This paper explores the prescriptive, distancing and separating qualities that exist in Western systems of knowledge production. It examines scientific language and how discrimination takes place in the university setting and explores the ways in which academic knowledge production affects the learning experiences, participation and completion rates of Indigenous students. It suggests improving teaching and learning strategies to enhance unacknowledged learning processes towards providing inclusive learning practices, and to strengthen educational outcomes for Indigenous students with the prospect of improving their completion rates at universities.

Education Queensland’s Remote Area Incentives Scheme (RAIS) is intended to provide financial and other benefits to teachers who choose to accept employment in undesirable locations in the state. On paper, this scheme claims that remoteness from an urban centre is the foremost measure of a school’s undesirability. However, the percentage of Indigenous students in a school has a strong influence on the assignment of transfer ratings to Queensland state schools. This paper provides the details of a statistical analysis that shows that there is a strong relationship between the Indigenity of a school and its institutionalised perception of undesirability. It also includes a survey of urban schools in southeast Queensland that are categorised as less desirable than surrounding schools in the region primarily because there is a higher percentage of Indigenous students enrolled in those schools.

The purpose of this report is to investigate the need for and purposes of parental and community involvement in an Outer Torres Strait Island school, namely Saibai State School, and to explore and report on some of the approaches to community involvement that we have trialled in our school.

If a school is aiming to educate its students for an active role in the society, then it is vital that the school be a living, active part of that society. It is unrealistic for teachers to assume that the school can stay separated from the community but still educate its students in a real and meaningful way.

One of the biggest debates in Australian Indigenous education today revolves around the many contested and competing ways of knowing by and about Indigenous cultures and the representation of Indigenous knowledges. Using Bakhtin's theories of dialogue and voice, my concern in this paper is to explore the polyphonic nature of power relations, performance roles and pedagogical texts in the context of teaching and learning Indigenous Australian women's music and dance. In this discussion, I will focus on my experiences as a lecturer in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit at the University of Queensland and my involvement in this educational setting with contemporary Indigenous performer Samantha Chalmers. Like a field experience, the performance classroom will be examined as a potential site for disturbing and dislocating dominant modes of representation of Indigenous women's performance through the construction, mediation and negotiation of Indigenous knowledge from and between both non-Indigenous and Indigenous voices.

This project was designed to enhance the academic success and profiles of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) through increased proficiency and awareness of computer technology. The program attempted to establish a community of practice with technology, that focused on teaching and mentoring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students by supporting their use of computer technology. Prior to this project, there was no sound base of support for encouraging the use of technology with this group of students in the university and thus they were reluctant and apprehensive about its use in their studies.

Initially, we focused on the development of the students' proficiency in word processing so that they could apply their newly learned skills directly to their coursework and assessment in the specific degree that they were studying. Secondly, we introduced the students to the Internet and finally we assisted them with the location of information in the Library and from other sources. Consequently, the key notions of the project related primarily to improving the students' skills in writing, communications, and searching and accessing information.

A dramatic increase in the number of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders undertaking teacher education courses in Colleges of Advanced Education and Universities has occurred over the past ten years. In 1976 it was estimated that there were approximately 59 Aboriginal Teacher Education students throughout Australia (Anderson § Vevoorn, 1983:122). Today, in one institution alone - James Cook University - there are almost double this number. It is estimated that there were approximately 400 Aboriginal/Islander student teachers in 1985.

Increasing attention has been given in recent years to the effects of various factors upon the academic achievement of ethnic minority group children. In those Australian states where there are schoolswith significantly large proportions of Aboriginal children, special programs have been devised and implemented.

The Department of Education in Queensland has been involved throughout the past decade in the development and refinement of both techniques and materials designed to foster the academic attainments of Aboriginal children. One program involved the employment of Aboriginal adults from a local community to work along side of teachers in and out of the classrooms as para-professional teachers’ assistants. This program is currently in the ninth month of a twelve month pilot study in the Cherbourg Community School.

The role of these assistants is regarded as being essentially mediatory. Primarily the objective has been to increase the degree of home/school and parent/teacher contact with a view to closing the knowledge and understanding gap existing between the school and the community generally. It is hoped to increase parental awareness and appreciation of the aims, ideals, and processes operating within the school environment. Conversely, it is hoped to acquaint the teachers with a more thoroughgoing understanding of the cultural, socio-economic, and familial backgrounds of the children they teach.

In implementing the project it has been considered that changes within the school itself can have only limited effect on the educational development of children, and that the ultimate success of any intervention program depends on the involvement of the children’s families.

In the August issue we presented the terms of reference of the Aboriginal Consultative Group’s Report, their vision of education, and the basic assumptions upon which they operated. In this issue we present the recommendations and thinking with respect to the four areas of need in the education of Aboriginal people as recognized by the Consultative Group.

This paper describes a teaching technique well suited to encouraging older children with poor reading ability to attack reading with interest and purpose. The strength of this method lies in the fact that it is based upon sound theory and can be implemented without too much trouble. Children enjoy it, and reading can come alive to a child for the first time in his school career.

Policy documents on Indigenous education include statements such as equitable access to education, participation and outcomes that can be broadly described as social justice goals. However, there has been little academic analysis of how these goals are to be achieved. This paper proposes that the indirect discrimination provisions in Australian anti-discrimination law can provide a framework in which the goals can be evaluated against the endemic effects of dominant power on mainstream education. The legal provisions are designed to assess whether a policy or practice might adversely affect certain groups in our society distinguished by, for example, their “race”. If a higher proportion of persons who do not have that particular attribute can comply with the policy or practice, and the demand is unreasonable in the circumstances, then this will constitute unlawful indirect discrimination. This paper analyses three social justice strategies which appear to be race-neutral and to apply equally to all students, Indigenous and non-Indigenous: Indigenous studies in the curriculum, using Standard English in the classroom, and instilling Australian values. The outcome suggests that these approaches may have an adverse impact on Indigenous students, and may even be undermining the social justice goals they set out to deliver.

