As the final piece of scholarship in the special issue, this paper pulls together data from the "Aboriginal Voices" project to analyse how Aboriginal students in Australia today experience schooling, particularly in relation to the futurity of their identity as sovereign First Nations Peoples. Using Decolonising Race Theory as a key…

Since contact, there has been a foundation of inhospitable interactions between the original sovereign peoples of the Australian continent and Eurpoean arrivals. Despite government policies appearing to shift from assimilative practices to reconciliation processes in the latter half of the 20th Century, ongoing interactions continue to be…

Despite an expenditure of over $45 billion in the last decade aimed at meeting the "Closing the Gap" strategies, successive Federal and state governments have overseen a generation of Aboriginal students who have experienced a failure of promised improvements to their educational outcomes. Recent scholarship has highlighted the paucity…

Little research exists about Indigenous-led teacher professional learning to improve skills in developing culturally responsive practices in schooling. This paper addresses a noticeable gap in the literature, that of Indigenous people mentoring non-Indigenous teachers to develop culturally responsive pedagogies. In the Australian context, the…

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…

This paper contributes evidence-based scholarship to how teachers understand the value of Aboriginal student-focussed programmes and how discourses of Indigeneity appear to influence those views. Interviews with n = 22 teachers across n = 3 secondary school sites in New South Wales highlighted teachers' understanding of Aboriginal programmes as…

The 'Aboriginal Voices' project is a consortium of researchers invested in seeking long-term solutions to the many and varied issues that have been identified as factors contributing to the underachievement of Indigenous students in education across Australia. The Aboriginal Voices systematic review project established an agreed methodology and…

2020 looms large for Indigenous education in Australia, with the 'Refreshed' "Close the Gap" strategy hanging over the collective heads of schools, Indigenous students and their families. After a decade of promises, there is now an acknowledgement within the government that programmes to improve student outcomes in literacy, numeracy and…

Education for Australian First Nations students living in remote communities has long been seen as an intractable problem. Ten years of concerted effort under Closing the Gap and related policy initiatives has done little to change outcomes beyond small, incremental improvements. Programmes and strategies promising much have come and gone, and…

This review analyses studies that identify pedagogies to support, engage and improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student outcomes. Some studies focus on pedagogies to support and engage, while others describe pedagogies that are designed to improve engagement, attendance and academic skills. The role of context emerges as a key theme,…

This paper focuses on the 'problem' of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education represented in the Australian Curriculum's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures cross-curriculum priority. Looking beyond particular curriculum content, we uncover the policy discourses that construct (and reconstruct) the…

School systems and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have long acknowledged the levels of social, cultural and epistemic conflict that has historically existed between teachers and schools, and Aboriginal students, families and their local communities. This relationship is both symptomatic and causal of the broader and highly complex field of…

Beginning in 2017, the Aboriginal Voices project brought together 14 researchers from 11 Australian universities to conduct the first systematic review of empirical research on Indigenous education. Collectively, the project has now reviewed more than 13 000 publications in 10 areas that address the experiences and achievements of Aboriginal and…

This critical systematic review of Australian research literature provides insights into the aspirations of Indigenous communities to collaborate with schools in establishing local Indigenous language and cultural programmes. This systematic review investigates the body of Australian research into the cultural, social and educational impacts on…

The import of professional learning in support of quality teaching is well established. Moreover, demonstrating active engagement with ongoing professional learning is now a requirement of maintaining teacher accreditation. For example, within an education policy climate that monitors the achievements of Indigenous learners closely, the evaluation…