Faculty of Education

Assessment Task Cover Sheet

Unit Co-ord./Lecturer Paul Cutler

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Tutor:(if applicable) Paul Cutler

Student ID 081343
Student Name Simon Burnett
Unit Code EMT690
Unit Name Cultural Awareness: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
Assessment Task
AT1
Title/Number
Word Count 1420
I declare that all material in this assessment task is my own work except where there is clear acknowledgement or reference
to the work of others and I have complied and agreed to the University statement on Plagiarism and Academic Integrity on
the University website at www.utas.edu.au/plagiarism *

Signed

SIMON BURNETT

Date 13 August 2015

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This essay will address a number of the major barriers to non-Indigenous

teachers engaging with teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives in the
high school classroom, with a particular emphasis on history, and attempt to discuss how
those barriers may be overcome in practice.
While in an ideal world, teaching the history of indigenous1 Australia and the
realities of the interactions between the original inhabitants of the continent and white
settlers would be as straightforward as any of the more traditionally accepted,
Eurocentric aspects of the history curriculum. We2 are not, however, teaching in an ideal
world, and by the time students get to high school they have already been living and
learning for over a decade in a culture where the hegemonic ideology is one which
brushes over indigenous perspectives at best and actively favours settler perspectives in
every point of conflict between the two from 1788 to last week at worst. This means
that even the hardest-working and best-trained teacher will have a hard time teaching
anything contradictory to this, as any unit which intends to give due consideration to
indigenous perspectives must do. Or as Lacey (quoted in Gillborn, 1990) put it schools
cannot solve the problem of racism in our society, but they should surely not contribute
to it.
Even a teacher who has spent significant amounts of time and energy correcting
their learned views on indigenous issues one who has learned to see colour, as
Aveling (2002) puts it has still come from that same ideological place, and the
narrative they have grown up with provides a not insurmountable but certainly
1

In this essay, indigenous will be used as shorthand for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander for the
sake of brevity.
2
The author of this essay is not an indigenous Australian, and despite having worked closely with
indigenous community groups in a number of states does not purport to speak for the indigenous
experience. The use of we is intended to refer to all teachers, while acknowledging that the
unfortunately overwhelming majority of teachers in Australia do not come from indigenous backgrounds.

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omnipresent barrier to their own engagement with indigenous perspectives. Just as the
teacher is seeking to help their students unlearn embedded prejudices against
indigenous perspectives ingrained by the master narrative, they must also remain
constantly aware of their own embedded prejudices. This also carries with it the risk of
the teacher (again noting that the vast majority of teachers in Australia do not come from
indigenous backgrounds) falls into the trap of using their privilege as a figure of
authority to not speak in support of indigenous positions but speaking for and over
indigenous experiences.
Even the best-intentioned teacher with the most receptive class faces the
challenge of the influence of parents and the community, whose ideology has had far
longer to embed itself more thoroughly than it has in the case of students. This issue is
exacerbated further still in regional communities, where circumstances such as lack of
diversity, low levels of education, the fact that teachers usually come from outside the
community and actual poverty and conditions of struggle can typically cause the
community to be even more recalcitrant than usual. In such situations, the teacher faces
a serious challenge to not be seen as an outsider imposing politically correct, innercity or ivory tower (to choose just a few of the most common pejoratives) values on a
community and dismissing their history and lived experience in order to paint them as
the villains. The pioneer story is an essential part of the founding and defining
mythology of many regional Australian communities and as ODowd (2010) points out
is thus an intrinsic element of that communitys pride and resilience. Yet no accurate
history of indigenous Australia and the impact of European colonisation can do anything
but depict those same pioneers as villains. This provides a massive dilemma, especially
to teachers from outside that community (Corbett, 2007).

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The teacher will often face further barriers from that same master narrative when
it comes to resourcing and providing information for their classes. For all the popular
talk of progress, recognition and reconciliation, there is still very little in the way of
school-accessible and accurate history on the topic of the colonisation of Australia. The
vast majority of resources aimed at a primary or high school level student are sugarcoated to the point of bearing very little resemblance to the actual historical events, and
deliberately gloss over the atrocities which are nonetheless essential to understanding the
true nature of frontier conflict in Australia. One only needs to look at any high school
textbook published last century (which in poorer schools as most regional schools tend
to be are often the only ones available due to budgetary restrictions). On the other,
radically opposed hand, historians have (especially since the 1970s) offered
meticulously researched accounts of the violent displacement of indigenous Australians,
but this comes with its own challenges. Firstly, that the language used is often academic
in nature and needs to be heavily scaffolded for students, causing still more work for the
teachers. Secondly, while work such as Pilgers (1986, 2013) or Reynolds(1989) are
valuable sources of information and should be studied by all prospective teachers, the
information as it is presented in their books and documentaries is overwhelmingly dark
designed to incite an emotional response in adults, but which runs the risk of turning
children away from engaging with the information. Again, despite the quality of the
resources it creates almost more work than it saves for teachers due to the amount of
editing and scaffolding required.
What, then, can teachers do to overcome these not insignificant barriers? In
Ethical Positioning, ODowd (2010) offers the experience of two different approaches.
The second, and apparently far more successful, approach involved emphasising

