First Nations education Archives

Aboriginal Perspectives in the Curriculum: Many teachers feel they lack the necessary skills and knowledge to teach Aboriginal perspectives, even though it’s a cross-curriculum priority. Researchers have sought to identify effective strategies to assist teachers, including how to meaningfully incorporate such perspectives into classroom learning and respond to the needs of local Aboriginal communities. It is vital for promoting mutual respect and understanding between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members of society.

Alongside research into the skills and knowledge needed to teach Aboriginal perspectives effectively, we suggest that understanding teachers’ motivation towards working with Aboriginal perspectives is a valuable avenue to explore. Taking self-efficacy as a motivational case in point, teachers lack the confidence to teach Aboriginal perspectives. This lack of confidence has been observed to impact their students’ own motivation for learning, including their Aboriginal students’ motivation.

Culturally Nourishing Schooling

We recently conducted a study as part of the Culturally Nourishing Schooling project, investigating teachers’ motivation to teach Aboriginal perspectives, what factors can support their motivation, and the implications of this for their Aboriginal students’ motivation.

Specifically, we looked at two aspects of teachers’ agency (adaptability and teacher-student relationships), their role in teachers’ motivation (self-efficacy and valuing) to teach Aboriginal perspectives, and the extent to which this motivation predicted Aboriginal students’ own motivation (self-efficacy and valuing) to learn. The following figure shows the process we examined.

Teachers’ Motivation—and Links to Students’ Motivation

We explored two aspects of teachers’ motivation to teach Aboriginal perspectives: self-efficacy and valuing.

Previous scholarship has argued that when teachers feel confidence (self-efficacy) in their capacity to teach particular subject matter, they invest greater effort in working with students, persist in meeting the needs of diverse students, and are more enthusiastic and energetic. This leads to positive impacts on students’ own motivation. When teachers place value in a subject or subject matter, this is communicated directly and indirectly to students, through instructions and through encouragement and modelling. This positively impacts student motivation.

In our study, we hypothesised that teachers’ motivation to teach Aboriginal perspectives in the curriculum would positively impact their Aboriginal students’ motivation to learn, specifically, Aboriginal students’ academic self-efficacy and valuing of learning.

Agency Factors Underpinning Teachers’ Motivation

There are salient agency factors that can impact motivation. Identifying such factors is important because it provides some guidance as to where professional learning might be directed to better support teachers’ motivation to teach Aboriginal perspectives.

Research identifies two key aspects of agency implicated in teachers’ motivation: adaptability and teacher-student relationships.

Adaptability is the capacity to adjust one’s thoughts, behaviours, and feelings in response to unfamiliar, new, changing, or uncertain situations and circumstances. Some examples of adaptability include looking at a situation in a different way (thought), taking a new course of action (behaviour), or minimising disappointment or fear (emotion).

Adaptability is highly relevant to teachers because their work often involves responding to and managing ongoing change and unfamiliar terrain, including new or changing curriculum. That includes teaching Aboriginal perspectives in the curriculum.

A large body of research has identified the ways in which interpersonal relationships impact motivation. Positive teacher-student relationships have an energising function that activates positive task-related emotions. Teachers ‘getting on’ with students in their classroom are more likely to be enthused and energised to teach these students. In many Aboriginal cultures, relationality to people and place are central ontological axes that have been demonstrated to underpin the manner and conditions by which students interact with teachers and learning content in Australian schooling spaces. For this study, we examined the extent to which teachers positively connected interpersonally with their Aboriginal students.

Our Participants

Our online questionnaire had nearly 300 responses from Australian teachers who had taught Aboriginal perspectives to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students in 2020, 2021 and 2022. This made it both recent and relevant. Most of our respondents were women and they had taught, on average, for ten years. Other participant details can be found in the published study.

What We Found

Four key findings emerged from the study.

