This article presents an analysis of statements from Indigenous students in an Australian university that describe how they use supplementary tutors. The analysis provides some evidence that students use tutors for much more than the prescribed remedial purpose to assist with gaps in assumed academic knowledge and skills to prevent subject…

The current change agenda to improve the persistently lower rates of access, participation and outcomes of Indigenous Australians in higher education is a broad one that attempts to address the complex range of contributing factors. A proposition in this paper is that the broad and longer-term focus runs the risk of distracting from the detailed…

This is a reflective opinion piece, on our efforts in Australia to achieve alignment between the goals of Indigenous self-determination, Indigenous studies programmes and decolonising theory for an open and critical dialogue in south-south scholarship agendas. In this spirit, extant approaches to Indigenous studies in the Australian higher…

The promise of higher education remains elusive for many Indigenous students in Australia. To date, institutional efforts to improve the persistence and retention of Indigenous students have been largely piecemeal, poorly integrated and designed to remediate skill deficits. Yet, market-led expansion of Australian higher education is driving…

The challenges of finding more productive ways of teaching and learning in Australian Indigenous Studies have been a key focal point for the Australian Indigenous Studies Learning and Teaching Network. This article contributes to this discussion by drawing attention to new possibilities for teaching and learning practices amid the priority being…

The need to address the substantial inequities that exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in higher education is widely recognised. Those factors that affect the performance of Indigenous students in tertiary education have been reasonably well documented across different institutions, disciplines, and programme levels but there…

This article reflects on pathways for Indigenous education in the developing agenda of the Australian Curriculum, the cross-curriculum priorities, the general capability area of intercultural understanding, and the positioning of Indigenous learners within the diversity of learners with English as an additional language or dialect (EALD).

The interface between Indigenous knowledge systems and Western scientific knowledge systems is a contested space where the difficult dialogue between us and them is often reduced to a position of taking sides. Storytelling is however a very familiar tradition in Indigenous families where we can and do translate expertly difficult concepts from one…

Although the need for the development and provision of culturally appropriate rehabilitation programs for offenders is widely acknowledged, there is a lack of empirical data that can be used as a basis for the development of new programs. This article reports the findings of a comparison of indigenous and nonindigenous male prisoners on a range of…

For a while now I have been researching and writing about Australian Indigenous education issues. Like you all, I have seen much good work and learnt much from what is going on across the country and internationally to improve outcomes for Indigenous learners in formal education processes. And still we go on with the struggle and with the…

This paper critically examines some elements of the nation's policy on Indigenous education priorities (Department of Employment, Education and Training, 1989) and how they have framed our approaches to formal schooling issues over the past decade. I draw on some of the 'cultural' tensions in the policy position to illustrate the dilemma they…

As we move forward with the shaping of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research agendas and directions in Australia we are confronted with many issues basic to the beginning of any discipline: the problem of small numbers; the complexity and enormity of the problems; the diversity in the intellectual field; the limited albeit developing…