There remains significant under representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australian higher education systems. A number of strategies have been implemented by governments and universities to best support Indigenous students within higher education that have produced varying levels of success in increasing participation, retention and completions. One key strategy is the inclusion of Aboriginal Education Units within universities. The current study aimed to examine students experience and engagement with a range of support services across university, in particular with an Aboriginal Education Unit. Utilising a mixed-method approach, data were collected from 103 students who identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander at The University of Adelaide. Overall, students were most satisfied with support provided by family (70%) and the Aboriginal Education Unit (61%), followed by support provided by university faculties (49%), and the wider university (43%). The main reasons students were accessing the Unit was for academic and tutoring purposes, also rating tutoring as the most beneficial service provided by the Unit. This study highlights the importance of examining and evaluating enablers such as support mechanisms from the student perspective and has demonstrated the significant role Aboriginal Education Units play in the student experience, laying a crucial foundation for targeted support initiatives.

Kaupapa Māori is thoroughly theorised in academia in Aotearoa and those wishing to use it as their research methodology can find support through the writing of a number of Māori academics. What is not so well articulated, is the experiential voice of those who have used Kaupapa Māori as research methodology. My identity as a Māori woman researching with Māori women became integral to my methodology and approach to the research. The highs and lows of my research experiences with Kaupapa Māori methodology are examined in this article. The discussion contends that Kaupapa Māori research methodology can be a framework, guide and support for research within a Māori context and adds an experiential aspect to understanding the wider field of Indigenous research methodology. My hope is that through my experience with Kaupapa Māori methodology other Māori and Indigenous researchers will be eager to embrace their own research methodologies.

A variety of statements made by Aboriginal people and groups about what they see as the aims of education is presented. There are diverse emphases but a common thread relates to the education of children in both cultures and a wish to see the children grow in competence in Western skills and knowledge but also retain their own culture and its associated knowledge, skills and values.

The following sets of statements, made by people from various locations throughout Australia, exhibit concern for the achievement of the basic skills, for education that will permit job access (including emphasis by some on education to tertiary level), for the development of skills to live in the modern industrialized world and/or to contribute to their own communities, and concerns expressed by many that children learn about their own culture, some seeing this as part of the school program and others believing it should be taught by the Aboriginal people themselves.

Otitis media (middle ear infection) is one of the most common childhood diseases all over the world and is very prevalent in many indigenous populations including Australian Aborigines. When children have otitis media they often have a hearing loss that can range from slight to moderately severe. This hearing loss is often hard to identify and can come and go. The problem often starts in infancy and can continue for years; hearing returns to normal in some children but some have permanent hearing loss. Even a mild hearing loss in early childhood can seriously affect communication development and learning. This can make it very difficult for children to succeed in the classroom — even when they no longer have active otitis media or hearing loss.

Over the past months quite a few people have asked me what the differences are between bilingual education and two-way schooling. I will try to contrast the two models in this paper, partly because it's worth doing anyway and partly because it might be one way to reveal some differences between genuine two-way schooling and pseudo two-way schooling. Of course this is just one white person's view, and involves extrapolations from the types of things that actually are happening in, say, a half dozen schools, to what may happen as a result of a wider shift to Aboriginal control of school philosophy and curriculum.

Koorie High School is a Government school. It is not the school's real name but it is the name I will be using for this article.

Koorie High School is an innercity comprehensive high school from Years 7-12 in Sydney. It has a total population of 344 students, 186 at the Intensive English Unit on a different site and 158 in the mainstream high school campus. Fifty-five percent of the 158 students are Aboriginal. There are also 32 students in the Back-To-School Program, an annex of the main high school. All of these students are Aboriginal. I will mainly be referring to the main high school and no reference will be made to the Intensive English Unit as they are not part of this study.

Teachers of Aboriginal children in Australia often have the problem of adapting or modifying curriculum materials which have been developed to meet the needs of the average white Australian/European child. For science and mathematics teachers especially, we believe that appropriate adaptation is essential to ensure that Aboriginal children are better able to comprehend the concepts involved. Many of these concepts at the primary school level involve some aspect of conserving quantities. For example, take a simple experiment where a child is asked to find out whether or not aluminium foil sinks in water. Its flotation, of course, is dependent on shape. The child may roll the aluminium foil into a ball, or flatten it out, and place it in the water. What happens can be observed and discussed and reported. But what if the child thinks this aluminium foil has some unexplainable properties? Maybe it not only changes shape but also its weight! Certainly, on the surface this may appear to be a typical case of nonconservation of weight, but perhaps this is a direct consequence of working with unusual materials and is not a true indicator of mental development!

