Identifying pedagogical factors enabling success in elite level team sport for Indigenous Australians: Lessons for Closing the Gap. Despite significant social disadvantage and alarming underachievement in educational outcomes, Indigenous Australians achieve remarkable success across a range of high profile sports. Indigenous Australians' achievement in sport is often explained as a result of inherited racial characteristics but, when seen as the result of a process of learning, it demands inquir ....Identifying pedagogical factors enabling success in elite level team sport for Indigenous Australians: Lessons for Closing the Gap. Despite significant social disadvantage and alarming underachievement in educational outcomes, Indigenous Australians achieve remarkable success across a range of high profile sports. Indigenous Australians' achievement in sport is often explained as a result of inherited racial characteristics but, when seen as the result of a process of learning, it demands inquiry into how this learning occurs and what socio-cultural factors facilitate this. This project will identify the socio-cultural and pedagogical factors that encourage and enhance achieving excellence at the highest levels of sport as a process of learning. Read moreRead less
A qualitative and quantitative study of Indigenous content in curriculum. The Indigenous curriculum content in the Australian Curriculum, is tasked as the latest attempt to improve outcomes for Indigenous students. This project aims to investigate how teachers approach this cross-curriculum mandate, consider teachers’ attitudes regarding the teaching of Indigenous content, and identify the complex factors that act as barriers to the success of teaching this content. Employing an innovative desig ....A qualitative and quantitative study of Indigenous content in curriculum. The Indigenous curriculum content in the Australian Curriculum, is tasked as the latest attempt to improve outcomes for Indigenous students. This project aims to investigate how teachers approach this cross-curriculum mandate, consider teachers’ attitudes regarding the teaching of Indigenous content, and identify the complex factors that act as barriers to the success of teaching this content. Employing an innovative design that combines policy analysis, survey research and qualitative research to consider the structural, epistemic and curriculum factors impacting on the success of this policy mandate. This will illuminate the affordances and constraints of new ways of understanding the inclusion of Indigenous content into the curriculum.Read moreRead less
Transforming Lives and Communities: Impact of Quality Indigenous Education. The project aims to advance knowledge, policy and practice by exploring the impact of Indigenous education programs in transforming lives and communities. There is a revolution in Australian education whereby private boarding schools are actively enabling Indigenous students to reap the rewards of a quality education. While there is anecdotal evidence suggesting that these programs have long-term and far-reaching effects ....Transforming Lives and Communities: Impact of Quality Indigenous Education. The project aims to advance knowledge, policy and practice by exploring the impact of Indigenous education programs in transforming lives and communities. There is a revolution in Australian education whereby private boarding schools are actively enabling Indigenous students to reap the rewards of a quality education. While there is anecdotal evidence suggesting that these programs have long-term and far-reaching effects for the students that extend to Indigenous communities, non-Indigenous peers, and the whole-school community, the actual impact of and pathways through which these benefits are achieved is unknown.Read moreRead less
Shielding our futures: storytelling with ancestral and living knowledge. This project aims to overcome persistent narratives of loss and despair with regards to Aboriginal cultures within urban and metropolitan communities today. Storytelling is an essential means of knowledge transmission that ensures the survival of diverse Indigenous knowledge, however colonial storytelling has removed the Stories from Country, their peoples, and the important lessons within them. The project will reciprocall ....Shielding our futures: storytelling with ancestral and living knowledge. This project aims to overcome persistent narratives of loss and despair with regards to Aboriginal cultures within urban and metropolitan communities today. Storytelling is an essential means of knowledge transmission that ensures the survival of diverse Indigenous knowledge, however colonial storytelling has removed the Stories from Country, their peoples, and the important lessons within them. The project will reciprocally engage with the oral histories of D’harawal Elders that engage with Garuwanga Waduguda (Ancestral Laws) and Narinya Wadugua (Living Laws) to emancipate representations of D’harawal’s knowledge from dominant colonial-storytelling narratives that largely speak of assimilation, cultural loss and extinction. The project will assist in revitalisation and respect of Aboriginal identities and knowledge within urban communities.Read moreRead less
Evaluating and developing music-based strategies for teaching and learning in remote Aboriginal communities in Western Australia. This project examines music-based teaching and learning employed by Aboriginal stakeholders in their efforts to sustain endangered cultural practices in remote communities in the Kimberley. Community and University-based researchers and teacher/practitioners will develop strategies to improve cultural teaching and learning in a variety of contexts.
