The quest to improve Indigenous people's access, participation and outcomes in education wherever we live in the world involves a concerted effort from all, and across all levels of education from the pre-school to the postgraduate sector. Improvements in these areas, as we have seen in past issues of The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, are closely tied to improving other social and economic indicators in Indigenous lives, such as health, employment, governance and housing. The importance of research in the field of Indigenous education is a fundamental part of understanding the complexity of the issues, the level of constraints, as well as the many possibilities as we move forward in time. And, as practitioners of Indigenous education continue to keep looking for new ideas or examples of teaching and learning practice, AJIE continues to invite descriptions of educational practice and articulations of Indigenous experience from our readership. As educational research and practice have progressively become global, we have sought experiences beyond our Aeotorea/New Zealand and North American colleagues to countries and contexts that are less familiar to us. We are pleased to report that for our efforts in this regard, AJIE is now listed with SCOPUS, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature.
As the Indigenous education field grows across the world, and research and discussion fragments across the many specific areas that warrant attention, it is important we keep developing our understandings of the broader field and where all this effort is taking us. The field will be constituted by a growing number of perspectives, different areas of interest, a range of theoretical positions, and a range of methods for research. There will be different sorts of articles, from reports on funded research, desktop research, position papers, and descriptions of practice. All these will make a valuable contribution to the field of Indigenous education. But there is still much to think about, and it is important not to stand still. The AJIE editorial team encourages all those involved in Indigenous education to push at the boundaries of understanding and actively shape the future discussions and debates that will come to populate the field.
In Volume 43.2, 11 of our 14 articles are focused on Indigenous schooling or teacher pre-service education, with one of the remaining three articles focused on pre-service education for health professionals. It is pleasing to note that many of the articles that directly or indirectly relate to Indigenous schooling report on substantive research studies. The Indigenous schooling sector continues to struggle to produce the outcomes desired by Indigenous families, communities and other Australians, and the need for useful research is paramount to changing this situation both here and in other parts of the world. A further two articles focus on methodology issues for Indigenous research, an area of specific interest to Indigenous education researchers. Five articles include an international focus, and we particularly welcome and hope you are informed by the contributions from Botswana and India.
On the schooling theme, the first three articles in this volume report on research that increases our knowledge and understanding of Indigenous students. Genevieve Johnson and Rhonda Oliver report on a qualitative study of Indigenous boarding school adolescents’ use of small screen technology. Jeannie Herbert, Dennis McInerney, Lyn Fasoli, Peter Stephenson and Lysbeth Ford explore findings from a large Australian Research Council funded study of over 1,000 secondary school students on such things as students’ motivation, how they value education, and their future goals and learning preferences. Natasha Magson, Rhonda Craven, Genevieve Nelson, Alexander Yeung, Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews and Dennis McInerney report on their research into the motivational profiles of secondary students in Papua New Guinea and Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian students. All of these projects were able to examine cross-cultural similarities and differences with non-Indigenous Australians and the implications of these for educational practice or further research.
The next three articles discuss innovations to pre-service teacher education in Australian universities. Utilising Hannah Arendt's call to think about what we do, Barbara Kameniar and Sally Windsor describe and discuss a pedagogic practice within the Master of Teaching program at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. Elizabeth Labone, Patrick Cavanagh and Janette Long analyse the Enhanced Teacher Training Program (ETTP) implemented in 2008 in four universities in collaboration with the New South Wales Education Department. By disseminating the program's rationale and critical design features, they hope to encourage the wider development of similar programs elsewhere. Raegina Taylor reports a case study that examined five pre-service students’ assignments following a particular pedagogical approach in an Indigenous education core unit. These articles invite us to keep thinking about current practice and what the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers means in relation to Indigenous education.
On the same theme of the preparation of effective teachers for Indigenous students, Tasha Riley examines the literature on successful educational methods that have been shared across the disciplines, to support the argument that rather than focusing on the characteristics of Indigenous learners, courses might do better to focus on critical consciousness-raising and self-awareness capacities of teachers. Still in the area of pre-service education but in the discipline of health science, Antonia Hendrick, Katherine Frances Britton, Julie Hoffman and Marion Kickett describe and discuss the design principles and processes of a core unit developed to prepare health science students for professional work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
From Aeotorea/New Zealand, Catherine Savage, Sonja Macfarlane, Angus Macfarlane, Letitia Fickel and Hēmi Te Hēmi report the initial phase of the development of a Kaupapa Māori approach to support positive student behaviours and effective management frameworks for a nationwide, whole-schools, strengths-based intervention. In the language revitalisation area, Maree Jeurissen addresses a significant oversight within the schooling sector in the quest to increase the numbers of te reo Māori speakers to ensure survival of the Maori language; namely, the potential role of English-medium schools. She reports on a case study that investigated the relevant factors in one English-medium secondary school, to elicit more understanding of what inhibits the process.
Both Eureka Mokibelo in Botswana and Urmishree Bedamatta in India remind us of how little we know of the specific challenges faced in some parts of the world, but also of some of the similarities that give us a common interest and concern. From Botswana, Eureka Mokibelo reports on a qualitative investigation into the reasons San learners drop out at primary and junior secondary school in the Central District in Botswana, and offers insights into how educational practice might change in a responsive manner. Urmishree Bedamatta provides us with an informative examination and discussion of the role of the multilingual education teacher in a mother tongue-based multilingual education program for the Juangas (tribe) in an Eastern state of India, as part of a broader study of the state's Multilingual Education program.
In the important area of research methodology for Indigenous contexts, Marc Higgins provides a useful reconfiguration of a generic participatory visual research methodology, Photovoice, to assist researchers to utilise its critical and pedagogical potential across the various stages of the research process. Annabelle Wilson makes a contribution for those who occupy the vexed position of White researchers committed to undertaking ethical research in Indigenous contexts. She articulates her use of reflexivity as a research tool to improve her own ethical practice and her own learning. This makes a useful contribution to literature on research methods for Indigenous contexts, given that reflexive practice is such an important tool for all qualitative researchers.
All these articles provide food for thought for those of us trying to improve Indigenous education. Please feel encouraged to respond and contribute to the ongoing discussions and debates across the various research areas and strands of thought in Indigenous educational research and practice, and we look forward to publishing your engagements in future issues of AJIE.
