This paper explores the prescriptive, distancing and separating qualities that exist in Western systems of knowledge production. It examines scientific language and how discrimination takes place in the university setting and explores the ways in which academic knowledge production affects the learning experiences, participation and completion rates of Indigenous students. It suggests improving teaching and learning strategies to enhance unacknowledged learning processes towards providing inclusive learning practices, and to strengthen educational outcomes for Indigenous students with the prospect of improving their completion rates at universities.

Teaching Aboriginal studies to a diverse student cohort presents challenges in the pursuit of developing a critical pedagogy. In this paper, we present Children of the Sun (2006), a local film made by Indigenous youth in the Illawarra region south of Sydney, New South Wales. We outline the film's genesis and its utilisation in our praxis. The film is a useful resource in the teaching of urban Aboriginal identity to primarily non-Indigenous students in the discipline of Aboriginal studies. It contributes to the development of critical thinking, and our own critical practice as educators and offers a starting point to address pre-conceived and stereotypical notions about race and colour. We situate this paper within a theoretical framework of identity and whiteness studies to explore the issue of light skin in relation to the constraints of identity surrounding urban Aboriginal youth, as represented in Children of the Sun. We discuss the usefulness of this film as a self-representational text that subverts and challenges pre-conceived notions of Aboriginal identity.

This paper explores how the colonial hegemony of racism in Australia could be disrupted in schools by introducing mandatory reporting of racism by teachers in Australia, and addresses the benefits and risks of mandatory reporting of racism. Using Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as a case study, the ongoing prevalence of racism in schools is established. I then draw on the literature associated with teachers’ mandatory reporting of child abuse and neglect to construct racism as a form of emotional abuse of children. The complexity of racism as evidenced from the literature limits the mandatory reporting to interactional racism by teachers as an antiracist practice. The justification for mandatory reporting covers the emotional stress caused by racism to students and can also be extended to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff in schools. The evidence of learning success where antiracism strategies have been introduced in schools, the opportunity to normalise bystander antiracism by teachers, and the alignment of this reporting initiative with the professional standards of teachers together support a case for mandatory reporting of racism in schools. The arguments against mandatory reporting of racism draw on the generative practices of teachers integrating antiracist discourses in schools.

In the August issue we presented the terms of reference of the Aboriginal Consultative Group’s Report, their vision of education, and the basic assumptions upon which they operated. In this issue we present the recommendations and thinking with respect to the four areas of need in the education of Aboriginal people as recognized by the Consultative Group.

In the recent history of Australia Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have only had widespread access to a university education for approximately 20 years. Before this, Indigenous graduates from Australian universities were relatively few. Universities were seen as complex, often alien places in Indigenous cultural terms; institutions of European Australian social empowerment and credentialling from which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff and students were virtually excluded.

Policy documents on Indigenous education include statements such as equitable access to education, participation and outcomes that can be broadly described as social justice goals. However, there has been little academic analysis of how these goals are to be achieved. This paper proposes that the indirect discrimination provisions in Australian anti-discrimination law can provide a framework in which the goals can be evaluated against the endemic effects of dominant power on mainstream education. The legal provisions are designed to assess whether a policy or practice might adversely affect certain groups in our society distinguished by, for example, their “race”. If a higher proportion of persons who do not have that particular attribute can comply with the policy or practice, and the demand is unreasonable in the circumstances, then this will constitute unlawful indirect discrimination. This paper analyses three social justice strategies which appear to be race-neutral and to apply equally to all students, Indigenous and non-Indigenous: Indigenous studies in the curriculum, using Standard English in the classroom, and instilling Australian values. The outcome suggests that these approaches may have an adverse impact on Indigenous students, and may even be undermining the social justice goals they set out to deliver.

Increasing attention has been given in recent years to the effects of various factors upon the academic achievement of ethnic minority group children. In those Australian states where there are schoolswith significantly large proportions of Aboriginal children, special programs have been devised and implemented.

The Department of Education in Queensland has been involved throughout the past decade in the development and refinement of both techniques and materials designed to foster the academic attainments of Aboriginal children. One program involved the employment of Aboriginal adults from a local community to work along side of teachers in and out of the classrooms as para-professional teachers’ assistants. This program is currently in the ninth month of a twelve month pilot study in the Cherbourg Community School.

