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.

What is the state of play in Indigenous education today? What kind of thinking is driving the reform agenda in Indigenous education right now? What kinds of gains have we made and what work is there yet to do? In an era of unprecedented ‘gap’ talk, these are pressing questions, which the articles in this issue address and explore.

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.

There is often a disparity in Indigenous Affairs between many documents, such as policies, reports and legislation, and outcomes. This article explores this difference through analysing the policy area of Indigenous education during the period of 1991 to 2000. I examine three key documents relating to Indigenous education. These are the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act (Cth) and the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. I then analyse the abysmal outcomes of Indigenous education over this period, including educational access, educational attainment, school attendance and reading benchmarks. I argue that the substantial educational disadvantage experienced by Indigenous people is in stark contrast to the goals, policies and objectives contained in the numerous documents on Indigenous education. I then explore the role of governments in contributing to this disparity between documents and outcomes in Indigenous education, including their failure to acknowledge the history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations, their lack of commitment to address Indigenous educational disadvantage, their failure to recognise self-determination and the lack of cooperation between governments to address Indigenous educational disadvantage.

It is the aim of this article to provoke debate and encourage greater scrutiny regarding the use and meaning of the expression ‘Indigenous education’ within the discursive practices, research and policy in Australian education. Drawing on Hall's (2007) development of ideas from Foucault that give rise to ‘Indigenous education’ being viewed as a ‘regime of truth’, it is my contention that the widespread and largely uncritical use of this expression is contributing to sustaining deficit assumptions regarding the engagement and outcomes of Indigenous students within Australian schools. To explore this concern, I will first ‘archaeologically’ excavate (Scheurich, 1997) the emergence of this ‘regime’ within the Australian setting. Following on from this, I will discuss and reflect upon recent debates associated with initiatives designed to ‘close the gap’ when comparing Indigenous and non-Indigenous student achievements in education. Given the changes inaugurated by the Labor-led ‘Education Revolution’ since 2007, this is a particularly pertinent line of inquiry to take up, with the focus of this article largely concerned with its impact in the Queensland setting.

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.

This article examines a controversial initiative in Indigenous education: the establishment of the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy (CYAAA). The article provides a brief description of the Academy's three campuses and their communities and considers: the circumstances of its creation, including the role of Noel Pearson and Cape York Partnerships; the rationale and philosophy underpinning the case for establishing the Academy; implementation; and some key issues relevant to assessing this reform. These include its impact on a range of performance measures, the veracity and power of the social and educational rationales on which the reform is based, the use of ‘Direct Instruction’ (DI), and the practicability of extending and broadening the reform. The time period considered is from late 2009 through 2011. The article draws on publications, and on visits to campuses of the school and meetings/communications/discussions with personnel from the Queensland Department of Education and Training (DET, now Department of Education, Training and Employment), Cape York Partnerships, the CYAAA and others undertaken in the author's role as a teacher union officer.

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.

This article explores student and teacher engagement with Australian Indigenous Studies. In this article I identify key themes in the film September (2007) that demonstrate how the film can be used as a catalyst for student learning and discussion. Critical whiteness theory provides a framework to explore three themes, the invisibility of whiteness, the reachability of whiteness and the cultural interface. Critical whiteness theory identifies the way in which non-Indigenous people centralise and normalise whiteness within colonised societies, and particularly considers how white privilege is maintained. Interpreting the film September through the lens of critical whiteness theory contributes to translating curriculum and social justice aims of education into action.

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.

State and Federal education departments have increasingly recognised the importance of community consultation in the development of school curricula, and the requirement for teachers to consult with Indigenous communities is explicit in many curriculum documents. This article reports the findings of research into how teachers of senior Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies are engaging with consultation as part of their work. As Australia moves towards full implementation of a national curriculum that requires the embedding of Indigenous perspectives across all subjects, an understanding of how teachers are currently experiencing community consultation is particularly important.

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.

This article focuses on the funds of knowledge that are mathematical in nature and how they might be used to support parents and children with their learning of mathematics that is taught and learned in the early years of school. Funds of knowledges are those that have been historically and culturally accumulated into a body of knowledge and skills essential for people's functioning and wellbeing. Drawing on community research design, where the process of learning is owned and framed by the community and its people, a consultative meeting was held to discuss the pilot project.

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 project has been developed on Darug country, Sydney to examine how pre-service and beginning teachers can work with Aboriginal people in their local urban community. These teachers often want to know how to approach an Aboriginal ‘community’, how they can ask Aboriginal people for information in order to include it in their teaching, and how to adopt respectful ways of talking when they contact a community member. While these questions are commonly addressed in the Working with Community documents published by the various state Departments of Education, we found that the actual practice of working with a community is daunting for many. This article therefore attempts to document two examples of this practice, and in so doing it applies the protocols identified by Martin (2008) to the reflective work of both a pre-service teacher and a university educator. It also draws on the extensive literature of reflective practice developed for classrooms, and applies this to pedagogical practice outside schools.

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 describes an intervention strategy, initiated under the New Zealand Government's tribal partnership scheme, which promotes a culture-based/place-based approach to education in mainstream schools and early childhood centres in one tribal region. Through place-based education children are immersed in local heritage, including language and culture, landscapes, opportunities and experiences. The strategy is a tribal response to the overwhelming evidence of Māori underachievement in education in the tribal catchment. A case study is presented of a place-based/culture-based initiative called the Ngāti Kahungunu Cultural Standards Project (NKCSP). It is argued that the development of cultural standards offers an opportunity by which teachers and others within the education sector can develop and incorporate practice that reflects, promotes and values the student's culture. The core assumption underpinning the project is that cultural knowledge contributes to Māori student success in 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.

In 2008, almost 40% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students enrolled in the Graduate Diploma in Indigenous Health Promotion at The University of Sydney failed to complete the course. Although this was not considered unusual when compared to previous years, the decision was made to investigate why so many students struggled to meet the expectations of a course that was pedagogically progressive, culturally affirming, taught by highly regarded academics and strongly supported by the university and its stakeholders. A qualitative study using in-depth semi-structured interviews was conducted, and many complex and interrelated issues were explored. One issue that was raised both unexpectedly and emphatically by almost half the study participants who completed the course was the unintentional stifling of individual student effort and achievement through the development of co-dependent relationships between academic staff and students. This article presents the data relevant to this particular issue, reflects on the findings, and outlines some of the strategies implemented since this study commenced that have contributed to a healthy completion rate of 98% over the past 3 years.