Australian Indigenous education policies are formed in settler colonial systems that are structured by institutional racism. Gumbaynggirr academic Lilly Brown (2019) argues that Australian 'education was incorporated into Indigenous policy as a justification for dispossession' (p. 67) throughout the 20th century. In recent times, First Nations…

Acknowledging Australian Indigenous cultural diversity involves respecting local Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. This can be difficult for teachers who do not know about Indigenous people and their knowledge. The Differentiated Indigenous Pedagogies project evaluated digitally available information describing Indigenous in this paper,…

New data is presented from two studies involving thirteen practising secondary teachers and twelve pre-service early childhood, primary and secondary teachers in Australia. The first study explored how non-Indigenous practising teacher identities, shaped by external and policy discourse, create obstacles to teachers' willingness and confidence in…

The language and cultural priorities in Australian Indigenous education have been priority areas since the inaugural national Indigenous education policy was launched in 1989. For over thirty years, these priorities have sat awkwardly in the largely non-Indigenous teaching profession and classroom teachers continue to struggle with how to embed…

Every aspect of the Australian education system is a colonial construct, which was established across the continent and adjacent islands as part of the ongoing British colonisation process. As such, in contemporary music classrooms in Australia, there are decisions made every day that perpetuate settler futurity. This paper explores five ways…

From the rallying call of the USA's Black Lives Matter movement, three Australian university teacher educators present perspectives on First Nations dance in the school curriculum. The Australian education system has emerged from the devastating impact of European colonisation upon the continent's First Nations peoples resulting in trauma,…

In Australia, pervasive deficit representations and positioning of Aboriginal peoples continue to impact on teachers' capacity to meaningfully embed Aboriginal curriculum and pedagogies into their teaching. This sits within a policy context driven by standardization, competition and market forces focused on closing the gap between Aboriginal and…

Australia first documented national goals for primary and secondary education in 1989 with the Hobart Declaration on Schooling. Since then, Australia's goals for the education of children have been updated in three subsequent National Education Declarations. Each of the Declarations includes specific goals for Indigenous Australian students, as…

In a policy landscape dominated by forces that seek to continually reshape education according to market logics, there are particular impacts on the seemingly intractable crisis of Indigenous education policy making. Entrenched discourses of deficit result in education policy continually being 'done to' communities, with little heed paid to the…

Policy analysis can be useful for learning about 'what works' in policy. Contemporary policy studies literature highlight that such learning is influenced by power relations in government that shape our ways of knowing the world. This paper offers a critically reflexive narrative account of power relations present during Indigenous higher…

This article provides a critical insight into some of the key challenges that are found in Indigenous education at university. It achieves this through sharing the storied experiences of non-Indigenous pre-service teachers, academics and myself. Overall, the study found, through storying methodology, a total of 11 key challenges across…

Journalistic news values and digital technology align with education policy and practice to construct a narrow world of Indigenous educational achievement and contribute to a discourse of negativity, failure and disempowerment. Digital technologies have enabled the online publication of educational performance that is a valuable source of news for…

Drawing from principles of ethical research derived from our review of national and international policy documents, in this paper we reflect on our research experiences working in partnership with Indigenous educators in a project to support young Indigenous children's oral and written language development through collaborative action research.…

Our past shapes our present. However, do Australian universities understand the ways historical discourses continue to shape them? Provoked by the findings of our empirical study implemented in Western Australia's Kimberley region in 2018-2019, we conducted a critical text analysis of recent and past policies to seek historical explanation. As a…

In the review of rural, regional and remote education in Australia, Halsey briefly reflected on the old conundrum of how traditional Indigenous culture and 'western' knowledge (as represented in mainstream curriculum) might be integrated in remote schooling contexts. The recommendation supplied was for 'greater opportunity in the curriculum for…