The role of these assistants is regarded as being essentially mediatory. Primarily the objective has been to increase the degree of home/school and parent/teacher contact with a view to closing the knowledge and understanding gap existing between the school and the community generally. It is hoped to increase parental awareness and appreciation of the aims, ideals, and processes operating within the school environment. Conversely, it is hoped to acquaint the teachers with a more thoroughgoing understanding of the cultural, socio-economic, and familial backgrounds of the children they teach.

In implementing the project it has been considered that changes within the school itself can have only limited effect on the educational development of children, and that the ultimate success of any intervention program depends on the involvement of the children’s families.

This paper describes a teaching technique well suited to encouraging older children with poor reading ability to attack reading with interest and purpose. The strength of this method lies in the fact that it is based upon sound theory and can be implemented without too much trouble. Children enjoy it, and reading can come alive to a child for the first time in his school career.

In an article published in this journal, Guenther and Osborne (2020) use data from the reading test of the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) to evaluate the effectiveness of the Flexible Literacy for Remote Primary Schools program in its first 3 years of implementation. However, their analysis has some serious flaws, including that the ‘post-intervention’ data were actually collected from the start of the implementation period. This calls their conclusions that the program was ineffective into question.

Education Queensland’s Remote Area Incentives Scheme (RAIS) is intended to provide financial and other benefits to teachers who choose to accept employment in undesirable locations in the state. On paper, this scheme claims that remoteness from an urban centre is the foremost measure of a school’s undesirability. However, the percentage of Indigenous students in a school has a strong influence on the assignment of transfer ratings to Queensland state schools. This paper provides the details of a statistical analysis that shows that there is a strong relationship between the Indigenity of a school and its institutionalised perception of undesirability. It also includes a survey of urban schools in southeast Queensland that are categorised as less desirable than surrounding schools in the region primarily because there is a higher percentage of Indigenous students enrolled in those schools.

This research article addresses an important issue related to how teachers can support Aboriginal secondary school students' learning of science. Drawn from a larger project that investigated the study of vertebrates using Queensland Indigenous knowledges and Montessori Linnaean materials to engage Indigenous secondary school students, this article focuses on the three-staged lessons from that study. Using an Action Research approach and working with participants from one secondary high school in regional Queensland with a high Indigenous population, there were several important findings. First, the materials and the three-staged lessons generated interest in learning Eurocentric science knowledge. Second, repetition, freedom and unhurried inclusion of foreign science knowledges strengthened students' Aboriginal personal identity as well as identities as science learners. Third, privileging of local Aboriginal knowledge and animal language gave rise to meaningful and contextualised Linnaean lessons and culturally responsive practices.

Campfire sessions are springing up at conferences and educational institutes as an alternative to PowerPoint presentation workshops. As an educational tool, the campfire session is presented as innovative pedagogy, yet sitting around an open fire, telling stories, talking and ‘yarning’ has long been practised in Indigenous societies. This paper reflects on story-telling as an Indigenous educational method with a focus on traditional Māori society in Aotearoa/New Zealand. More specifically, the authors reflect on a campfire session facilitated at the Ako (reciprocal teaching and learning) Aotearoa (Māori name for New Zealand) Conference in Christchurch in November 2018. The campfire session was designed to draw on participants' experiences and stories of biculturalism and their own bicultural journeys. Its intention was to enable participants to explore what it means to be bicultural in Aotearoa/New Zealand and how being bicultural manifests in practices of ako across a range of disciplines and fields of practice. The paper endeavours to be an instructional article for educators interested in experimenting with the Indigenous teaching method of campfire sessions. Detailed explanations and descriptions of the campfire method are provided to assist teachers to design their own campfire sessions. The campfire method was well received by the initial audience, as evidenced by their full engagement and participation. All participants fed back that they felt enabled to design their own campfire sessions. The main benefit of this method is its engagement and appreciation of Indigenous wisdom. The main challenge is its unpredictability as just like fire, it can produce a wonderful warmth and transformation, but also engender inflamed discussions. It requires skilful facilitation and appreciation of potentially diverse views and opinions.

