Indigenous Education Commons^™

The Native American Organic Garden: Using Service Learning As A Site Of Resistance To The Boarding School Tradition, Donna Chollett

Anthropology Publications

As educators, we owe it to our students to enable them to transgress structural impediments and to create sustainable alternatives from the margins of the industrial agro-food system. Policies of assimilation, allotment, and enclosure of the Native American commons and ecosystems brought devastation to Native cultures. Dependence on government commodities replaced Native food sovereignty and contributed to malnutrition, obesity, and diabetes as diets responded to corporately produced and processed foods. Young people often feel disempowered and ask how they might confront such formidable forces as corporate control of our agro-food system, destruction of natural resources, and threats to human health. …

Learning, Earning And Yearning: The Case For Positive Disruption, Innovation And Expansion In Indigenous Education, Tony Dreise

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

‘What for, I do this?’ asks an Aboriginal young man who has just become the first in his community to finish high school. Rather than celebrating his achievement, he felt the need to ask one of the most profound questions in education – what for or why? This particular story, discovered during the course of my PhD research, leads to an even larger question: How do we personalise education? The question seems a mile away from the perennial debate in education – ‘back to basics’ versus an expansive education agenda. Conservatives in the ‘back to basics’ corner rightly point out …

Bubalamai Bawa Gumada (Healing The Wounds Of The Heart): The Search For Resiliency Against Racism For Aboriginal Australian Students, Gawain Bodkin-Andrews, Rhonda Craven

2009 - 2019 ACER Research Conferences

Within the Australian research setting, a strong research base has emerged to articulate both the nature and impact of racism from the perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It may be argued though that quantitative approaches to this research have been limited by simplistic measures that fail to capture the complexity of racism today. This limitation may have important implications for the identification of factors that could provide a buffer against the detrimental effects of racism, and thus promote a stronger and positive sense of resilience and engagement for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth. It is the …

Contextual Factors That Influence The Achievement Of Australia’S Indigenous Students: Results From Pisa 2000–2006, Lisa De Bortoli, Sue Thomson

Lisa De Bortoli

Results from international programs that assess the skills and knowledge of young people have indicated that Australia’s Indigenous students perform at a significantly lower level than non- Indigenous students. An in-depth comparison of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students’ performance on the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) across three cycles is provided in an accompanying volume to this report, while the current report provides an understanding of how various aspects of students’ background and psychological constructs relate to each other and to student performance. Chapters 2 through 5 each focus on a different group of potential influences on the performance of …

The Achievement Of Australia's Indigenous Students In Pisa 2000-2006, Lisa De Bortoli, Sue Thomson

Lisa De Bortoli

The three-yearly PISA assessments provide an opportunity to monitor the performance of Australian students in reading, mathematical and scientific literacy. In particular, the assessments allow us to examine the performance of particular equity groups; to look at how well particular groups of 15-year-old students, approaching the end of their compulsory schooling are prepared for meeting the challenges they will face in their lives beyond school. A special focus for Australia has been to ensure that there is a sufficiently large sample of Australia’s Indigenous students so that valid and reliable analysis can be conducted. This has been achieved in each …

Unfinished Business : Pisa Shows Indigenous Youth Are Being Left Behind, Tony Dreise, Sue Thomson

Dr Sue Thomson

The latest international assessment of students’ mathematical, scientific and reading literacy – the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) – shows that the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students has remained the same for the last decade. In short, Indigenous 15-yearolds remain approximately two-and-a-half years behind their non-Indigenous peers in schooling.

This essay provides a précis of the results and analysis of some of the issues; it compares Indigenous performance in 2012 with that from previous PISA cycles; and discusses a range of implications for policy and practice.

Unfinished Business: Pisa Shows Indigenous Youth Are Being Left Behind, Tony Dreise, Sue Thomson

Indigenous Education Research

The latest international assessment of students’ mathematical, scientific and reading literacy – the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) – shows that the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students has remained the same for the last decade. In short, Indigenous 15-year olds remain approximately two-and-a-half years behind their non-Indigenous peers in schooling.

This essay provides a précis of the results and analysis of some of the issues; it compares Indigenous performance in 2012 with that from previous PISA cycles; and discusses a range of implications for policy and practice.

Spaces Of Nature: Producing Gilgit-Baltistan As The Eco-Body Of The Nation, Nosheen Ali

Institute for Educational Development, Karachi

A while ago, when I was studying in Grade 8 at an English-medium school in Lahore, our class was divided up in four groups for a Geography project on Pakistan. The group of which I was a part had to make a sculptural map of Pakistan, demonstrating the diverse physical and social qualities of its landscape. And so we had set about carving our country with materials like styro-foam, cotton, cloth, and cardboard. In the final map that we made, the region of Gilgit-Baltistan - then the “Northern Areas” – had remained unlabeled and unpeopled, marked only with mountains made …