Teaching the teachers:Re-educating Australian teachers in indigenous education

Recent Australian education reform has resulted in qualified teachers recognising that they are inadequately prepared to teach content within the area of Indigenous education. The knowledge and theoretical understanding imparted in teacher education programs over the past decades did not prepare educators to embed Indigenous content across all years and areas of the curriculum. Today, pre-teachers in Australian universities are assessed on their ability to deliver content that is relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and peoples in our contemporary world, to varying degrees. This chapter aims to discuss some of the challenges facing the embedding of meaningful Indigenous content in schools today. These include, but are not limited to: lack of teacher preparedness, a lack of Indigenous content historically in Australian schooling, a lack of Indigenous teachers, the experiences of racism and discrimination faced by Indigenous staff and students in schools as well as a lack of Indigenous content in university teacher preparation courses. This chapter is informed by my learnings as an Aboriginal educator, and is a sharing of experiences aimed at informing the reader of the challenges. I will also consider what a culturally inclusive Australian schooling system might look like in the foreseeable future

Towards an Australian Indigenous women's standpoint theory: A methodological tool

In this article I outline an Australian Indigenous women's standpoint theory. I argue that an Indigenous women's standpoint generates problematics informed by our knowledges and experiences. Acknowledging that Indigenous women's individual experiences will differ due to intersecting oppressions produced under social, political, historical and material conditions that we share consciously or unconsciously. These conditions and the sets of complex relations that discursively constitute us in the everyday are also complicated by our respective cultural differences and the simultaneity of our compliance and resistance as Indigenous sovereign female subjects