Excerpt Aboriginal and Culturally Responsive Pedagogies Assessment 1: Report

Undertaking this cross-curriculum pedagogies, we look at the essay question as a way

to design cross curriculum for all students to engage in reconciliation, respect and recognition
of the world’s oldest continuous living culture. This leads us as educators to influence the
need to identify and create learning methods that relate to the Indigenous communities as
well to increase this self-esteem and positivity both in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander student and the classroom. Highlighting strategies that are involved with making
these changes within the geography curriculum for example is to become in teaching, more
inclusive are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective and values. By these means,
Lewthwaite et al. (2014) student’s home culture was non-existent or required in the school
culture to provide academic success. Facing this stigma, strategies involved in reverting this
held view is the allowance for students or external sources (i.e. the community) to provide the
Indigenous background and values that they have hold to provide wider perspective as in
2.4.2 of the teachers professional knowledge. Aikenhead & Michell (2011) provide the
benefits of rounded knowledge and teaching of different perspectives of the world context as
a core way of ‘enhancing their creative problem-solving capabilities’ (Aikenhead & Michell,
2011, p.81). For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, strategy that does assist in
their learning and creation of positive classroom environments is to link the water in the
world syllabus to perspectives of the Indigenous population and how the water is valuable to
them, rather than just the western view of water. This can come through example such as
yarning circles and community engagement. Coming in the form Elders and lore that the
local Indigenous community values who can bring forth their knowledges and their own
connection to place, country and histories. This extension of perspective will provide that link
to the Indigenous communities to assist with the students to create meaning and context
between their culture and what they are learning through interrelating these aspects. This
achieves the chance for educators to know the student as a learner, a way for teachers to gain
cultural knowledge of how to teach, and as Beresford, Partington and Gower (2012, p.170)
would go on to exhibit the ‘understanding of how children learn and they know how to tap
into children’s natural abilities to learn and to convince them that they have some control
over their learning.’ Learning the perspective of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
values, culture and histories will assist in the engagement of reconciliation, respect and
recognition efforts in with the purpose of creating ongoing relationships to all students and
teachers involved. Making these connections and generating this perspective can the
professional teaching standards be developed on a graduate level.