This paper seeks to identify and explore the differences of Indigenous approaches to historical practice. Why is history so important to Indigenous Australia? History is of crucial importance across the full spectrum of Indigenous understanding and knowledge. History belongs to all cultures and they have differing means of recording and recalling it. In essence, the paper explores the undercurrents of Australian history and the absence for so long of an Aboriginal place in that history, and the process over the past 40 years in correcting that imbalance. During the 1960s and 1970s the Aboriginal place in Australian history for so long erased, overlooked or ignored was suddenly a topic worthy of wider attention and importance. But despite all that has been published since, we have not realistically even touched the surface of what is buried within both the archives and oral memory. And quite clearly what has been recovered remains largely embedded within a white viewpoint of the past.

In our ongoing research on edible insects in the Limpopo Province of South Africa, we have found evidence of the unsustainable harvesting of edible insects and the food plants of certain insects. The decline in the edible insect industry, together with the need for food security provides a strong incentive to investigate possible causes of problems using different knowledge systems. Any solution to these problems needs to take Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) into account if it hopes to be successful and sustainable. We have found that different communities have different explanations for the same phenomena. Some of these explanations correspond with the explanations for the same phenomena in Western science. Where areas of overlap between IKS and Western science exist, these can be used in education in such a way that recommendations for sustainable harvesting can be developed with reference to African science. In this process, the area of overlap between the systems may grow as information from one system is incorporated in another. In this contribution the overlapping roles of IKS, African science and Western science are explored in the teaching of the sustainable harvesting of Indigenous resources for food security and conservation. This creates opportunities to teach relevant science in such a way that the concerned communities can benefit through better food security and the conservation of culturally important plants and animals.

Just as computer delivered instruction in urban Australian schools remains an unknown quantity, its role in tribal Aboriginal schools and in urban schools which increasingly cater to tribal children is even more unclear. There are some exciting possibilities for Aboriginal education. Computer courseware can provide the highly visual, graphics oriented type of instruction which appeals to Aboriginal children and may tap their learning style. Also, the new technology should be able to overcome limitations of bilingual programs set by the cost of producing language materials for many different language groups. For example, with the Prologic Authoring Language (PAL), it is a simple matter to work through a developed program and change the text from one language to another.

This study takes a retrospective look at the educational experiences of Indigenous health professionals who graduated from The University of Queensland's Indigenous Health Program between 1994 and 2005, to understand the enablers for growing an Indigenous health workforce capable of advancing the health of Indigenous peoples. Drawing on the qualitative accounts of 31 students and 9 staff members, this paper examines the enablers to educational success at this time, juxtaposed against current Indigenising agendas in higher education, of aspiration and capacity building alongside the task of embedding Indigenous knowledges within curricula. We look back not as a call to return to Indigenous-specific cohort courses but rather reconsider both the measures of and strategies for success in Indigenous higher education, within health and beyond, interrogating the ideological assumptions that inform them.

Lack of a common means of verbal or written communication always creates problems of interpersonal communication and gives rise to misunderstandings and (possibly) prejudice against one or other party. On the surface, there would seem to be a good deal of merit in the suggestion that “if everyone spoke the same language, all these problems would disappear”. However, the matter is not as simple as it seems, for questions must be asked as to what language should be chosen, the dialect of it, and to what extent cultural factors, deeply related to the true understanding of how thought is expressed within a language, need to be addressed. In Australia, most reasonably well education Anglo-Celtic Australians asked these questions would immediately think of Standard Australian English (SAE), though working-class and indigenous Australians may consider it too “posh” and out of touch with their lifestyles. Few from the dominant group, however, would be even remotely aware of the degree to which cultural factors influence how thought is expressed in a language (as already mentioned), and how this influences the spoken language and, more particularly, the written language in a literate society.

This article describes how five pre-service teachers at similar stages of completion in their course at an Australian university responded to case studies on Indigenous education topics such as government policies, developing relationships, and teacher attitudes in the final assessment of a core unit of study. With the intent of encouraging student–teacher understandings to move beyond prior knowledge through dynamic scholarship, a case-study methodology was embedded across the pedagogical approach in an intensively taught Indigenous education core unit. The data consisted of an in-depth examination of five pre-service teachers’ assignments for levels of reflective language, and degree of orientation towards discourses in Indigenous education as associated with the assessment criteria. The findings support prior research in asserting core units in Indigenous education for pre-service teachers as paramount for developing teacher competencies, and argues careful consideration when deeming a graduate ready to teach according to the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.

This research aims to create and evaluate a model for a culturally appropriate, interactive, multimedia and informative health program for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health workers that aims to improve the capacity to independently control their learning within an attractive learning environment. The research also aims to provide recommendations for policy development and further research. This study involved four phases: program needs assessment, identification of the key factors that should be considered in developing the CD-ROM, model development, and formative evaluation for the model. A general needs assessment as a first step in program development highlighted the presence of continuing education gaps and indicated the need for a new means to deliver a sustainable, efficient and culturally acceptable program. This article explores the second objective in this study, which is the identification of the key factors considered for developing the program. The identification began with a systematic review of the literature which served as background information, followed by qualitative semistructured interviews with diverse key stakeholders to explore their expectations and recommendations. The findings indicated that the most important key factors could be categorised under four main categories: cultural factors, information technology availability and literacy, learning aspects, and interactive multimedia factors. Cultural factors included cultural inclusivity, oral cultural, pre-existing knowledge, and Aboriginal preferred learning styles. Information technology factors concerned technology availability and literacy. Learning aspects highlighted the impact of the learning theory in model design. Interactive multimedia development factors explored included the requirements for the process, fitting and design of the program. Recommendations for program design were also provided.

