In this engaging, thought provoking and encouraging presentation, Julie Woodlock from Barrier Reef Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) Queensland, Australia, reflects on ways to incorporate Indigenous standpoint theory into the cultural interface in her teaching practice. Through the use of binary tools eg. close and distant, she examines the seven critical factors in course design and delivery, identified by Miller (2005).

This discussion forms the basis of a conference paper jointly written by Julie Woodlock and Dr Sarojni Choy which is currently under review for publication with the Queensland University of Technology. It was written after her presentation at the (Re) Contesting Indigenous Knowledge & Indigenous Studies Conference, on the Gold Coast, Australia, June 28-30 2006.

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When tensions lead to change…

Hi, my name is Julie Woodlock and I live in Townsville and I work at the Barrier Reef Institute of TAFE.(Slide 1)

Today’s presentation ‘When tensions leads to change…’ is in many ways, I guess, my attempt to try and articulate some of my own practices using some current research, Miller’s (2005) critical factors in design and delivery and I have tried to apply them to my practices to actually just, I guess, analyse more and I guess the tension…where the tension is ..is a bit of a metaphor around using an elastic band and trying to stretch my thoughts, as much as I possibly can, so that I am trying to be more inclusive in my own practices as a teacher. So with no further ado I will just start the presentation.

When I first started considering about what Miller’s seven critical factors were and how they actually articulated into my own practice, um…this came under the banner of Indigenous standpoint theory, which was a new theory to me and I was asked to present at a conference in (Re)Contesting Indigenous Knowledges earlier this year and so I had to start considering well what does Indigenous standpoint theory mean? This particular slide here…

(Slide 2)

I put in a Google search as an example because I mean I’m no great authority on it, but I do … (and this presentation is not really about going into great details on it), but it is important that you understand that Indigenous standpoint theory is about shifting knowledges into more of the core of curriculum and more the core of… the centre of how Indigenous people their knowledge, their values etc. have been always marginalised and this particular theory says “No. We are not going to do that any more. We are actually going to move it across as a very important central part of curriculum” and where we do delivery of vocational education, for instance, in my situation. So this definition says: ‘Repositioning Indigenous knowledge from notions of disadvantage or equity to generally embedding Indigenous knowledge at the core of the curriculum’.

(Slide 3)

When you are considering Indigenous standpoint theory one of the definitions to help us along the way is I guess considering the space that we live in, the cultural interface, it is called. And it really is about thinking in terms of: who’s in the cultural interface and what role do we play in the cultural interface? Now this definition is quite good. It is by Martin Nakata (2002) and you will see that he is one of the key players in this particular theory. He has defined it as: Spaces where Indigenous and non-Indigenous create and act upon meaning or misunderstandings and can be considered as a series of ongoing cultural dialogues.

This is very important to consider, but probably more importantly it is also important to think about what role do you, do you play in this cultural interface? And whether we like it or not like it, we are actually part of it and I think it is important for us to acknowledge that the reality is, is that we are sitting in a cultural interface, whether on the border or not, we are still living in a cultural interface.

(Slide 4)

And as you read about Indigenous standpoint theory you will get lots of different types of definitions of this, depending on people’s positions. Some people even call it war zones. And I think that is a fair enough statement because essentially as you experience the cultural interface, depending on your experience, will determine exactly how you deal with this theory. So let’s just get back to the idea that we are playing along in it, but just for a minute consider what sort of role could be, you might be playing.

(Slide 5)

So for instance, are you are a lurker? Are you somebody who is aware that there are Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, that you are teaching or working in the mainstream and you are aware that there are Indigenous people are there. But you are just lurking, you are actually watching and not able to really do too much about it at this point. Or are you in it and aware that you are in it, quite strongly, so you’re not just lurking, but you really don’t know what role you are supposed to play in it, so when it comes to…especially if you are a non-Indigenous person as myself, how/what role do you have in the culture interface that especially will benefit and assist non Indigenous, (sorry) Indigenous people?

Or do you have great ideas or ways of actually positively moving forward, but not sure about how you are going to go about it? Now they ‘re just three positions that you could take. There are many, many more, but maybe we need to sit down and reflect for a moment about what position we do take in the cultural interface and what meaning or misunderstandings do we have? and this is again I guess another reinforcing of the notion of stretching and using tension, so that we are able to really stretch our minds and think about a more positive move forward.

(Slide 6)

Okay, so I think that no matter what position you take or wherever you have come from, after you have acknowledged, I guess, a good look at where you are at in terms of the cultural interface, then I guess we need to try then, if we are going at Miller’s critical factors, we are going to start to perhaps analyse a little bit more what some of these factors – there are seven of them to be presented – might have in the way we work.

