Abstract
Bucknell and Mannion (2007) commented that student responses in the 2006 VCE Outdoor and Environmental Studies (OES) exam could be boiled down to a pat answer of “Indigenous good, non-Indigenous bad” (p. 8). They suggest that the subject of OES is too rich for such a simple answer. This paper uses the expression of ‘Indigenous good/non-Indigenous bad’ as a springboard to explore some of the ways notions of the environment, race and ethnicity intersect and how this might lead to an exam question being answered in such a uniform and simplistic way by some students. The aim of this paper is to highlight some of the productive tensions of environment, race and ethnicity as a strategy for richer and more complex debates around peoples’ interactions with the environment.
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Her research interests include students’ and teachers’ experiences of outdoor education, how contemporary practices of outdoor education come to be seen as normal, particularly in the context of the school curriculum and post-structural research methodology.
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Zink, R. Can we move beyond ‘Indigenous good, non-Indigenous bad’ in thinking about people and the environment?. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education 11, 3–9 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03400852
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03400852