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empathy and using the students own experiences to help them understand and overcome
the barriers to engaging with indigenous issues. For example, in a regional school,
explicit links were made to the ethical basis of social justice programs for rural
students. Rural disadvantages concerning the economics of travelling and living in a city
to attend an urban university were all too apparent when contrasted to urban students
who could stay at home and attend university. Thus the social justice of rural
scholarships for equity reasons was clear.
Concerted efforts were also made apparently successfully to step beyond the
postmodern haze and centre the arguments on ethics and the idea that there may well be
a more concrete right or wrong point of view, or result in line with natural justice. This
allowed students to develop their own sense of ethics by basing it on current events they
were aware of or had experienced themselves, and extrapolating that to indigenous
experiences. The combination of these approaches was, according to student feedback
and contrasted with a control group in a separate cohort, apparently largely successful.
From a systemic perspective, positive steps have already been made in the past
decade through the implementation of the new national curriculum. The curriculums
featuring of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures as one of the
three cross-curriculum priorities means that indigenous issues are difficult to ignore for
teachers, even those who believe it to be outside the purview of their subject area. This
is backed up by a number of AITSL Standards specifically 1.4 and 2.4. The national
curriculum has only been publicly implemented for a few years, and hopefully exposure
to indigenous issues in primary school will begin filtering through as more open
attitudes in high schools in the near future. While remote community placement
programs exist, it would also serve students better if experience in a community with a

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significant indigenous population was a necessary element of the Professional

Experience requirements of teacher training.
While there could be an argument made for the shock value of a Pilger
documentary and its usefulness in awakening students to some of the horrific elements
of indigenous-settler relations in Australia, it seems from both research and experience a
much more reliable option to encourage empathy and a desire to explore the issues from
a number of perspectives in students (a more useful alternative, for example, would be
Featherstones mockumentary Babakieueria [1986]). Building a unit around
encouraging students to view issues not as a narrative where they are forced to see
themselves as villains but through empathy and understanding is the best thing a teacher
can do in these situations to overcome the barriers inherent in teaching indigenous
perspectives in modern Australia.

REFERENCES
AITSL Standards, retrieved from http://www.aitsl.edu.au/australian-professionalstandards-for-teachers/standards/list 13-AUG-2015

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Australian Curriculum, retrieved from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/ 13AUG-2015

Aveling, N. , 2002, 'Student Teachers Resistance to Exploring Racism: reflections on
doing border pedagogy', Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education , 30, 2, 119-130
Beattie, G. 2013, Chapter 1. Introduction: Approaches and avoidance (in) Beattie,
Geoffrey.: Our racist heart? : an exploration of unconscious prejudice in everyday life,
Routledge, Hove, East Sussex
Berger, S. 2008, Chapter 3. The Metaphor of the Master Narrative Hierarchy in
National Historical Cultures of Europe (in) Berger, Stefan., Lorenz, Chris, European
Science Foundation: The contested nation : ethnicity, class, religion and gender in
national histories, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke
Corbett, M. (2007). Travels in space and place: identity and rural schooling. Canadian
Journal of Education, 30(3), 771-792
Gillborn, D. (2006). Citizenship Education as placebo: standards, institutional racism
and educational policy. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 1(1), 83-104.
Hearn, M. 2007, Writing the nation in Australia: Australian historian and narrative myths
of nation (in) Berger, Stefan.: Writing the nation : a global perspective, Palgrave
Macmillan, Basingstoke001, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, N.S.W.
McNaughton, G. & Davis, K. , 2001, 'Beyond 'Othering': rethinking approaches to
teaching young Anglo-Australian children about indigenous Australians', Contemporary
issues in early childhood, 2, 83-93

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ODowd, M. , 2010, 'Ethical positioning, a strategy in overcoming student resistance

and fostering engagement in teaching Aboriginal history as a compulsory subject to preservice primary education students', Education in rural Australia , 20, 1, 29-42
O'Dowd, M., 2011, 'Australian Identity, History and Belonging: The Influence of White
Australian Identity on Racism and the Non-acceptance of the History of Colonisation of
Indigenous Australians', The international journal of diversity in organisations,
communities and nations., 10, 6, 29-43
Pilger, J. 1985, The Secret Country, ITV
Pilger, J. 2013, Utopia. Secret Country Films
Reynolds, H. 1989, The frontier: Peaceful settlement or brutal conquest? (in) Reynolds,
Henry: Dispossession : Black Australians and white invaders, Allen & Unwin, Sydney
Stanesby, C. & Thomas, E. c2012, Seeing the invisible and confronting culture: From
pre-service teacher to graduate (in) Phillips, Jean., Lampert, Jo.:Introductory indigenous
studies in education : reflection and the importance of knowing, Pearson Australia,
Frenchs Forest, N.S.W

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