Transcript Presentation title Date or subhead

Including Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander histories and
cultures:
fears, fallacies and futures
27/9/2013
Dr Kathy Butler
Bert Groves addressing the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board 1953
• We know what it is for men to live without
government and, living without government to
live without rights; ...We see it among many
savage nations, or rather races of mankind;
• for instance among the savages of New South
Wales... no habit of obedience, and thence no
government; no government and thence no
laws; no laws, and thence nor any such thing as
rights, no security, no property” (Bentham 1973:
268-9).
Orion (cited in
Baskin, 2002, 11)
I agreed with them because
it was propaganda… If you
talk about a hole in the
street up there that’s
politics. And this old clichéd
business of saying we are
non-political. If you’re nonpolitical, man, you’re dead,
you’re not even thinking
(Noonuccal, 1988, 19).
• For me, critical pedagogy poses the challenge:
• This is a great discovery, education is politics!
After that, when a teacher discovers that he or
she is a politician, too, the teacher has to ask,
What kind of politics am I doing in the
classroom? That is, in favor of whom am I
educating? By asking in favor of whom am I
educating, the teacher must also ask against
whom am I educating… After that moment the
educator has to make his or her choice (Freire in
Shor & Freire, 1987, 46).
Examples of
English that
are current,
and
exemplify
the lived
experience
and
language
conventions
of Australian
children
today
• Attempts to discover an Indigenous
Mathematics are undoubtedly wellintentioned, but ultimately ill-directed. It is
neither useful nor beneficent to bestow on
aspects of Aboriginal and Islander cultures
a significance that they do not, in fact,
possess. (Deakin 2010)
• “Our mainstream culture, the culture that
all Australians will inherit, needs the
precision of modern science. Earlier
cultures did indeed develop accounts of
such matters, and these served them well
through many millennia; however, they are
nowadays superseded” (Deakin
2010)…therefore
Living Knowledges
Indigenous knowledge in science education
• “The Garma Maths curriculum, for
example, finds correspondences between
aspects of the Yolŋu kinship system,
(Gurrutu), and aspects of numeracy; and
between people’s connections with place,
(Djalkiri), and concepts of pattern and
space in western maths”.
(http://livingknowledge.anu.edu.au/index.htm)
• OI.2 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities
maintain a special connection to and responsibility for
Country/Place throughout all of Australia.
• OI.5 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ ways of
life are uniquely expressed through ways of being, knowing,
thinking and doing.
• OI.7 The broader Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
societies encompass a diversity of nations across Australia.
• OI.8 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have
sophisticated family and kinship structures.