Abstract
This chapter offers an account of the impact of the increasing standardization of Australian teacher education programs upon the experiences of educators who exist at the intersections of Indigeneity (The term Indigeneity and Indigenous are spelled with a capital “I” to denote that these terms are referring specifically to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.), gender, class, and sexuality. As such we are a blackfella (The term blackfella is mostly used by Indigenous Australians and is a prominent marker of individuals who are speaking Aboriginal English. There are no rules preventing white people from using the term beyond the stigma around the use of Aboriginal English (which is considered by many to be bad English). If used in a derogatory manner, it would be highly inappropriate, but in a positive way, can be used to indicate good relationships and trust between white and Indigenous people.), a gay man and a lesbian who walked into an Australian school of teacher education to find that the possibilities for teaching with and for social justice through engaging students with issues of diversity, difference, and inclusion are being restricted. What is restricting the aforementioned possibilities are prescriptive teaching standards that seek to reduce teaching to a set of technocratic skills. We deploy a story as data approach in our writing here that draws upon autoethnography as a methodology that enables us to reflect upon our own embodied experiences as Other to the normative space of teacher education. We use our own stories as lenses through which to examine what it is like to work at and with the intersections of Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. For us, intersectionality is both an analytical tool and a framework for working within our day-to-day lives.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Examples at The University of Melbourne include The Richard Berry Building (since renamed), the Frank Tate Learning Centre, The Agar Lecture Theatre, Baldwin Spencer Building, and John Medley Building. More details can be found in Dobbin (2015).
- 2.
A Reconciliation Action Plan is a policy document that outlines the aims and processes that an organization can engage with to promote reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. These documents are varied in their content and scope, but each document seeks to progress reconciliation through practical actions and outcomes.
- 3.
At Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University, these targets are presently governed by the university’s admissions policy regarding students and the enterprise bargaining agreement negotiated by the National Tertiary Education Union for staff.
- 4.
Yarning is a practice based on Indigenous ways of communication. Traditionally, it would have been conducted by a group of people sitting in a circle. In the middle would be an object, usually a message stick, and as an individual wanted to speak, they would move to the centre of the circle, take the object back to their position, and then speak. As a practice, it was a supportive, nonjudgmental place, where any topics could be discussed. In the context of the academy, given that it is a white space, and it would be used as a form of assessment, it could be modified to engage with Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, being, and doing, as well as provide opportunities for culturally responsive and authentic assessment. The use of this approach as a pedagogical tool has been discussed by Mills, Sunderland, and Davis-Warra (2013/2014).
- 5.
In 2017, Same-Sex Marriage was put to public opinion in Australia via a non-compulsory, non-binding postal survey. The result was announced on November 15, 2017: 61.6% YES, 38.4% NO. Many in the LGBTIQ+ community experienced the survey period as damaging, traumatic, and hurtful.
- 6.
The Closing the Gap Report is an annual report published by the Federal Government of Australia. This report details the efforts that the Government as well as various non-government organizations are doing to “improve the lives of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.” As part of this report there are seven targets relating to education, health, and employment. As of 2019, the report shows that the Australian Government are on track to achieve only two of the seven targets.
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press.
AITSL (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership). (2017). Australian professional standards for teachers. Retrieved August, 28, 2020, from https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards
Arendt, H. (2003). In J. Kohn (Ed.), Responsibility and judgement. Schocken Books.
Berger, T. M., & Guidroz, K. (2009). The intersectional approach: Transforming the academy through race, class and gender. The University of North Carolina Press.
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge.
Clandinin, J. (Ed.). (2007). Handbook of narrative inquiry: Mapping a methodology. Sage.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299.
Crenshaw, K. W. (2011). Twenty years of critical race theory: Looking back to move forward commentary: Critical race theory: A commemoration: Lead article. Connecticut Law Review, 117.
Cross, D., Epstein, M., Hearn, L., Slee, P., Shaw, T., & Monks, H. (2011). National safe schools framework: Policy and practice to reduce bullying in Australian schools. International Journal of Behaviour Development, 35(5), 398–404.
Crowhurst, M. (2001). Working through tension: A response to the concerns of lesbian, gay and bisexual secondary school students. Department of Education Policy and Management, University of Melbourne.
Crowhurst, M., & Patrick, R. (2018). Critical incident sparks critical incident sparks critical incident: An ‘aresolutionist’ method. Reflective Practice, 19, 389–398.