(Slide 7)

So in order for us to do that, I would like to look at some binaries. As I take one/each factor and work with it, I would like to present to you one set of binaries to help consider what that might be in terms of thinking about what we could do. So I am just going to give you some…a bit of ideas and a bit of a snapshot of some of the things that I do, or how I consider stuff. And I’d like you to also consider maybe other binaries that might be useful for yourself. So the four sets of binaries that we are looking at will be ‘within the group and outside of the group’, ‘close and distant’, ‘Indigenous and non-Indigenous’, and ‘past and future’. But that is just some samples of ways we can look at it, and the binaries are tools that I actually use to help stretch the ways I will interpret each set or each critical factor by Miller. Let’s just have a look and see what each one might mean.

(Slide 8)

All right. We are going to look at the establishment of true partnerships. I am going to use the binary, ‘within the group and outside of the group’. Now when I think about ‘within the group’, I think we can’t underestimate the value that is in the group themselves, the students. The relationships that the students have and they bring, the experiences they bring, good and bad, to the group because the different types of personalities and needs and I guess viewpoints bring quite a rich learning environment. Added to that then you’ve got student support officers, hopefully, teachers, tutors and anyone else who is actually within that particular group and I think that’s where it is very very important to start with and think about …it’s not always about building relationships outside, but it is about building partnerships. So to define it with the groups just to sort of let them know that they are going to be starting together for a given period of time and also considering about how people are going to behave and deal with concepts in the group etc. So that is where we start. But ‘outside the group’ is also very rich and interesting because depending on where students are going you need to consider both their family life and their work life and their study life. So balancing all those sorts of areas up can be quite a challenge and we need to think about what it is that they need to consider. We need to invite people into the learning environment and define their roles as well in terms of what we want from them within the learning experience and it might be things like… it could be work experience, it could be support, healthcare workers – a range of things – but when Miller talks about true partnerships in the way that my curriculum works, it is very, very important to build these relationships and in fact we actually have subjects in the Learning Pathways program for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people that actually are titled ‘Building relationships with community Indigenous members’. So building those relationships should not be underestimated and it is the first key factor from Miller.

(Slide 9)

I think we need to, when we look at quality staff and committed advocacy, if you look at ‘non-Indigenous and Indigenous’ then I think it starts to broaden our views and of course it is probably more appropriate, especially with the cultural types of modules, to select Indigenous people who have the Indigenous knowledges. Now that’s…on the other hand you might find that by drawing on the committed advocacy side of this that there are other people who may come into the learning environment and offer different types of knowledge, such as Elders coming in to talk about some of the cultural histories etc. So when you think of quality staff I think we need to think about staff who are culturally appropriate, but also have the qualifications and background. In some instances that is not always easy to get and especially the more remote you get the less likely probably to find people like that, but not necessarily. So we need to really stretch our minds in ways of looking at how do we provide the quality staff when it is available and if not consider what advocacy can we draw in from the community that will be able to provide some of the direction to the group? And this is particularly relevant I think in communities because, especially Indigenous communities, because it is really important for these participants to see the leadership coming from people within their own community and not always within the learning environment as such and that helps I guess take those walls away and blend the two together.

The committed advocacy doesn’t have to be something that is really quite difficult to do or someone who is there all the time. It can come with just guest speakers, it can come with people dropping in to have a cup of coffee and just seeing how the students are going. And again it’s part of the partnerships and relationships that are built throughout the program that seem to probably have the most effect on the students, knowing that there are people there who they can go to outside the program or outside the learning environment, if they need to. So I think the quality staff and committed advocacy need to be thought about and we need to also bring out issues then about how do we also pay if necessary for people who are going to be advocates to the program? Because if you are going to expect people to be involved in the program extensively then you have got to consider what funds, what rewards they will get for their work in the environment.

(Slide 10)

Incorporating Indigenous knowledges cultures, identities and values is crucial to, if we are going to actually be true to incorporating Indigenous standpoint theory to the cultural interface. Now how we do that, we are going to look at ‘past and future’ here. If you think of the past for Indigenous people, it was done naturally through their Elders and through generations, this is pre-colonisation, but through history things have become very fragmented and people have been dislocated from family and there has been a whole shift away from the Indigenous knowledges in the core mainstream curriculum. So the way I guess I deal with that is to bring it to the future, is I invite the Elders in and I step back. I think it is very important to create space and I think that is one of the key words. Create a place and a welcome as well for Elders to come in and consult and talk to the students about what they are actually doing and to consider how they can actually negotiate or identify themselves in a modern society, in the present society, in the future, without taking away their past. So this is a very, very important aspect to consider and if you take any of those binaries in this area you will come up with another picture to help support that particular factor, critical factor in shifting.

