Child‐directed Dramatic Play as Identity Text in Northern Canadian Indigenous Kindergarten Classrooms

In this paper, an Anishnaabe educator and university researcher/former primary teacher make a case for viewing children's dramatic play as multimodal identity texts. Indigenous children in our research study take up an agentic role and construct positive identities in dramatic play, creating narratives that reflect Indigenous cultural practices, as well as some practices of mainstream Canadian society that may be imbued with colonising perspectives. We argue that the Indigenous Cultural classes and follow‐up dramatic play counter the marginalisation of Indigenous knowledge, culture and languages that has occurred with devastating effects on generations of Indigenous families. Our paper is based on video recordings of 4‐ and 5‐year‐old children's dramatic play that were analysed collectively by 12 Indigenous educators in terms of the Indigenous cultural meanings that children created in their play. We conclude with implications for non‐Indigenous teachers, arguing that a case can be made for including child‐led dramatic play in the literacy curriculum when dramatic play narratives are viewed as multimodal identity texts. These texts, which can involve multiple modes including print, draw from children's own cultural and linguistic knowledge and experience.     

Attendance,performance and the acquisition of early literacy skills: A comparison of Indigenous and non-Indigenous school children

As part of an evaluation of a web-based early literacy intervention, ABRACADABRA, a small exploratory study was conducted over one term in three primary schools in the Northern Territory. Of particular concern was the relationship between attendance and the acquisition of early literacy skills of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. Using the GRADE literacy assessment, it was found that students made significant gains in a number of early literacy skills (e.g. phonological awareness skills and vocabulary processing). Classroom attendance was strongly and positively correlated with the acquisition of phonological awareness skills and early literacy skills (e.g. letter recognition, word identification processing). Indigenous children attended class significantly less frequently than non-Indigenous children and performed significantly worse overall, particularly with regard to phonological processing tasks. In light of these findings, it is suggested irregular attendance contributed to the Indigenous students' lowered literacy acquisition.     

Misrepresentations of Indigenous History and Science: Public broadcasting,the Internet,and education

This paper examines the role of history in power relations which suppress Indigenous knowledges. History is located as being about power and about how the powerful maintain their power. The paper further examines the Bering Strait theory/myth and ways that discourses in history combine with discourses in science to devalue Indigenous knowledges. The “truth” of science is challenged and examples of manipulation of scientific knowledge are provided, including discussions of a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation made for television production A people's history and an Internet website provided by the American government. These production activities supported by the Canadian and American governments are considered educational activities engaged in the practice of cultural representation in which dominant discourses about Indigenous peoples are presented. The paper challenges dominant misrepresentations of discourses about Indigenous peoples in a discussion of educational practices emphasizing the need of Indigenous peoples to control education and cultural representations. The paper concludes that it is a responsibility of society to educate all students to understand that any portrayal of history comes from a particular vantage point and to understand that dominant society privileges some representations and disadvantages others. If we teach in a critical way and challenge dominant discourses we can begin to create a society in which all persons in Canada and the USA, including Indigenous peoples, have a role to play.     

The role of Aboriginal literacy in improving English literacy in remote Aboriginal communities: an empirical systems analysis with the Interplay Wellbeing Framework

Indigenous language endangerment is critical in Australia, with only 120 of 250 known languages remaining, and only 13 considered strong. A related issue is the gap in formal education outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people compared with other Australians, with the gap wider in remote regions. Little empirical research exists in Australia to explore the role of developing Aboriginal literacy through bilingual education to address these combined issues. As a ‘shared space’ collaboration between remote communities, government, and scientists, the Interplay Wellbeing Framework and associated Survey were designed to represent community values and priorities in a quantifiable system to inform policy and practice. A cohort of 842 Aboriginal people aged 15–34 years from four remote communities completed individual surveys designed and administered by Aboriginal community researchers. We applied structural equation modelling to this data to understand the role of cultural indicators on education outcomes. Results confirmed the importance of strong relationships between community and schools. Furthermore, learning about culture and learning literacy in ones first language in schools to develop Aboriginal literacy, is established as a necessary step to improve English literacy in remote schools. This suggests bilingual education and strengthening culture and community involvement in schools are necessary to improve both education outcomes and language preservation.     

