Aboriginalisation Implies Empowerment and Disempowerment
Abstract
In some people’s minds, the Aboriginalisation of education means placing Aboriginal teachers in community schools and training these Aboriginal teachers to teach and to conduct the school in the ways Westeners once did. That objective is as wrong-headed as it is racist.
The Aboriginalisation of education in each community can only mean the development of an Aboriginal pedagogy if it is to address the perennially documented failings (for example, McConnochie and Harker, 1985; Folds, 1987; Lanhupuy, 1987) of Western schools in the education of Aboriginal people. In this view, Aboriginal people will determine appropriate subject matters for curriculum, ways of teaching, ways of organising the social context of learning, and ways of structuring the relationship between school, community, and the State. That is, the institutionalisation of education will be contested primarily among Aboriginal views of the ways in which education can be coopted for Aboriginal purposes. Anything short of Aboriginalisation of pedagogy in this manifold sense runs the risk of enshrining forever the roles Western education has consistently and persistently used for the practices of cultural imperialism, political domination, and territorial colonisation.
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