Rationale 3

Australia’s historical and contemporary establishment is one of settler colonialism; a reality that was thrown into sharp relief by the 2023 referendum where just over 60% of the nation voted ‘no’ to an Aboriginal voice to parliament. Settler colonialism is a distinct form of colonial domination characterised by the permanent settlement of exogenous populations, who seek to usurp Indigenous sovereignty and establish hegemonic control over territory, resources, and socio-political structures. This process often involves systematic dispossession, marginalisation, and erasure of Indigenous peoples, as well as the imposition of new governance systems and cultural paradigms that serve the interests of the settler society.

Education systems in colonial countries such as Australia are integral to historical and ongoing processes of colonisation, being ‘established to serve an imperial agenda; upholding colonial values and social norms’ (Bishop, Vass & Thompson 2019, p. 196). This is potently expressed by Kenyan de-colonial scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986) who wrote that:

The night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle. (p. 9)

He terms this ‘visibly gentle’ approach the ‘cultural bomb’, and describes how it serves to

annihilate a people’s belief in their names, their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as a wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. (p. 3)

The education system in Australia continues to ignore and delegitimise First Nations and other cultural knowledges and experiences that are deemed ‘different’, while reinforcing and validating normalised ‘whitestream’ (Andersen, 1999) ways of thinking. At the same time, the settler citizens of Australia are exposed to an education system that maintains an ignorance of past and ongoing atrocities (Gillan, Mellor & Krakouer, 2017; Rose, 2015), an oblivion of worldviews and knowledges other than their own (Pascoe, 2014; Phillips, 2012), and a denial of the structural inequities of race and whiteness (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Schulz, 2013; Schulz et al., 2023). In this way, school remains functioning as a powerful tool of assimilation, that is uncontested by a majority of peoples whose education has let them down (Beresford, 2012; Bishop, Vass & Thompson, 2019; Morgan, 2019; Rigney, 2024).

CRP offers a way to start redressing education’s current assimilatory imperative (Moodie, Vass & Lowe, 2021) and move it towards a more emancipatory trajectory. CRP as a form of critical pedagogy, is poised to unsettle the current knowledge hierarchy by validating and building on student and community lifeworld knowledges (Hynds & Sleeter, 2011; Yunkaporta & Shillingsworth, 2020). To this end, pedagogies need to include Aboriginal and marginalised knowledges, not just as a hook to the official curriculum (Apple, 2000), but also to transform the official curriculum itself. As Rigney (2020) states in relation to First Nations Australian students, ‘the Aboriginal child as knowledge consumer but never producer is false emancipation’ (p. 579).  In this way CRP can trouble assumptions of dominant knowledges as the ‘epistemological a priori’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2004, p. 75, emphasis in original).

Decolonising learning helps us to recognise, understand, transform the ways in which our world is shaped by colonialism. Inclusion and diversity education moves schools beyond tolerance and promotes innovation that employs knowledges from a plurality of cultures and perspectives. This benefits people’s sense of belonging and respectful working relationships, as well as the nation. In this way, culturally responsive pedagogy can have a decolonial function (Hattam, 2023; Zembylas, 2023) by setting up students as active citizens who can contribute to ‘intellectual, political, social and economic emancipation’ (Rigney, 2006, p. 42).

References

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