Principals as Literacy Leaders with Indigenous Communities (PALLIC) building relationships: one school’s quest to raise Indigenous learners’ literacy

In 2011 to 2012, 48 schools in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland participated in the Principals as Literacy Leaders with Indigenous Communities (PALLIC) project. Central to this project was the establishment of positive working relationships between school principals and Indigenous community leaders in order to improve Indigenous literacy rates. Professional development in leadership skills and effective literacy instruction was provided through five professional learning modules. Participants worked together to create an action plan to support the literacy achievement of Indigenous students in their schools and communities. This article presents a case study of one participating school in Northern Queensland that successfully utilised the PALLIC framework to facilitate leadership actions and activities between Indigenous community and school leaders in order to form productive partnerships for the teaching of reading. In particular, the case study highlights the way that school leaders and Indigenous leaders established shared leadership and shared ways of learning in the school for reading outcomes of Indigenous students.     

Negotiating critical,postcritical literacy: the problematic of text analysis

Critical literacy has been a particular focus in literacy education in the past two decades. Literacy models such as the ‘four resources’ model provide a significant framework for a critical understanding of texts and the social and cultural practices that inform them. In this paper, I draw on the ‘four resources’ model to argue that the success of the framework in developing critical literacy depends upon focusing adequate analytic attention on those subjectivities used in such practices. The intersubjective classroom dynamics and the subjective engagement of literacy practitioners are of equal importance in determining the meanings co‐constructed among subjects. I argue that beyond being text analysts, reflective practitioners, that is the teacher, and students as a group, can engage in postcritical negotiations of the text, contribute to new meaning possibilities and adopt an ongoing critical stance. Applying this literacy model successfully requires acceptance of a multiplicity of interpretations, collaborative practice between teachers and students and fluid subject positions. The paper concludes by considering the problematic of the classroom as a dynamic site for textual and cultural contestation of multiple perspectives.     

Signatures of quality teaching for Indigenous students

This paper presents findings from the validation of a survey instrument constructed in response to what Indigenous parents/carers and students believe constitutes culturally responsive pedagogies that positively influence Indigenous student learning. Characteristics of culturally responsive pedagogies established through interviews with Australian Indigenous parents, community members and students generated themes which were distilled into survey items by a team of Indigenous and other educators. The instrument was then put on trial with 141 teachers for statistical validation. Analyses employing the Rasch model confirmed that the instrument measured a unidimensional latent trait: culturally responsive pedagogy. Seven subscales, content validities of which were determined by a panel of experts, were also confirmed. Results highlighted differences between primary and secondary teachers’ self-reported practice, and important facets of teacher pedagogy in the two different school contexts emerged. Analyses of four of the subscales of the instrument—Indigenous cultural value, self‐regulation support, literacy teaching and explicitness—are presented in the context of current emphases on quality teaching and Indigenous student outcomes. The instrument can be used to measure teachers’ nuances in pedagogy, and the resulting teacher profiles can be used to assist teachers to focus on particular aspects of their pedagogy to meet the needs of their students.     

Other ways of being: challenging dominant financial literacy discourses in Aboriginal Context

Financial literacy education (FLE) continues to gain momentum on a global scale. FLE is often described as essential learning for all citizens, despite the bulk of initiatives outside the compulsory school classrooms focussed on educating economically disadvantaged individuals. Informed by Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing a critical discourse analysis of FLE facilitators resources used in train-the-trainer workshops in/for a Canadian Aboriginal community was conducted to identify dominant discourses. An uncomfortable space was uncovered as the ubiquitous focus on individual wealth accumulation contradicted Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing, underscoring the challenges of embedding Indigenous epistemologies in highly institutionalised charitable organisations’ attempts to help Indigenous (and non-Indigenous) peoples in poverty. Although this research is based on a Canadian program, the explosion of FLE as a “solution” to collective problems such as poverty lends itself to other—including Australian—contexts.     

Language and literacy challenges for Indigenous children in Australia

Despite considerable effort, progress in ‘closing the gap’ in literacy and in school retention in Indigenous communities is very slow. The reasons for continuing problems are many and various and are generally known at social and environmental levels. In this paper, I identify and emphasize the importance of proximal factors in understanding difficulties in learning to read competently. These are influences that are closer to the actual process of learning to read, since they reside within the child and family, and strongly influence the early pathways into success in reading. These factors are not specific, they apply to all beginning readers, but they have been neglected in the many attempts to improve academic success in Indigenous children. They include particularly a degree of competence in the English language and knowledge of the basic building blocks of successful reading skills. While no-one would deny that maintaining Indigenous cultural languages is important, the hard fact is that all children need to read the English language if they are to fulfill their educational promise in Australian society. Early failure in this task sets up risks of entrenched learning difficulties and a cascade of negative effects on school experiences and on social adaptation and mental health. Hence, prevention and early intervention to prepare children for school is critical to their futures. I argue that collaboration with families and communities in attending to the need for building school readiness in their children is essential for better outcomes in Indigenous education. In addition, better training in teaching methods based on the science of reading is a basic necessity if teachers are to meet the challenges they find in their classrooms.     