Improving numeracy outcomes for young Indigenous children through the Patterns and Early Algebra Preschool (PEAP) professional development program. The study aims to improve mathematics outcomes for young Indigenous children and advance the pedagogical content knowledge of early childhood educators and working towards closing the gap in numeracy achievements for Indigenous children. The study will add to the research literature on early algebraic thinking and mathematical reasoning.
Sparking Imagination Education: Transforming inequality in schools. This project will produce an Imagination Education Pedagogical Framework for use by teachers in schools. Imagination is recognised as beneficial for diverse groups of young people who experience educational inequality. This collaboration will support access to prominent industry insights on methods for using imagination practices to enhance educational equity. Using co-design with AIME and Social Ventures Australia, it will inve ....Sparking Imagination Education: Transforming inequality in schools. This project will produce an Imagination Education Pedagogical Framework for use by teachers in schools. Imagination is recognised as beneficial for diverse groups of young people who experience educational inequality. This collaboration will support access to prominent industry insights on methods for using imagination practices to enhance educational equity. Using co-design with AIME and Social Ventures Australia, it will investigate how these insights can be translated to school contexts to enrich Australian schooling in an environment under intensifying external pressures. The outcomes of this project will support national education agendas for embedding twenty-first century skills of imagination in Australian schooling.Read moreRead less
Deadly Futures:Enabling Indigenous Children’s Literacy, Numeracy, Wellbeing. This project aims to test the effectiveness of new literacy, numeracy and wellbeing interventions using powerful interdisciplinary approaches. The project expects to generate new knowledge about enabling Indigenous students to have deadly futures by enhancing literacy, numeracy and wellbeing, capitalising on research-derived interventions and the wisdom of Indigenous communities. Expected outcomes include salient interv ....Deadly Futures:Enabling Indigenous Children’s Literacy, Numeracy, Wellbeing. This project aims to test the effectiveness of new literacy, numeracy and wellbeing interventions using powerful interdisciplinary approaches. The project expects to generate new knowledge about enabling Indigenous students to have deadly futures by enhancing literacy, numeracy and wellbeing, capitalising on research-derived interventions and the wisdom of Indigenous communities. Expected outcomes include salient intervention and advances in Indigenous education. Benefits encompass identifying effective intervention and drivers that enhance Indigenous students’ literacy, numeracy, wellbeing, and adaptive motivation, and working effectively in genuine partnership with Indigenous community to address a community-identified need.Read moreRead less
Indigenous persistence in formal learning. This project will improve knowledge of the learning experiences of Indigenous students transiting from TAFE to university studies. The results will have significant implications for the ways Indigenous students can be supported in their studies in order to achieve better quality learning experiences as well as learning outcomes.
Testing for scale up: An Indigenous social and emotional learning program . This project takes key learnings from prior research that conceptualised, set up, and tested a social and emotional learning program, Skills for Life (SFL), with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in grades 7-9 in remote Northern Territory and Queensland schools. It aims to: establish the process and necessary conditions for scaling up SFL to diverse remote schools with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander s ....Testing for scale up: An Indigenous social and emotional learning program . This project takes key learnings from prior research that conceptualised, set up, and tested a social and emotional learning program, Skills for Life (SFL), with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in grades 7-9 in remote Northern Territory and Queensland schools. It aims to: establish the process and necessary conditions for scaling up SFL to diverse remote schools with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students across Australia's top end. Further evidence for the program’s effectiveness will also be built by measuring students’ resilience, help seeking, and psychological distress; and teachers’ cultural awareness; quality of teacher-student relationships, and perceptions of students’ emotional and behavioural difficulties. Read moreRead less