1st Edition

Critical Studies and the International Field of Indigenous Education Research

Edited By Greg Vass, Melitta Hogarth Copyright 2024

    This book focuses on three broad and intertwined concerns in Indigenous education across several settler-colonial settings such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

    Within these settler-colonial contexts, many Indigenous learners continue to be failed by education policies and practices, while teaching and learning – all too often concomitantly – reproduce and maintain deficit perspectives and expectations from those in the wider community towards Indigenous Peoples. The contributions presented in this book seek to interrupt this cycle in some way and share three broad and intertwined areas of focus:

    •  Holistic and more-than-human view of the world and knowledge making practices

    • Critical engagement with the ongoing legacies of colonial institutions, practices and histories

    • And efforts that seek to reveal and address social injustices, inequities and discrimination.

    The book highlights the work of scholars who are actively working to privilege Indigenous ways of working and/or recognising the resilience of Indigenous peoples in all aspects of education.

    Critical Studies and the International Field of Indigenous Education Research offers inspiration, hope and practices to learn from and with. In doing so, a wider community of researchers and professionals can draw on the ideas and strategies to help inform their efforts within the settings they work and live. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Studies in Education.

    Introduction: Can we keep up with the aspirations of Indigenous education?
    Greg Vass and Melitta Hogarth

    1. Identifying and working through settler ignorance
    Carla Rice, Susan D. Dion, Hannah Fowlie and Andrea Breen

    2. Uncanny pedagogies: teaching difficult histories at sites of colonial violence
    Liana MacDonald and Joanna Kidman

    3. Community according to whom? An analysis of how indigenous ‘community’ is defined in Australia’s Through Growth to Achievement 2018 report on equity in education
    Marnee Shay and Jo Lampert

    4. Deficit discourses and teachers’ work: the case of an early career teacher in a remote Indigenous school
    Meghan Stacey

    5. The untold story of middle-class Indigenous Australian school students who aspire to university
    Sally Patfield, Jennifer Gore, Leanne Fray and Maree Gruppetta

    6. Shaming the silences: Indigenous Graduate Attributes and the privileging of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices
    Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews, Susan Page and Michelle Trudgett

    7. On the land gathering: education for reconciliation
    Lilach Marom and Curtis Rattray

    8.Indigenous education sovereignty: another way of ‘doing’ education
    Michelle Bishop

    Biography

    Greg Vass is Senior Lecturer at Griffith University, Australia. His research interests are focused on investigating policy enactment through teaching and learning practices. Central to this research is addressing the cultural politics of schooling and knowledge-making practices that shape the experiences of teacher and learner identities in the classroom.

    Melitta Hogarth is Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include the translation of policy to practice, particularly in the area of Indigenous education.  Integral to this research is investigating how to best support educators to engage with Indigenous knowledge and peoples to ensure the nation building aspirations of curriculum and policy is possible.