Tactics or strategies? Exploring everyday conditions to facilitate implementation of an Indigenous graduate attributes project

In 2017 Universities Australia (UA), the peak body representing Australian universities released its Indigenous Strategy 2017–2020. The document unites universities together in common goals for Indigenous achievement, filling a notable gap in the Australian higher education landscape. The Strategy outlines a comprehensive plan for enhanced Indigenous outcomes in critical areas of higher education including student access and success, graduate research, and community engagement. This paper focuses on the implementation of Indigenous curriculum for all Australian university graduates which is a key aspect of the Strategy. The changing Indigenous higher education landscape invites the nuanced analysis that critical examination of universities, as organisations, might elicit. Drawing on de Certeau’s notion of tactics and strategies, the paper examines the policy and cultural climate of an Australian university which supports an Indigenous Graduate Attribute curriculum project.     

The Learning is In‐between: The search for a metalanguage in Indigenous education

Following the first significant research into Indigenous methods of learning, it was argued that Indigenous students could learn western knowledge using Indigenous ways of learning. Subsequent research contradicted this finding to take the position that Indigenous students must learn western knowledge using western methods and so this set the scene for the development of a pedagogy where Indigenous students could learn how to learn. Theorists in Indigenous education began to search for a metalanguage. Crosscultural theorists have perceived this metalanguage in terms of an explicit and transparent pedagogy while critical theorists want Indigenous students to develop their own ways of speaking and writing and to be conscious of how they do this. However, I take the position in this paper that there is already a metalanguage at work in‐between the student and the teacher in the classroom although it is often obscured from consciousness in the effort to articulate valid, quantifiable outcomes.     

Pre-service physical education teachers’ Indigenous knowledge,cultural competency and pedagogy: a service learning intervention

In this paper, we investigate the effects of a community- and school-based service learning experience (SLE) on pre-service physical education teachers’ Indigenous knowledge, cultural competency and pedagogy. Informed by the theoretical tenets of Indigenous research methodologies, experiential learning and critical reflection, we examine 55 final-year pre-service physical education teachers’ (age: 21.9 [8.3]; 10.7% low SES; 68% females) cultural learning and competency in a core unit of study with a six-week SLE. Measures of their experiences included reflective journals, multicultural teaching competency scales and focus group interviews. Findings support the design of the SLE, with statistically significant changes in pre-service teachers’ perceptions of their cultural competency (p < 0.001). Pre-service teachers were able to challenge their assumptions about Indigenous students, plan and implement student-centred and culturally relevant pedagogies. Attention is drawn to the design of this SLE and demonstrates the importance of using Indigenous community members and teachers as mentors, which has not been explored in previous SLE studies.     

Revitalising Indigenous Languages in Homogenising Times

The world's linguistic and cultural diversity is endangered by the forces of globalisation, which work to homogenise and standardise even as they segregate and marginalise. Here, I focus on the struggle to conserve linguistic and cultural diversity among Indigenous groups in the United States. Native languages are in drastic decline. Yet even as more Native American children come to school speaking English, they are likely to be stigmatised as 'limited English proficient' and placed in remedial programmes. This situation has motivated bold new approaches to Indigenous schooling that emphasise immersion in the heritage language. This article presents data on these developments and their impacts on students' self-efficacy and school performance, analysing these data in light of critical theory and current knowledge in the field of bilingual education. Indigenous language reclamation efforts must not only confront a legacy of colonialism, but also mounting pressures for standardisation and English monolingualism. I conclude with an examination of these power relations as they are manifest in the struggle for Indigenous self-determination and linguistic human rights.     