Teachers’ adaptability was significantly associated with higher self-efficacy for teaching Aboriginal perspectives. It thus seems that teachers’ capacity to navigate change, uncertainty, unfamiliarity, and novelty underpinned a confidence to teach Aboriginal perspectives.
Teacher-student relationships was significantly associated with teachers’ valuing of Aboriginal perspectives. It seems that when teachers connect with their Aboriginal students, there is a greater sense of the intrinsic utility and importance of Aboriginal perspectives. This may be because these interpersonal connections lead teachers to feel a sense of purpose and commitment to their Aboriginal students, and by implication, a desire to promote Aboriginal perspectives in their teaching.
Teachers’ self-efficacy for teaching Aboriginal perspectives was associated with greater valuing among their Aboriginal students. Thus, teachers’ confidence to teach Aboriginal perspectives may help their Aboriginal students to be interested in their learning and to see their learning as important and worthwhile.
Teachers’ valuing of Aboriginal perspectives was associated with greater self-efficacy among their Aboriginal students. It seems that when teachers value teaching Aboriginal perspectives more, Aboriginal students tend to also show more confidence in their schoolwork.

The figure below summarises these main findings.

Implications for Practice

These findings have important practice implications. They suggest adaptability and teacher-student relationships are critical to teachers’ motivation and for supporting Aboriginal students’ motivation. Adaptability and teacher-student relationships are modifiable so they are viable foci for supporting teachers’ professional learning and development.

We suggest teachers might be encouraged to identify areas of Aboriginal curriculum where they are uncertain or find unfamiliar. They could then brainstorm adjustments that could be made to enhance adaptability.

Here are some examples:

thought (e.g., adjust their attitudes, beliefs, or expectations about these areas of curriculum)
behaviour (e.g., seek help or look for new resources to help them navigate these areas of curriculum)
emotion (e.g., address anxieties about implementing this new curriculum material)

For interpersonal relationships, we suggest that teachers may benefit from better understanding the different forms of relational support they can provide students, including their Aboriginal students. Two major sources of relational support are instrumental support and emotional support. Instrumental support includes:

help with homework and assignments
support for study management
additional content-specific instruction
seeking help from Aboriginal Education Officers in the school on pedagogical approaches

For emotional support, teachers could look to:

ensure that communication with Aboriginal students is characterised by empathy, warmth, and care
provide encouragement to Aboriginal students if they experience setback at school
connect and work with local Aboriginal communities
understand sovereignty and relational systems between students

To Sum Up

Our study provides further insights into the motivational dimensions of teaching Aboriginal perspectives and the factors that may be targeted to better support this motivation, with a view to better supporting Aboriginal students’ own motivation to learn at school.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Paul Ramsay Foundation (grant number: 5031). Any opinions, findings, or conclusions expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. The authors would like to thank members of the Culturally Nourishing Schooling project and the Blak Caucus for advice and assistance during the conduct of this research.

Biographies

Andrew J. Martin is Scientia Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology in the School of Education at UNSW, Sydney. His research interests are student motivation, engagement, learning, instruction, and quantitative research methods.

Keiko Bostwick is a Research Fellow in the Assessment and Evaluation Research Centre at the University of Melbourne. She previously worked for the Culturally Nourishing Schooling project at UNSW as a quantitative Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

Tracy Durksen is a Scientia Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer of Educational Psychology for the School of Education at UNSW, Sydney. As a non-Indigenous Canadian and former primary school teacher she aims to impact the learning and development of students and teachers through research on interpersonal interactions and psychological characteristics like motivation and adaptability.

Rose Amazan is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at UNSW, Sydney. She has extensive experience working with low socio-economic status communities in Australia and internationally. Rose’s research, teaching, and service activities are motivated by her commitment to community development and creating equitable environments for marginalised and disadvantaged communities.

Kevin Lowe is a Gubbi Gubbi man from southeast Queensland and is a Scientia Indigenous Fellow and Professor at UNSW, Sydney. Kevin has had experience in education as a teacher, administrator and lecturer. He has expertise in working with Aboriginal community organisations on establishing Aboriginal language policy and school curriculum implementation.

Sara Weuffen is a specialist of educational research in cross-cultural studies, history, diversity, and inclusion. As a non-Indigenous woman of German, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry, she works with other non-Indigenous educators with the intention of interrogating the almost invisible conditioning factors and systemic pressures of education in order to develop more relational and authentic schooling experiences for all students.

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The CNS logo was designed by Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay artist and curator, Dennis Golding.

