Abstract
The Aboriginal Voices project has sought to understand how Aboriginal students and parents tackle pervasive discourses that largely characterise these students as failures, disinterested in education, or without aspiration. This paper presents the conceptual and methodological approach to a multi-site case study of six whole-school communities, adding to the 10 systematic reviews of literature provided in the first phase of this project. Working through Moodie’s Decolonising Race Theory framework, we describe the methodology, research questions and methods adopted in this empirical extension of the project. This paper emphasises the perspectives of Aboriginal students and their communities on schooling structures, common pedagogical and curricula practices, as well as the importance of cultural activities and connection. Moodie’s framework enables us to provide a holistic analysis of daily classroom discourses, how these discourses impact young people and their families, and contributes to the interruption of settler colonialism in Australian schooling systems.
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Notes
The authors appreciate the complexities of terminology currently used to describe First Nations and acknowledge that the word “Aboriginal” does adequately reflect the diversity of Indigenous people and communities in Australia. In line with the broader Aboriginal Voices project, which did not collect data with Torres Strait Islander people, the team has used the term “Indigenous” (relatedly “indigeneity”) to allow for international translation of ideas and findings where relevant, and “Aboriginal” to specifically acknowledge the orientation of the project to the interests of the people, lands and waters on the mainland of the continent.
ICSEA: Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage. This index was created by the Australian national curriculum authority, in order to allow comparison of standardised literacy numeracy test results across the country.
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The project was supported by Macquarie University through Post-Doctoral Research Funds.
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Ethics approval was granted by Macquarie University (ID: 5201600672) and the NSW Department of Education in October 2016 with data collection occurring through late 2016 to early 2017. An additional reporting line was established to the NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group who approved the research and outputs of the project.
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Moodie, N., Fricker, A. Applying Decolonising Race Theory to the Aboriginal Voices project. Aust. Educ. Res. 50, 11–31 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-022-00601-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-022-00601-9