The purpose of this paper is to explore the educational journey of indigenous Australians since the time of the 1788 invasion through into the modern Australian university. This…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the educational journey of indigenous Australians since the time of the 1788 invasion through into the modern Australian university. This exploration is intended to clarify the way in which education delivery in this country has been used to position the nation's “first peoples” within a context of centre/periphery thinking.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper established an overview of the educational service provision for indigenous Australians through a review of archival materials, historical texts and education reports. This information was then aligned with the data gathered through face‐to‐face interviews and focus group meetings conducted by the author in her own PhD research, to test the complementarity of the sources in terms of the indigenous experience.
Findings
The paper provides insights into the current positioning of indigenous Australians. The process of viewing the present against the backdrop of the past identified important historical landmarks that were then examined through the diversity of lens provided through interviews/meetings with contemporary students and staff to reveal the critical impact of centre/periphery thinking on indigenous education in this country.
Originality/value
This paper provides an historical overview of indigenous Australian education that, in clarifying some of the connections and ruptures between “centre and periphery”, provides valuable insights into the full diversity of the indigenous historical experience in Australian education.
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The purpose of this paper is to explore representations of Aboriginal people, in particular children, in the Victorian government’s school reader The School Paper, from the end of…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore representations of Aboriginal people, in particular children, in the Victorian government’s school reader The School Paper, from the end of the Second World War until its publication ceased in 1968. The author interrogates these representations within the framework of pedagogies of citizenship training and the development of national identity, to reveal the role Aboriginal people and their culture were accorded within the “imagined community” of Australian nationhood and its heritage and history.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on the rich material available in the Victorian Department of Education’s school reader, The School Paper, from 1946 to 1968 (when the publication ceased), and on the Department’s annual reports. These are read within the context of scholarship on race, education and citizenship formation in the post-war years.
Findings
State government policies of assimilation following the Second World War tied in with pedagogies and curricula regarding citizenship and belonging, which became a key focus of education departments following the Second World War. The informal pedagogies of The School Paper’s representations of Aboriginal children and their families, the author argues, excluded Aboriginal communities from understandings of Australian nationhood, and from conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen-in-formation. Instead, representations of Aboriginal people relegated them to the outdoors in ways that racialised Australian spaces: Aboriginal cultures are portrayed as historical yet timeless, linked with the natural/native rather than civic/political environment.
Originality/value
This paper builds on scholarship on the relationship between education, reading pedagogies and citizenship formation in Australia in the post-war years to develop our knowledge of how conceptions of the ideal Australian citizen of the future – that is, Australian students – were inherently racialised. It makes a new contribution to scholarship on the assimilation project in Australia, through revealing the relationship between government policies towards Aboriginal people and the racial and cultural qualities being taught in Australian schools.
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This article considers the impact of competing knowledge structures in teaching Australian Indigenous history to undergraduate university students and the possibilities of…
Abstract
Purpose
This article considers the impact of competing knowledge structures in teaching Australian Indigenous history to undergraduate university students and the possibilities of collaborative teaching in this space.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors, one Aboriginal and one non-Aboriginal, draw on a history of collaborative teaching that stretches over more than a decade, bringing together conceptual reflective work and empirical data from a 5-year project working with Australian university students in an introductory-level Aboriginal history subject.
Findings
It argues that teaching this subject area in ways which are culturally safe for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff and students, and which resist knowledge structures associated with colonial ways of conveying history, is not only about content but also about building learning spaces that encourage students to decolonise their relationships with Australian history.
Originality/value
This article considers collaborative approaches to knowledge transmission in the university history classroom as an act of decolonising knowledge spaces rather than as a model of reconciliation.
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Abstract
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During World War I, more than 11,000,000 children, or over half of all schoolchildren in America, joined their local Junior Red Cross and engaged in volunteer war work. What these…
Abstract
During World War I, more than 11,000,000 children, or over half of all schoolchildren in America, joined their local Junior Red Cross and engaged in volunteer war work. What these children learned in school from their work with the Junior Red Cross, as well as those who did the same work outside of the organization, was an important part of the war work underway in the nation. While they may not have been working for wages, they were still an essential part of the war work economy. Across the nation, they made thousands of quilts, not just for the soldiers in the hospitals but also for the orphans of France, Belgium, and Armenia. Their colorful and warm quilts are the perfect example of youthful resistance against the pallid and cold realities of war. By focusing more on the journalism of the day, rather than the secondary sources related to the economics of the war, this chapter strives to tell their stories and return to the children the praise and admiration they got during the war for their dedication to their country that was, unfortunately, forgotten over time. By making these quilts, the children not only showed great patriotism and interest in the war, for they were responsible for providing comfort to the casualties of war and hope for the survivors of genocide, but they also served as valuable economic sources in the war economy. And as we all know, a good citizen contributes to the economy, and good citizens deserve recognition.
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The UK government’s attempt to “prevent” terrorism and extremism in the university sector is rightly seen as an intolerant threat to academic freedom. However, this development…
Abstract
The UK government’s attempt to “prevent” terrorism and extremism in the university sector is rightly seen as an intolerant threat to academic freedom. However, this development has not come from a “right wing” authoritarian impulse, but rather, replicates many of the discussions already taking place in universities about the need to protect “vulnerable” students from offensive and dangerous ideas. Historically, the threat to academic freedom came from outside the university, from pressures exerted from governments, from religious institutions who oversaw a particular institution or from the demands of business. Alternatively it has been seen as something that is a particular problem in non-Western countries that do not have democracy. While some of these problems and pressures remain, there is a more dangerous threat to academic freedom that comes from within universities, a triumvirate of a relativistic academic culture, a new body of identity-based student activists and a therapeutically oriented university management, all three of which have helped to construct universities as safe spaces for the newly conceptualized “vulnerable student.” With reference to the idea of vulnerability, this chapter attempts to chart and explain these modern developments.
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SO much controversy has raged around the subject of newsrooms in the past two years, that librarians are, as a rule, utterly tired of it, and the appearance of still another…
Abstract
SO much controversy has raged around the subject of newsrooms in the past two years, that librarians are, as a rule, utterly tired of it, and the appearance of still another article upon the subject is not calculated to tone down the general spirit of vexation. It requires no little courage to appear in the arena in this year of Grace, openly championing those departments of our institutions which were originally intended to convey the news of the day in the broadest manner.
This chapter suggests that the unsettling reconfiguration of ‘home’ in works of post-colonial literary adaptation has an affective impact on non-Indigenous readers, contributing…
Abstract
This chapter suggests that the unsettling reconfiguration of ‘home’ in works of post-colonial literary adaptation has an affective impact on non-Indigenous readers, contributing, potentially, to processes of decolonisation. Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, in their book Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation, argue that Australian texts which seek to disturb readers by pursuing modes of post-colonial ‘unsettlement’ can activate new discourses and, thereby, inspire social change (1998). Focussing upon undergraduate student responses to two works of Aboriginal Australian literary adaptation, Melissa Lukashenko's short story ‘Country: Being and Belonging on Aboriginal Land’ (2013) and Leah Purcell's stage play, The Drover's Wife (2016), this chapter draws upon ideas pertaining to ‘affect’ to reveal how, through the subversive reimagining of tropes and structures commonly associated with Western dwelling, works of Indigenous literary adaptation elicit emotional responses in non-Indigenous readers and, in so doing, open up new spaces for listening within existing frameworks of white possession.