The AIJE has an established tradition of publishing special Supplements to highlight papers on a particular topic. This special edition of the AJIE is an outcome of a 2-year curriculum renewal project funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, which focused on teaching and learning practice in Australian Indigenous studies. The project involved collaboration between academics of Australian Indigenous studies in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. The articles in this special edition comprise descriptions of pedagogical innovations and discussions or reflections on the issues engaged in the course of the project by some of the key participants.

Indigenous Australian studies, also called Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies, is an expanding discipline in universities across Australia (Nakata, 2004). As a discipline in its own right, Indigenous Australian studies plays an important role in teaching students about Australia's colonial history and benefits both non-Indigenous and Indigenous students by teaching them about Australia's rich and shared cultural heritage (Craven, 1999, pp. 23–25). Such teaching and learning seeks to actively discuss and deconstruct historical and contemporary entanglements between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and, in doing so, help build better working relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. As educators in this discipline, it is important for us to find pedagogical approaches which make space for these topics to be accessed, understood, discussed and engaged with in meaningful ways.

This article explores the shift in terminology that occurred in a 2-year Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC)-funded curriculum renewal project that set out to broadly explore current teaching and learning practice in Indigenous Australian studies (www.teaching4change.edu.au). While we started with the term ‘Problem-Based Learning’, it became clear as the project progressed that the terminology we were using was not politically or pedagogically appropriate. As the data began to reveal, the research team became increasingly uncomfortable with the colonial underpinnings and associations of the term ‘Problem-Based Learning’ (PBL), and began to explore the possibility of redefining what we do as something else entirely. A key outcome of the project was that PBL became PEARL, to describe the Political, Embodied, Active, and Reflective aspects of this teaching and learning approach in Indigenous Australian studies. The shift from PBL to PEARL was unexpected, but has resulted in exciting possibilities for migrating and extending theories of teaching and learning in Indigenous Australian studies into critical pedagogy, critical race theory and transformative education. Drawing on critical pedagogy, critical race theory and transformative education theory, this article explores the rationale behind the shift in terminology from PBL to PEARL. We also draw on student data from focus groups, questionnaires and lecturer reflection to examine the ways the results from this project hold great potential for the further implementation of PEARL into primary and secondary classrooms, specifically in relation to pedagogical practice in embedding Indigenous perspectives.

The Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC)-funded project ‘Exploring Problem-Based Learning Pedagogy as Transformative Education in Indigenous Australian Studies’ raised a number of issues that resonated with concerns we have had as professionals engaged in teaching and researching Australian Indigenous studies and Indigenous education. In this discursive paper we air some of the concerns we share which emerge from our collective research and teaching interests. We argue that Australian Indigenous studies and Indigenous education are too frequently collapsed or used interchangeably, and while there is tension between these areas rather than see as a problem we chose to interrogate this and argue for the potential for fruitful intellectual collaboration. This article problematises pedagogy and finds that sustained effort needs to be made to understand how pedagogical approaches to Australian Indigenous studies and Indigenous education are guiding and shaping each cognate area.

In this article I discuss the way Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and reflexivity is employed in a university environment to address the question of how we can most successfully transfer knowledge about the presumed Other into our own cultural space without reducing, fragmenting, and exoticising complex knowledge systems. My goal is to stimulate in students an awareness of, and empathic engagement with, Indigenous epistemologies and Indigenous perspectives on environment, other species, moral ecology and cultural and commercial activities undertaken on Country. In this article I focus on one particular course in which I use ethnographic scenarios as learning triggers for weekly workshops to provide a multi-sensorial and experiential style of learning. Topics range from the construction of ethnoclassificatory systems to the construction of kinship as an expression of moral ontological frameworks. The process draws on over 30 years experience working with the Yanyuwa families of the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory. Central to the success of the course are the li-Yanyuwa li-Wirdiwalangu (Yanyuwa knowledge holders), a core group of senior men and women who play an active daily role in the maintenance and dissemination of Yanyuwa knowledge systems, increasingly a site of their own empowerment. In consultation with Bradley, they have selected and annotated core ethnographic information which I have then developed into PBL triggers for the course.

This article critically examines the possibility of using Problem-Based Learning as an approach to teaching and learning and curriculum design in Indigenous studies. This approach emphasises the potential for Experience-Based Learning or Problem-Based Learning as a model that frames the curriculum and pedagogical activities to encourage student engagement with key issues in ways they find meaningful. It takes the form of an interview with Professor David Boud, a well-known scholar in this area.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australian schools continue to have poor education and health outcomes, and the introduction of a new national curriculum may assist in redressing this situation. This curriculum emphasises recommendations which have been circulating in the sector over many years, to require teacher education institutions to provide their students with an understanding of past and contemporary experiences of Indigenous Australians, as well as the social, economic and health disadvantages that challenge Indigenous communities, and to equip them to integrate Indigenous issues into their future teaching programs. This article, while focusing on teacher education developments at the University of Tasmania (UTAS) to meet National Standards and Frameworks for preservice teachers, provides some general background, and identifies recently developed resources, including the potential for Indigenous centres within universities to assist educators.

This article explores a project at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney, funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) in 2011, titled ‘Indigenous On-Line Cultural Teaching and Sharing’. One of the team members (Kutay) was also a project team member on the ALTC-funded project ‘Exploring PBL in Indigenous Australian Studies’, which has developed a teaching and learning process (PEARL) for Indigenous Australian studies. In this article, we present the ‘Indigenous On-Line Cultural Teaching and Sharing’ project as an exemplar of this teaching process. The project turns a highly successful interactive kinship workshop into an interactive online experience for all students and staff of the University of Sydney. The project is developing a sharing portal for Aboriginal people in New South Wales (NSW) to incorporate their stories and experiences of cultural, historical and educational issues within a knowledge-sharing workshop. The site will use voices of Aboriginal participants to express the knowledge of their culture in a comparative and affirmative context. An interface for uploading audio and video has been generated to combine example stories from different perspectives. The interactive kinship workshop and Aboriginal voices will then be used in an online game, embedding Aboriginal knowledge and values within different professional learning contexts, such as law, social policy, health, and education.

This article explores the concepts advanced from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC)-funded project, ‘Exploring Problem-Based Learning pedagogy as transformative education in Indigenous Australian Studies’. As an Indigenous art historian teaching at a mainstream university in Canada, I am constantly reflecting on how to better engage students in transformative learning. PEARL offers significant interdisciplinary theory and methodology for implementing content related to both Canadian colonial history and Indigenous cultural knowledge implicit in teaching contemporary Aboriginal art histories. This case study, based on a third-year Indigenous art history course taught at University of Regina, Saskatchewan in Canada will articulate applications for PEARL in an Aboriginal art history classroom. This content-based course lends itself to an interdisciplinary pedagogical approach because it remains outside the traditional disciplinary boundaries accepted in most Eurocentric-based histories of art. Implementing PEARL both theoretically and methodologically in tandem with examples of contemporary Indigenous art allows for innovative ways to balance course content with the sensitive material required for students to better understand and read art created by Indigenous artists in Canada in the past 40 years.

In this article, I take a creative and autoethnographic approach to reflect upon processes of decolonisation in Indigenous Australian studies classrooms. Positioning myself as a non-Indigenous educator, I take the reader on a journey through my search for pedagogy which makes space for the colonial, difficult and messy politics of race, whiteness and knowledge to be actively challenged, deconstructed and reimagined in this context as PEARL.