This paper explores how the colonial hegemony of racism in Australia could be disrupted in schools by introducing mandatory reporting of racism by teachers in Australia, and addresses the benefits and risks of mandatory reporting of racism. Using Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as a case study, the ongoing prevalence of racism in schools is established. I then draw on the literature associated with teachers’ mandatory reporting of child abuse and neglect to construct racism as a form of emotional abuse of children. The complexity of racism as evidenced from the literature limits the mandatory reporting to interactional racism by teachers as an antiracist practice. The justification for mandatory reporting covers the emotional stress caused by racism to students and can also be extended to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff in schools. The evidence of learning success where antiracism strategies have been introduced in schools, the opportunity to normalise bystander antiracism by teachers, and the alignment of this reporting initiative with the professional standards of teachers together support a case for mandatory reporting of racism in schools. The arguments against mandatory reporting of racism draw on the generative practices of teachers integrating antiracist discourses in schools.

This research article addresses an important issue related to how teachers can support Aboriginal secondary school students' learning of science. Drawn from a larger project that investigated the study of vertebrates using Queensland Indigenous knowledges and Montessori Linnaean materials to engage Indigenous secondary school students, this article focuses on the three-staged lessons from that study. Using an Action Research approach and working with participants from one secondary high school in regional Queensland with a high Indigenous population, there were several important findings. First, the materials and the three-staged lessons generated interest in learning Eurocentric science knowledge. Second, repetition, freedom and unhurried inclusion of foreign science knowledges strengthened students' Aboriginal personal identity as well as identities as science learners. Third, privileging of local Aboriginal knowledge and animal language gave rise to meaningful and contextualised Linnaean lessons and culturally responsive practices.

This article documents a teaching journey in a 6/7 class with 20 Torres Strait Islander students in the curriculum area of literacy, over the course of one academic year. Specifically, this action research study explores a classroom teacher's efforts to navigate and respond to the prominent teaching model of explicit instruction and culturally responsive teaching, both of which inform policy statements in Far North Queensland. Using a reflective journal, teacher observations, informal student dialogue sessions, yarning circles and student work samples, the first author (D'Aietti) endeavoured to adjust her teaching practice to determine how best to meet her learners' needs. Through on-going critical reflection, engagement with two critical friends and in consultation with a cultural mentorship group, her teaching underwent transformation. One of the key findings of this study was that students want to learn, and for this to occur, teachers must independently navigate the curriculum documents, and in doing so, the explicit instruction model must be re-aligned, re-adjusted and re-positioned to suit Torres Strait Islander student needs.

The following paper argues for a critical creative paedagogy as a means of meaningfully engaging with Indigenous and decolonial philosophies. We showcase our critical frameworks and pathways for teaching a decolonial and Indigenous university course where philosophy and arts meet to engage with complex colonial, racial and epistemological questions. We first frame our theoretical and philosophical stance within critical postcolonial, Indigenous and decolonial studies. We then describe an epistemological critique within western philosophical discourse that will gesture towards a decolonial pathway to arts and discuss our creative teaching approach grounded in decolonial and Indigenous theories. Lastly, we reach to a critical and decolonial space where ‘southern’ philosophies can be ‘heard’ in their fullest complexity. We contend that creative writing and visual arts grounded in critical decolonial and Indigenous theories provide a space in which a decolonised knowledge seems possible.

In her recent work, Sara Ahmed explores wilfulness as a negative charge made by some against others, thinking about the relationship between ill will and good will, the particular and the general, and the embeddedness of will in a political and cultural landscape. In Ahmed's reading, wilfulness is a characteristic often ascribed to those who do ‘not will the reproduction of the whole’ (2011, p. 246) — those who are deemed wayward, wandering, and/or deviant. Using Ahmed's discussions, in this paper, we report on the successes and failures of a research project exploring mentoring programs in enhancing the recruitment and retention of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander preservice teachers. We think about the tensions always present between two faces of such a project: the need to reproduce modes of compliance to the expectations of a Western academic institutional regime; and the wilful pursuit of the kinds of wayward resistance and critique that may be potentially undermining and self-sabotaging as well as wholly necessary as attempts at decoloniality. We report on both the successes of the program and the continuing failure to address issues of colonialism. In doing so, we position Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research as a performative doubleness which needs wilfulness in order to ‘stand up, to stand against the world’ (Ahmed, 2011, p. 250) of colonial reproduction in neo-liberal times.

This paper treats two analytically separable but interwoven themes: Firstly, the role of the community in the educational process, and secondly, the effects of the community situation on the classroom situation, and vice versa. A major point of departure in the argument is the view that Aboriginal communities, defined here as Aboriginal settlements under special government administration, can be seen as educational agencies or institutions in a process of Westernization. At least this is how statements relating to policy and community planning can usefully be interpreted.

The aim of bilingual education is to develop a person who can think, speak, read, write and act appropriately in the language and culture of both his home and the wider society. Therefore, although for sound educational reasons the first formal reading experiences of children in a bilingual program are provided in their mother-tongue and these activities are maintained and extended throughout the child’s school life, at an appropriate time a bridge to English literacy needs to be built. Once this is done the world of English literature should be explored as far as is possible for each individual child. Sarah Gudschinsky stresses the importance of the addition of English literacy skills for pre-literate groups within a wider society when she reminds us that

She has defined a literate person as one who