We are very pleased to bring you Volume 46.2 of the Australian Journal of Indigenous Education. In conversation as Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators working towards social justice in education, the papers in this Volume explore key questions across school, tertiary education and policy contexts. One of the key challenges for those of us working in Indigenous education landscapes in Australia and globally continues to be the ways in which policy plays out and is performed through high stakes testing of various shapes and forms. Like policy itself, ‘testing’ is linked to discourse about Indigenous peoples, capacity for educational ‘success’ and the kinds of pedagogies and teacher-ly performativities that might be enacted to achieve such outcomes. This is a necessarily complex landscape and the discussions we present in this Volume ask us to take pause and consider the relationship between policy, testing and educational practice and the ways these interface with Indigenous ways of being, doing and knowing.

This paper explores the transitional experiences and challenges faced by girls from the Torres Strait Islands when they leave individual communities to attend boarding school in regional Queensland. The paper presents original ethnographic research using a narrative enquiry approach, capturing stories as narrated by a broad cohort of girls from within these communities, both past and present students. The stories relayed in this article are integral to assisting parents and extended family, staff and administrators to better manage the transition process from one community to another. Identifying the cultural, social and academic challenges associated with the transition process will enable those involved in student support both within the community and the school system to do so with an enhanced awareness so that the students involved may be helped to negotiate this experience more easily. This paper will also inform, although not directly engaging with the topic, the ongoing debate about the advantages and disadvantages of girls leaving their communities to attend boarding school. It will also add weight to the call to improve current strategies to assist with the transition process.

The global standardization reform movement in education has seduced many Indigenous education policy makers in Australia, providing a powerful neoliberal discourse to further consolidate their focus on Indigenous educational deficit. A Share in the Future, the latest review of Indigenous education in the Northern Territory is an exemplar in this regard. This paper offers a brief exposition of this review, highlighting how an exclusive focus on comparative statistics and standardised testing of English literacy and numeracy works to maintain the coupling of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘deficit’, reifying colonial power relations and justifying technical and bureaucratic educational approaches, administered and monitored from afar. Such an approach is unable to adequately respond to the relational, cultural and linguistic complexities and nuances of local Indigenous education contexts. The educational assumptions and propositions of A Share in the Future will be juxtaposed with those of the Cross-Cultural Collaboration Project, undertaken in the Northern Territory in 2008, to consider alternative ways of successfully engaging these local educational complexities.

This article draws upon a ‘tale from the field’ (Van Maanen, 1988) to encourage New Zealand and Australian teachers of history and social studies to appraise how their own perceptions of place and teaching about Indigenous peoples’ histories impact upon their students’ learning. Moreover, it explains why Uri Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological systems model (despite its limitations) can assist the process of critiquing the teaching of Indigenous histories in schools on both sides of the Tasman Sea. It concludes that place conscious Indigenous land-based learning experiences, resulting from mutually beneficial collaborations with Indigenous communities, are needed to enhance the teaching of Indigenous peoples’ histories in both countries.

Determining the writing skill level of students commencing tertiary education is a key element in predicting their likely study success and in providing appropriate writing development opportunities. Writing tests constructed around written instructions often assume high levels of reading and comprehension skills, which in some instances impose difficulties for students who have varying levels of comprehension and writing skills as shaped by their cultural and ethnic, learning journey experiences and previous formal English language instruction. Many universities have now established Post-Entry Language Assessment (PELA) tools as a means to determining student language skills at the commencement of their studies. Discussed here is a Visual PELA (VP) intended to stimulate student writing of a small passage of text for the purpose noted above. The visual nature of this instrument is intended to provide an alternative approach for visual learners, or those for whom written instructions pose difficulties, to demonstrate their literacy skills. This paper describes the development and initial testing of a VP with a view to it becoming an additional tool for determining writing skills levels for commencing students. A trial of this VP took place with a cohort of mostly international students having English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D) undertaking higher degree by research studies in an Australian university. The VP used here was founded on the idea of using images to stimulate the writing of a short passage of text where students can find their own context and ideas to write in an imaginative way and thus demonstrate their writing skill on entry to their tertiary studies.

The Wollotuka Institute, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, is the first university or organisation to enter into the accreditation process with the World Indigenous Higher Education Consortium (WINHEC). Part of that process includes identifying the local cultural standards and protocols that drive and shape our work as a cultural entity. As a result of successfully completing these processes, the course ‘Working with Aboriginal Communities’, consciously underwent a process of affirmation recognising and embedding where missing, these cultural protocols within our pedagogy and curriculum. Each intake sees students from all disciplines enrol and all benefit greatly from their cultural learning experiences. In this paper, we discuss how these cultural protocols shaped the course material that both online and face-to-face tertiary students experienced, as well, noting the outcomes of this process. Both authors are long-term educators in higher education and have had our teaching invigorated by this experience of critique and reflection. This paper serves to both be a reflective and documentary process for ourselves as well as an opportunity to share our experiences with our colleagues involved in higher education.

This preliminary study considers the implications of where students of Aboriginal descent sat in a teacher education classroom, its significance in relation to the space of the classroom, the importance of the place to the individual and its links to creating a climate of cultural safety in the classroom. Six students from two cohorts of varying sizes were interviewed as to why they sat where they did in the classroom and why the place where they sat remained relatively stable. The study uses quotations from the students and reflectively seeks to understand their experience in the class. Risking themselves in a university context which itself is the product of the very colonisers who created the conditions for cultural genocide through residential schools. It is tentatively concluded that where First People sit in the classroom maybe reflective of the territory to which they belong.