In 2002 the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Technology Sydney began a major initiative to improve the participation of Indigenous Australians in the Information Technology (IT) sector. This followed an initial study which showed that very few Indigenous students undertook studies in IT at university and therefore few found employment as IT professionals. As a result of the new programme, the Faculty’s first Indigenous staff were hired, an Indigenous resource centre was established and the first postgraduate students recruited. In addition, an IT tertiary preparation short course, the Indigenous Pre-IT Program, was launched successfully, the Faculty’s first Indigenous-specific course. With the project, Indigenous student enrolments have increased, mainly as part of the Pre-IT Program and as a result of recruitment of undergraduates from amongst successful Pre-IT Program students. However, retention of undergraduates recruited via special admission provisions has proved difficult despite attempts to secure scholarships and to provide academic support. This paper traces the development of the project and analyses the achievements and challenges in the first three years.

Kids love computers. Computers are not seen as work but rather, games.

I believe this to be true for most children. The exception would be the young computer buffs who become hooked on computer technology, and even for these computer buffs, it is probably still a game.

Computer technology has become a fact of everyday life. We‘re all affected by computer technology. With this in mind, I believe it is essential that all children become familiar with computers, with regular ‘hands on’ experience. With the right selection of software, schools can incorporate computer-assisted learning across the curriculum. The experiences children have now with computers can lead to a variety of job opportunities in future years.

This paper is written with the intention of educating those Teachers who may at some stage of their career come into contact with Aboriginal children and their unique and complex learning style, as Sherwood (1982, p.41) states, “most student teachers, as well as practising teachers have no real preparation for teaching Aboriginal pupils or for teaching about Aboriginal Australians”.

This paper explores the impact of self-reflective processes of staff at Charles Sturt University (CSU) while undertaking an online Indigenous Cultural Competency Program (ICCP). The ICCP was designed for completion by all university staff to enhance their knowledge and understanding of Indigenous cultures, histories and contemporary realities. Staff were requirement to complete and submit answers to an online quiz, and a written reflection on their learning. This paper reflects on the responses of 64 volunteers and indicates large positive shifts are self-reported knowledge and understanding. The reflective texts of staff provide a rich source of information on the ‘journey within’. In-depth thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) identified three key themes: evaluation, the mapped learning journey and the personal learning journey. The participant feedback, not only pointed to the cognitive, attitudinal and emotional impact of the content and pedagogical approach of the programme, but also identified barriers and issues for programmes aimed at complex change in a contested space. Our programme assessment relied on self-reported individual perception that surfaced hidden assumptions about Indigenous cultural competency (Kumas-Tan¸ Beagan, Loppie, MacLeod, & Frank, 2007). We acknowledge in the longer term a range of comprehensive outcome measures are needed.

The paper will present findings from a Social Science and Humanities Research (SSHRC) funded participatory evaluation conducted over the past four years in the Cree nation of Wemindji in Quebec, Canada. COOL (Challenging Our Own Limits) or “Nigawchiisuun” in Cree, was launched in 2003 as part of a broader program of governance initiatives within Wemindji. As a key component of this new governance program, COOL was to address the need for after-school care within the community for parents, as well as to engage with the recurring problem of low retention rates in school. In consultation with the Band Council of the Cree Nation of Wemindji (James Bay), the Deputy Chief at the time (Rodney Mark) – who was elected Chief in 2006 – established a COOL committee to oversee the design, organisation, implementation and running of the program. Unlike the other eight Cree communities of the James Bay, Wemindji decided to fund and run its own program based on values, customs, and traditions that have been established through consultations with elders, parents, and other interested groups within the community. This has made COOL a distinctly homegrown, autonomous, self-determined Cree program. The paper will not only report on principal themes and issues connected with the establishment and administration of COOL, but will also discuss why a participatory evaluation has been used to assess its effectiveness as a social/educational program.

Since colonisation, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have been compartmentalised by white society in many facets in their lives. This paper focuses on education, detailing problems faced by Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. Participation of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in formal education (including post-compulsory) has been very low compared to other Australians, thus upward social mobility has not dramatically changed. In both health and welfare, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are still highly disadvantaged in society (Keen, 1988). The current federal government proclaims itself the champion of social justice and equity, yet these issues remain at the forefront of indigenous problems. Major questions have to be asked about how Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders consider the relevance of schooling, the way they learn, how they are taughtandby whom. Moreover, what is an appropriate mix of cultural preservation and education and training to ‘fit in’ with a capitalistic society? Is this the same for all indigenous groups in Australia, considering the diverse range of urban and rural groups?