The ‘education is the key’ mantra is often used as a metaphor in remote First Nations communities to indicate the importance of learning to achieve some measure of socio-economic advantage. It is fair to say that First Nations people have bought into education and training ‘vehicle’ with enthusiasm. The Year 12 completion data coming out of Closing the Gap Report in 2019 suggest that gaps are closing. The rates of people holding certificate qualifications in remote communities are also increasing at a fast pace.

But the vehicle appears to break down as it heads along the road towards jobs, economic participation and income. I have been using Census data to research the impact of First Nations students completing Year 12, with a special focus on income and what I found is disturbing.

My research extends the work of projects conducted by the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (now called Ninti One) between 2011 and 2016, in which I was I was also involved.

The Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation projects

The CRC-REP projects confirmed that education is important for First Nations people living in remote communities, but not necessarily because of jobs and careers. Education is important because it helps keep language and culture strong. It assists young people maintain a connection with Country and ensures that they have a strong identity. At the same time the projects confirmed the importance of education, they also raised questions about the efficacy of education and training as the key to economic participation by First Nations peoples.

Back in 2013 it was assumed there is a connection between going to school regularly, completing Year 12, getting a job and living a happy and successful life. It was often argued as common sense. For example, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs in 2013 stated “…you need to have an education if you’re going to take advantage of… this wonderful economic nirvana…”

A slightly more sophisticated argument sees benefit from education in terms of human, social and identity capital. But is that economic nirvana being realised for First Nations students from remote communities, particularly for those who have completed Year 12? One could expect so, given the public investment in boarding and scholarship programs designed to give remote First Nations people a quality education and complete their secondary education.

My research on Census data

In the last three Censuses there is evidence of strong growth in Year 12 completion rates for those First Nations people who speak an Indigenous language, as shown in the table below.

The number of Year 12 completers among language speakers increased by 362% in ten years. For English speakers, the growth was also a healthy 85%, compared to non-Indigenous growth of just 28%. If the common sense logic is right, we would expect that growth to take people to jobs.

And the good news is that jobs for year 12 completers have grown, but, as the table shows, the total number of jobs for First Nations people has not changed in 10 years.

So the net impact of all this education in terms of jobs for First Nations people is nil.

Meanwhile for non-Indigenous people there were more than an extra 4000 jobs for those working in very remote parts of the country.

But surely there is some economic benefit to attaining year 12?

I put that question to the test by comparing the median incomes of year 12 completers based on their status as First Nations people or non-Indigenous and whether they speak English only or another language as well. The table below, based on 2016 Census data shows what I found.

This table explains why the education vehicle has not lived up to its expectations for First Nation people. Some might say it has broken down altogether.

To be fair, First Nations Year 12 completers do get a relative income benefit compared to their Year 11 completer counterparts, around $300 per week if they speak English only, but the benefit dwindles to nothing for those who do not speak English very well.

By contrast, non-Indigenous people who speak another language appear to not lose out to the same extent because of their second language. Indeed the highest income earners in this table are non-Indigenous people who also speak a language other than English. There is also apparently no meaningful income benefit from stepping up from Year 11 to Year 12 either, for this group.

So what is going wrong?

Far from arriving at economic nirvana, First Nations people who have invested in their Year 12 education vehicle, have broken down well short of this glorious place. The income differentials are shocking. But why is this so?

In the CRC-REP research, we proposed several reasons for the differences. One reason we offered was related to agency. People make choices about the kind of work they want to engage in, and it isn’t always based on money. But this new data is somewhat disturbing as it suggests that some languages are treated more favourably than others, which may raise questions about racism and assimilation’s continuing role in educational institutions. The data shows that English has a higher value than Indigenous languages. But being able to speak another language that isn’t an Indigenous language is potentially more valuable than speaking English alone.

Just as disturbing is the evidence emerging from several studies that boarding and scholarship programs can have a detrimental impact on First Nations young people’s wellbeing. The large income differential offers another explainer as to why First Nations people in remote communities don’t bother to get on board the Year 12 vehicle. It just doesn’t pay!

John Guenther is currently the Research Leader—Education and Training for Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, based in Darwin. His work focuses on learning contexts, theory and practice and policies as they connect with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Between 2011 and 2016 he led the Remote Education Systems project with the CRC for Remote Economic Participation. More detail about John’s work is available at remote education systems.

Image is by John Guenther

First Nations education

How to teach Aboriginal perspectives