School Project

The School Project is about engaging and building relationships with the nominated primary and secondary schools and building the Indigenous Learning program within their environment and collating data.

This project aims to develop strategies and resources to support greater respect and reconciliation between both Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups and individuals through developing a cross curriculum approach that weaves Aboriginal perspectives throughout curriculum subjects.

The inclusion of Indigenous perspectives within school curriculum was brought to focus with the introduction of National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Education Policy in 1989 (Price, 2004). In line with this policy, the Adelaide Declaration on National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty First Century (1999), and the current Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (2008) bring to the forefront the importance of developing an understanding and respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditional and contemporary cultures in all students.

The storyteller over the last six years has delivered many small-scale pilot projects on attitudes and knowledge about Aboriginal heritage and cultural identity in educational and health settings, it shows that children and adults still feel less confident and less resourced to explore Indigenous perspectives
within their community.

In this application the endeavour is to further this work in the first in-depth state / territory project on this topic by proposing to study, how X nominated teachers, working across diverse disciplinary areas, from X nominated schools varied across urban and rural Victorian Secondary schools identify, develop, plan and implement Indigenous perspectives in their school settings over a 36-
month period guided by four questions:

  1. What relationships exist between school children’s understandings of Indigenous identity and culture, and teachers’ pedagogical practices?
  2. How can these relationships and understandings be best theorised?
  3. What factors influence school children's understandings of Indigenous identity and culture over time?
  4. How can teachers engage in exploring alternate pedagogical practices across discipline areas that better informs all students about Indigenous identity and culture?