways in which mobile learning supports their complex roles and provides pragmatic positive outcomes for their tertiary study in remote locations. The paper describes the apparent alignment between mobile learning and cosmology, ontology, epistemology and axiology, which may underpin both the popularity of mobile devices and the affordances of mobile learning.

BowerBird is an open platform biodiversity website (http://www.BowerBird.org.au) and a nationally funded project under management of the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and Museum Victoria. Members post sightings and information about local species of plants and animals, and record other features of ecosystems. Charles Darwin University's Northern Institute Elder on Country researcher, Kathy Guthadjaka, has shared pictures and information about the biodiversity of her homelands in the Yolŋu community of Gäwa, on Elcho Island in north east Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. The extent to which this knowledge can be exposed in the same way as other open resources, can pose dilemmas about the level of ‘openness’ that is appropriate. Open sharing of educational materials can be promoted as a basic human right. This paper will explore the extent to which traditional knowledge can be made openly available. What are the implications for sharing this knowledge in a westernised context that compartmentalises it, and how can a western academic perspective learn from this knowledge and engage functionally with it for the purposes of learning? The existence of this project on the interface between traditional knowledge and western technocratic information management also has implications for how information is presented and valued.

Recent media and policy focus in remote Aboriginal education has turned to boarding schools. The general rhetoric is that boarding schools will allow Indigenous Australian students to have access to quality education and to learn to ‘walk in two worlds’. However, to date, there has been very little exploration of the lived experiences of Indigenous boarding schools, either from broader political and sociological perspectives, or from the schools themselves. Furthermore, understanding of how the residential side of boarding constructs the use of time and presents educational and social development opportunities is lacking. This paper aims to begin to address this, by presenting the goals and intended outcomes of a residential program for remote central Australian Aboriginal students. Through analysis of 17 semistructured interviews with residence staff, this paper identifies the two overarching goals of the program, as well as the more specific learning outcomes from which the program expects its students to benefit. The research presented is preliminary data that forms part of a broader PhD study of postboarding school expectations and outcomes for remote Aboriginal students, their families, and their communities.

This study explored the experience of having a child educated away from home at boarding school for Aboriginal parents living in regional and remote communities in Western Australia (WA). In-depth interviews were conducted with 11 participants and thematic analysis found the following major themes emerged from the data: (1) Access, Standards and Quality, and the subthemes of Declining Local Schools, Opportunity, and Worldliness; (2) Parental Agency and the subthemes of Parent-School Connection, Parenting Style, Communication, and Milestones and Siblings and; (3) Cultural Heritage and the subtheme of Maintenance and Transmission. The findings are described and then discussed in terms of practice implications relevant to boarding schools in WA. Limitations of the current study are acknowledged and directions for future research are proposed.

The role of artistry in transformative maintenance of law and custom is a theme widely researched and discussed in Aboriginal arts related literature. However, it is the aim of this paper to contribute to a wider discourse about learning and economic participation in remote Australia, and in particular the role of multimodality as a significant asset. The paper draws from relevant literature and two case studies; one from Keringke Arts, and one from Eastern Arrernte teacher and artist, Kathleen Kemarre Wallace. In customary form, multimodality combines and recombines various modalities — including dance, song, sand drawing, body painting and design, storytelling, stories, rhythm, petroglyph and ochre-painted rock art — enabling the intergenerational teaching and learning of rich cultural heritage in ways which connect that experience to the law and custom of the homelands. Multimodality, as it is used in this paper, draws on the concept of ‘form-relationality’; the way various modalities are combined and recombined, as elements which together describe a body of knowledge and yet separately provide myriad detail. Although beyond the scope of this paper, multimodality is also a mediating influence between contemporary and customary elements and contexts. This paper considers the complexity of multimodality as an asset in a contemporary arts market.

The Remote Education Systems (RES) project within the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP) has, over the last four years, gathered and analysed qualitative data directly from over 230 remote education stakeholders and from more than 700 others through surveys. The research was designed to answer four questions: (1) What is education for in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities?; (2) What defines ‘successful’ educational outcomes from the remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander standpoint?; (3) How does teaching need to change in order to achieve ‘success’ as defined by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander standpoint?; and (4) What would an effective education system in remote Australia look like? Based on this data, the paper reveals how perceptions differ for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from remote communities compared with people who come from elsewhere. The analysis points to the need for some alternative indicators of ‘success’ to match the aspirations of local people living in remote communities. It also points to the need for school and system responses that resonate with community expectations of education, and to develop narratives of aspiration and success alongside community views.

In the Editorial, on page iv of issue 44 (2), the author's name was omitted in error and should read as:

John Guenther

Guest Editor