The pedagogical urge to decolonise student thinking has been at the heart of the drive to embed Indigenous knowledge in universities throughout the western world. Despite ongoing efforts in the Pacific, North America and South Africa, there is little in the way of explicit curriculum scholarship informing approaches to the inclusion of Indigenous…

Many great cultures of the world have recognised the impossibility of teaching. Governments in various colonial countries continue to spend huge sums of money on 'closing the gap' in Indigenous education, yet national assessment figures would support the claim that teaching is indeed an impossibility. This paper draws on some of Biesta's recent…

Student capacities to actively listen, sense and feel are often relegated to lower order skills in an education system increasingly governed by measurable outcomes. While most school-based pedagogies focus their approach on cognition, this paper considers how we might make sense of the affective experiences that often resist the deep thinking,…

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP) has become a driving force for change in North America and New Zealand and is gaining some recognition in Indigenous education in Australia. But as a model of learning and teaching, it cannot be imported unproblematically into Australian schools, wherein the past Indigenous students have had limited success.…

Geography is about the places that make up the world. A key focus of the new geography curriculum in Australia is on different ways of finding knowledge about those places. Yet there is limited demonstration in the curriculum and its elaborations of just how students might understand those places outside the realm of their own experience. In…

This article develops the case for a greater focus on the teaching of local histories in the Australian Curriculum: History. It takes as its starting point an Indigenous epistemology that understands knowledge to be embedded in the land. This connection between knowledge and country is used to examine recent literature on whether the teaching of…

Following the first significant research into Indigenous methods of learning, it was argued that Indigenous students could learn western knowledge using Indigenous ways of learning. Subsequent research contradicted this finding to take the position that Indigenous students must learn western knowledge using western methods and so this set the…

This paper is based on research conducted with indigenous students at a university in the Northern Territory. It examines crosscultural theories of education which explain the problems of teaching and learning in indigenous contexts in terms of the cultural mismatch between the home and school environment. These theories position the teacher as…