Davis, K. (2008). Intersectionality as buzzword: A sociology of science perspective on what makes feminist theory successful. Feminist Theory, 9(1), 67–85.
Davis, B., Sumara, D., & Luce-Kapler, R. (2015). Engaging minds: Cultures of education and practices of teaching (3rd ed.). Routledge.
DePalma, R., & Atkinson, E. (2009). No outsiders: Moving beyond a discourse of tolerance to challenge heteronormativity in primary schools. British Educational Research Journal, 35(6), 837–855.
Dobbin, M. (2015). Heart of darkness: Melbourne University’s racist professors. The Age. Retrieved 27 August 2020, from https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/heart-of-darkness-melbourne-universitys-racist-professors-20151127-gl9whm.html
Endo, H., Chamness Reece-Miller, P., & Santavicca, N. (2010). Surviving in the trenches: A narrative inquiry into queer teachers’ experiences and identity. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26, 1023–1030.
Epstein, D., & Johnson, R. (1998). Schooling sexualities. Open University Press.
Ferfolja, T. (1998). Australian lesbian teachers—A reflection of homophobic harassment of high school teachers in New South Wales government schools. Gender & Education, 10(4), 401–415.
Freire, P. (1970 [1993]). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. Ramos, Trans.). Penguin Books.
Fricker, A. (2017). Indigenous perspectives: Controversy in the history classroom? Ágora, 52(4), 5–13.
Gray, E. M. (2013). Coming out as a lesbian, gay or bisexual teacher: Negotiating private and professional worlds. Sex Education: Sexuality, society and learning, 13(6), 702–714. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2013.807789.
Gray, E. M. (2017). Teaching and tolerance: Aversive and divisive pedagogical encounters. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39(3), 422–433. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2016.1273881.
Gray, E. M., & Nicholas, N. (2019). “You’re actually the problem”: Manifestations of populist masculinist anxieties in Australian higher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 40(2), 269–286.
Holman Jones, S., Adams, T., & Ellis, C. (2013). Handbook of autoethnography. Communication Faculty Publications. Paper 287.
Jones, T. M., & Hillier, L. (2012). Sexuality education school policy for Australian GLBTIQ students. Sex Education: Sexuality, Society and Learning, 12(4), 437–454.
Jones, T., Smith, E., Ward, R., Dixon, J., Hillier, L., & Mitchell, A. (2015). School experiences of transgender and gender diverse students in Australia. Sex Education: Sexuality, Society, Learning, 16(2), 156–171.
Kohler Riessman, C. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Sage.
Medina, J. (2014). The performative turn and the emergence of post-analytic philosophy. In R. Braidotti (Ed.), After poststructuralism transitions and transformations: The history of continental philosophy (pp. 275–306). Routledge.
Moodie, N., & Patrick, R. (2017). Settler grammars and the Australian professional standards for teachers. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 45(5), 439–454.
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2004). Whiteness, epistemology and indigenous representation. In A. Moreton-Robinson (Ed.), Whitening race: Essays in social and cultural criticism (pp. 75–88). Aboriginal Studies Press.
Phillips, J. (2005). Indigenous knowledge: Making space in the Australian Centre. In J. Phillips & J. Lampert (Eds.), Introductory Indigenous studies in education. Pearson Education Australia.
Richardson, L., & St Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 959–978). Sage.
Røthing, Å. (2008). Homotolerance and heteronormativity in Norwegian classrooms. Gender and Education, 20(3), 253–266.
Sellers, M. (2013). Young children becoming curriculum: Deleuze, Te Whariki and curricular understandings. Routledge.
Stanner, W. (1969). The boyer lectures—After the dreaming. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Tuinamuana, K. (2011). Teacher professional standards, accountability and ideology: Alternative discourses. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 36(12), 72–82.
Ward, R. (2017). ‘I just want to be myself’: How we can challenge homophobia, transphobia, and racism in Australian schools. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 38(4), 469–479.
White, R. D., Wyn, J., & Robards, Y. (2017). Youth & society (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fricker, A., Gray, E.M., Crowhurst, M. (2021). Race, Gender, and Sexualities in Australian Teacher Education: Reflections from the Intersections. In: Murti, L., Flores, G.M. (eds) Gender, Race, and Class in the Lives of Today’s Teachers. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73551-7_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73551-7_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-73550-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-73551-7
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)