(Slide 11)

I would now like to look at community ownership and involvement and use ‘past and future’. Our past record is not good and I think we could all quite truthfully acknowledge that. The big question for us is how do you make it good, and what do we do about getting community engagement and involvement and ownership? And essentially it is about, I think, stepping back and stepping out of programs and giving opportunities for others to come into the programs, just as I have just been recently talking about. The more we have other committed advocacy etc. involved in the program, the more likely we are for the questions to be asked and people to be able to consider what they need to do in terms of making decisions about their learning environment and their future. And I think we need to also offer assistance as we need to. But a lot of the community ownership will, I think, naturally evolve if we increase the decision making by those communities and step in and give assistance as needed and appropriate, according to the learning environment I guess for our context anyway. So it is one of those things you need to think about all the time and question: Is whatever we do in the learning environment…. to consider is this… are we setting up people to be dependent or independent learners and by being independent learners and making decisions and making consequences clear, then I think we are able to start to get more community involvement and ownership back into the learning environment and lives of those learners.

(Slide 12)

The next area is flexibility in course design content and delivery. I am going to use ‘close and distant’ for this one. It is quite interesting for me because I operate on a distributed model and my students … that means that I am in Townsville and my students are somewhere else. So for me this is very important that I consider how am I going to get, I guess, the learning happening in their environment, at a distance from where I am, but at the same time provide a closeness to them so they are actually feeling like they are part of their local community? And I guess the way that I have done that is by investigating and looking at online delivery and when I say online delivery I mean the resources are online and accessible to students, if they have access to online materials. I soon found out that a lot of my students didn’t have that so I’ve got flexibility so that if they do have access to the World Wide Web, then they are able to access all the resources online. I meet virtually with the tutors weekly, for instance and if the students don’t have access then I provide booklets for them. But the booklets aren’t designed to be sitting there filling in and working through tasks that are within the walls of the classroom. In fact they are quite the opposite. Students are actually it’s very much around action learning. Students are required to go out into the community and find out the answers for a lot of the types of tasks that are set. So essentially when we look at ‘close and distant’ then we have to start to think about blended delivery, ways we can deliver that are going to get to people who in more remote areas and previously that have had no access to any formal training. So that is a real challenge for people to work through and a lot of people are experimenting with that right now, for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

(Slide 13)

I will use ‘close and distant’ again for this one, mainly because I really feel it is important for people to consider what extensive services are available to them and not always see it in terms of proximity related to right in front of you, but in fact often in the distance and from my experience here a lot of learners don’t necessarily know what services are available to them, other than the ones that are there face to face and in their face. So it is really important to consider what services and help the students find out what support services are available to them and know what their rights are and how to deal with those particular services. So I guess for this one it is really about an awareness and when I look at ‘close and distant’, it can be close, it can be something about even the person themselves, it can be about their own personal lives or distant could be at a distance and away and considering about where they can work in the future or learn in the future. All of those sorts of things need to be considered in terms of what is available here and what is available there, now.

(Slide 14)

I think we are going to look at the appropriate funding that allows for sustainability and the paper that I am currently writing… I basically say leave this up to the funding devices, funding sources, but I think ‘within the group’ we need to be able to consider the sustainability of programs and think about ways that students can access programs that are within mainstream or under direct grants, in our situation I suppose with vocational education. But also we need to consider ‘outside of the group’ because from my experience it is not just the funding that is important around the student learning environment and the students. It is also about helping provide and improve qualifications for staff to a professional development which is sort of ‘just in time’ learning. That involves a lot of creative thought, also management, through both State and National projects, so when we consider funding it is important to think about what is ‘within the group’ and that can be fees etc. It also is about looking ‘outside of the group’ and how we can get other funding. Also you can look ‘outside of the group’ when you think about what other partnerships can be formulated and maybe even sharing facilities etc. in programs that may make a difference to the delivery and how it looks and this is another area that I engage in, in the consultation process at the beginning of programs, is looking at what facilities are most appropriate, where are they and who could be involved in helping set up those learning environments, and where both parties see the benefit.

I guess finally Miller’s seven factors are there for us to think about our practices ourselves as teachers and to consider the whole curriculum, or the whole learning environment and what needs to be done in terms of moving Indigenous people forward and shifting them into a fairer position in our educational environments, whether it is VET or any other education environment.

(Slide 15)

So I hope this presentation has I guess given you some thought, some food for thought and I hope also, mostly it does move into one of the NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Islander Day of Celebration) aims which is ‘respect the past and believe in the future’.

(Slide 16)

Thank you very much for listening to (or viewing) the presentation and I wish you all well.

References

Miller, C. 2005, Aspects of training that meet Indigenous Australians’ aspirations: A systematic review of research, Australian Government, National Centre for Vocational Education Research, Leabrook, pp. 8-9. Retrieved 21 July, 2006 from http://www.ncver.edu.au/publications/1625.html

Nakata, M. 2002, ‘Indigenous knowledge and the cultural interface: Underlying issues at the intersection of knowledge and information systems’. Presentation to (Re) Contesting Indigenous Knowledge & Indigenous Studies Conference 2006, Surfers Paradise.