This article documents a teaching journey in a 6/7 class with 20 Torres Strait Islander students in the curriculum area of literacy, over the course of one academic year. Specifically, this action research study explores a classroom teacher's efforts to navigate and respond to the prominent teaching model of explicit instruction and culturally responsive teaching, both of which inform policy statements in Far North Queensland. Using a reflective journal, teacher observations, informal student dialogue sessions, yarning circles and student work samples, the first author (D'Aietti) endeavoured to adjust her teaching practice to determine how best to meet her learners' needs. Through on-going critical reflection, engagement with two critical friends and in consultation with a cultural mentorship group, her teaching underwent transformation. One of the key findings of this study was that students want to learn, and for this to occur, teachers must independently navigate the curriculum documents, and in doing so, the explicit instruction model must be re-aligned, re-adjusted and re-positioned to suit Torres Strait Islander student needs.

The following paper argues for a critical creative paedagogy as a means of meaningfully engaging with Indigenous and decolonial philosophies. We showcase our critical frameworks and pathways for teaching a decolonial and Indigenous university course where philosophy and arts meet to engage with complex colonial, racial and epistemological questions. We first frame our theoretical and philosophical stance within critical postcolonial, Indigenous and decolonial studies. We then describe an epistemological critique within western philosophical discourse that will gesture towards a decolonial pathway to arts and discuss our creative teaching approach grounded in decolonial and Indigenous theories. Lastly, we reach to a critical and decolonial space where ‘southern’ philosophies can be ‘heard’ in their fullest complexity. We contend that creative writing and visual arts grounded in critical decolonial and Indigenous theories provide a space in which a decolonised knowledge seems possible.

In her recent work, Sara Ahmed explores wilfulness as a negative charge made by some against others, thinking about the relationship between ill will and good will, the particular and the general, and the embeddedness of will in a political and cultural landscape. In Ahmed's reading, wilfulness is a characteristic often ascribed to those who do ‘not will the reproduction of the whole’ (2011, p. 246) — those who are deemed wayward, wandering, and/or deviant. Using Ahmed's discussions, in this paper, we report on the successes and failures of a research project exploring mentoring programs in enhancing the recruitment and retention of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander preservice teachers. We think about the tensions always present between two faces of such a project: the need to reproduce modes of compliance to the expectations of a Western academic institutional regime; and the wilful pursuit of the kinds of wayward resistance and critique that may be potentially undermining and self-sabotaging as well as wholly necessary as attempts at decoloniality. We report on both the successes of the program and the continuing failure to address issues of colonialism. In doing so, we position Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research as a performative doubleness which needs wilfulness in order to ‘stand up, to stand against the world’ (Ahmed, 2011, p. 250) of colonial reproduction in neo-liberal times.

During 1977, Ms Kathleen Miller and Mr Adrian Haydock operated an innovation program for disadvantaged children at the Kewdale Development Centre. A high proportion of the children attending the centre were Aboriginal, and so the Aboriginal Education Branch was approached for assistance in designing a suitable course. Mr Eric Hayward, an Aboriginal liaison officer, visited the Centre and suggested a community-based program similar to that outlined in a branch report entitled Minority Groups and the “Foxfire” Experience. Since then, the enthusiasm of the two teachers and the interest of the Aboriginal Education Branch have developed the project to the stage where the following report has been prepared.

For many children, belonging to a minority group with its varying degrees of alienation from mainstream society, presents an obstacle to success in the normal curriculum. With Aboriginal children in particular, it is known that excessive numbers of high school students are operating at basic levels and below. There are many factors that contribute to this situation. Yet there is one factor, possessing two facets, that probably overrides all others. This factor is aptly expressed in the following statement from the Ontario Ministry of Education in 1975:

The Interim Committee for the Australian Schools Commissioni in its Report in May 1973, considered the needs of disadvantaged schools. Many teachers in remote areas will not yet have had an opportunity to read this report and we felt that you would like us to make available to you some of the committee’s comments on disadvantaged schools.

9.5… The Committee has chosen the term “disadvantaged” in relation to schools drawing a high proportion of enrolments from neighbourhoods having certain characteristics known to be generally associated with a low capacity to take advantage of educational facilities. This is not to say that all children coming from such neighbourhoods achieve poorly in school. Low-income families may be emotionally richer than affluent ones. Nor can poor families be described as culturally or socially deprived in any general sense, for the cultural life of home and neighbourhood may be as sustaining, and the social experiences as broad, as those of any type of family. The poor are disadvantaged in their relative lack of power in society, in the absence of any cushioning against adversity, and in the paucity of the kind of experience which is helpful to success in school and society.