Introduction
Fricker (2021) suggests five ways to decolonise your classroom, noting: policy; curriculum; pedagogy; places and spaces; and community engagement. As teaching staff: policy is typically beyond our scope of influence; and places and spaces are largely inherited. For the individual teacher, we are faced with the options between curriculum, pedagogy and community engagement. I propose that as an English teacher, curriculum, especially text choice is moving too slowly to be meaningful; and community engagement is something simply too time consuming given the current teacher workload crisis we all face. This leaves pedagogy as the last reasonable respite for teachers seeking to authentically include Indigenous perspectives in their teaching practice. Findings are beginning to explore the effectiveness of Indigenous methods of memorisation that offer a genuine possibility to improve our students' recall of key information. Indigenous pedagogies can be used in a manner to expand our own teaching practice, whilst also achieving the goals of moving towards some elements of decolonising schooling.
Shallow and small text-list
As a teacher of ‘subject English’, I have always taught Indigenous texts. Indeed, reflecting on these texts, I’ve realised that they occur almost cyclically, perhaps almost seasonal, one per era. When I studied at University, My Place (Morgan, 2010), was the Indigenous text de jour. Whilst on teaching placements, Deadly Unna (Gwynne, 1998) took on this role. More recently, Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce, 2002) has assumed this position, with Growing up Aboriginal in Australia vying to become the most common text. So, as each text takes on the role of ‘ticking the box’ for Indigenous perspective in our schools, commonly also being used to achieve the cross-curricular priorities of the Australian Curriculum also. As we know, texts can serve as ‘mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors’ (Bishop, 1990; Thomson, 2022), but the use of more diverse texts alone, is never really enough (Ebarvia, 2021) and notably ongoing in a glacially slow manner. A different approach to engaging with Indigenous perspectives is a pedagogical approach.
Why pedagogical approach
Teaching remains one of the last bastions where teachers themselves are relatively untrammeled by intervention and observation, often despite leaders’ best efforts. For this reason, changes in curriculum can often be perceived as largely ‘top-down’ in nature, whilst the ‘enacted curriculum’ is always a teachers to explore and participate in. Australia is home to the longest continuous culture in the world, it would be wildly silly to overlook the educational system that allowed this continuation and thriving upon the very land that we occupy. Indeed, a large part of the work of decolonising one's own practice is accepting this fact, and seeing the Australian, and indeed the - broadly conceived - “Western” tradition’ as comparatively short lived, and found wanting in comparison.
Community engagement
Community engagement is of twofold importance, in that engaging with our community should be something we can all aspire to, and also because engaging with Indigenous pedagogies and knowledge would ideally involve a direct engagement and back-and-forth interaction. Yet, the sheer weight of teacher time crunch, and ever-increasing expectations on paper work, risk management and documentation attached to students leaving school to visit somewhere off-site makes community engagement in an outward manner unlikely. Bringing the community into our schools seems like a more natural and possible approach, and is definitely something to explore.
Cultural understanding or curiosity?
The crux of the challenge of engaging with Indigenous pedagogies and knowledge is the distinction between understanding and curiosity. The focus on approaching engaging with Indigenous culture tends towards cultural understanding, with understanding being the key word. This article proposes that Indigenous pedagogies have persisted for many generations across thousands of years, and that a recent study found that Indigenous memory techniques to be superior to other alternatives (Reser et al., 2021). The durability and longevity of these practices should be a cause for curiosity and interest, rather than simply something to be understood. The difference between curiosity and understanding being important here, curiosity suggests an ongoing engagement and process rather than the more passive and closed matter of mere understanding.
Cultural Sensitivity
It is, of course, important to be cautious and sensitive when engaging with Indigenous pedagogies, yet we must not let caution move towards inactivity, especially as teachers of English. We have the ability, and comparative ease, to both include Indigenous voices and perspectives within our content, in a manner that can be more challenging for other learning areas. We also have the same possibilities of all teachers to explore Indigenous approaches to teaching and learning; bringing our highly literate and wordy cultural practices towards those practices proven through time by oral cultures (Yunkaporta, 2019).
Things you can try tomorrow
Indigenous pedagogies are as diverse and dynamic as the language groups that practiced them, yet work has been done to make these approaches accessible and possible for Australian Teachers.
One approach to engaging with these works is to access them through the indices of memory, recall and retrieval practice (Kelly, 2017; Kelly; 2020; Yunkaporta, 2019). It can also be achieved through considering ‘On-country learning’ (Christie, et al., 2010) where the environment is considered a resource rich with possible learning and able to be encoded further with new knowledge. Perhaps the most easily accessible conception of Indigenous pedagogies can be drawn from the 8 ways pedagogy (NSW Department of Education, n.d.) which outlines 8 clear approaches to teaching consistent with elements of Indigenous practices.
As English teachers, whilst we continually strive to update our curriculum, especially in regards to text selection, as a means to diversify the perspectives represented. We can also explore Indigenous pedagogies, that have survived thousands of years, more quickly and independently.
References
Bishop, R.S. (1990). ‘Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors’. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom. 6(3).
Christie, M., Garŋgulkpuy, J., & Guthadjaka, K. (2010). Teaching from country, learning from country. Learning communities: international journal of learning in social contexts, 2, 6-17.
Ebarvia, T. (2021). Disrupting your texts: why simply including diverse voices is not enough. Idiom, 57(2), 12-13.
Fricker, A. (2021) Decolonising your classroom: five ways forward. AEU News.
Gwynne, P. (1998). Deadly Unna?. Puffin.
Heiss, A. (Ed.). (2018). Growing up aboriginal in Australia. Black Inc..
Kelly, L. (2017). The memory code. Simon and Schuster.
Kelly, L. (2020). Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History. Simon and Schuster.
Morgan, S. (2010). My place. Fremantle Press.
NSW Department of Education (n.d.) 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning. Website:
https://www.8ways.online/
Noyce, P. (2002) Rabbit Proof Fence. Becker Entertainment.
Reser, D., Simmons, M., Johns, E., Ghaly, A., Quayle, M., Dordevic, A. Tare, M., McArdle, A., Willems, J., & Yunkaporta, T. (2021). Australian Aboriginal techniques for memorization: Translation into a medical and allied health education setting. PloS one, 16(5), e0251710.
Thomson, A. (2022) Indigenous voices: why we urgently need windows and mirrors. The Conversation.
Yunkaporta, T. (2019). Sand talk: How Indigenous thinking can save the world. Text Publishing.
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I must say I do appreciate your distinction between curiosity and understanding, especially considering the obsession with learning in our schools. I'm interested to see how this might be implemented in Mathematics in a way that is authentic, something I might need some time to ponder on!