Indigenous knowledges,universities, and alluvial zones of paradigm change

ABSTRACT

In the past two decades, Indigenous faculty and graduate students at research-intensive universities have been asserting a kind of cultural and intellectual sovereignty over their own academic production and participation. While colonization through assimilationist education suppressed – and continues to suppress – Indigenous community knowledge and Indigenous scholars have been drawing on Indigenist revival movements creating new academic works and challenging the conventions of what constitutes research. This article presents conversations in contested spaces regarding Indigenous identity and expression. It draws, in part, on the author’s own experience traveling between Indigenous communities and universities while supervising Indigenous PhD students. Universities are in conflicted positions as they ostensibly invite Indigenous expression, but resist the undoing of conventional hierarchies that maintain hegemonic equilibrium. Are Universities that open spaces for Indigenous knowledges and the place-based blending – and bending – of metaphysical and physical realities leading a paradigm change in ecological consciousness? Can Indigenous scholars and Indigenous communities be represented in academic locations in ways that redirect the goals and purposes of research and knowledge production? This writing is a reflection on emerging, and ongoing, questions of Indigenous advance in academic spaces.     

试论中国科学教育的发展路径——基于科学文化视角

科学文化是科学教育的灵魂,当代中国的科学教育必须确立传承科学文化的基本价值取向。为此,就要丰富科学教育的科学文化内涵,开展科学文化素质教育,以传递科学的理性和实证精神,凸显科学的人文价值,强调科学的怀疑和批判精神。开展科学文化素质教育的基本途径是构建基于科学文化的科学教育体系,即重新定位科学教育目标,追求多元化的科学文化素养;丰富科学课程的科学文化内涵,构建融入式HPS课程体系;提升课堂教学的科学文化品位,注重建构与对话的学习方式。     

Environmental Literacy: functional,cultural, critical. The case of the SCAA guidelines

The author has argued elsewhere for an increased role for linguistics and literary studies within environmental education. Here he argues that the tripartite division of literacy skills as functional, cultural and critical can be useful in both planning and evaluating programmes of environmental education. As exemplification of the latter, the model is applied to a brief discussion of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA) guidelines for environmental education in England. It is concluded that these offer opportunities for teachers to develop all three kinds of environmental literacy, but with an emphasis on skills development which must largely be seen as functional.     

The limits of cultural competence: an Indigenous Studies perspective

Taking the Universities Australia report, National best practice framework for Indigenous cultural competency in Australian universities (2011) as the starting point for its discussion, this paper examines the applicability of cultural competence in the design and delivery of Australian Indigenous Studies. It argues that both the conceptual underpinnings and the operationalisation of cultural competence necessitate an over-reliance on essentialised notions of Indigeneity, cast in radical opposition to non-Indigeneity, which negate multiple and diverse expressions of Indigenous identity and lived experience. Thus, this approach perpetuates the very colonialist logics Indigenous Studies should endeavour to overcome. Secondly, it argues that cultural competency's emphasis on non-Indigenous self-reflexivity, broadly consistent as it is with both scholarship and praxis in Indigenous Studies, is represented in some of the literature as uncritical deference to an always-unified Indigeneity, thereby exacerbating the original essentialising impulse evident in the cultural competence paradigm. Therefore, this paper proposes that Indigenous Studies should explore the limits of self-reflexivity, with a view to establishing a genuinely anti-colonial/decolonising praxis that incorporates the capacity to negotiate Indigenous intracultural diversity along with other markers for identity.     

Critical media literacy is not an option

This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of critical media literacy and analyzes four different approaches to teaching it. Combining cultural studies with critical pedagogy, we argue that critical media literacy aims to expand the notion of literacy to include different forms of media culture, information and communication technologies and new media, as well as deepen the potential of literacy education to critically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power. A multiperspectival approach addressing issues of gender, race, class and power is used to explore the interconnections of media literacy, cultural studies and critical pedagogy. In the interest of a vibrant participatory democracy, educators need to move the discourse beyond the stage of debating whether or not critical media literacy should be taught, and instead focus energy and resources on exploring the best ways for implementing it.

Meaningful learning? Gendered experiences with an NGO-sponsored literacy program in rural Mali

This paper examines the effectiveness of an NGO-sponsored literacy program in rural Mali. The study employs ethnographic techniques to examine the type of literacy instruction provided, the level of participation, the meanings of literacy to participants, and the contextual factors that influence the social and personal effects of literacy. The analyses reveal that the program has been more advantageous for men, particularly in terms of opportunities for the use of literacy skills. Oversight of the cultural context combined with programmatic challenges including failure of the NGO to meet its own critical literacy goals have limited women's ability to access and derive benefits from the literacy program.