Global neoliberal imperatives that numerically measure student success through standardized testing undermine the educational outcomes of students, in particular Indigenous students, and construct a seemingly fixed reality that avoids State responsibility to address structural inequality in Australia. Achievement gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous school students in mathematics have become an urgent international problem. Although evidence suggests that culturally responsive pedagogies (CRPs) improve student academic success for First Nations peoples in settler colonial countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, less prominent is a focus on how CRP is enacted and mobilized in Australian classrooms. Although some initiatives exist, this article explores how creative and body-based learning (CBL) strategies might be utilized to enact CRP. Using an ethnographic case study approach, we examined how two early career teachers serving Indigenous and ethnically diverse students implemented CBL to reengage students with mathematics. Findings suggest that the teachers were able to mobilize a number of CRP principles using CBL strategies to facilitate engagement in mathematics for urban Aboriginal students. Specifically, when teachers repositioned students as “competent” and designed embodied learning experiences that connected to their cultural backgrounds, students let go of their cautious learner histories and remade themselves as clever and competent.

[1,2,3,4,5]. It is through supervised role play games that we feel a more holistic shared, reconciliatory cultural heritage knowledge can be shaped. This paper concludes with some recommendations for the implementation of a more inclusive reconciliation pedagogy.

A conceptual framework for looking and listening operates within aesthetic and affective moments when crafting objects. Assembling and modifying Sea Balls into arranged composition is my craft process that I use to access a state of mind play. Each found and modified object represents a key theoretical framework that I connect and re-organize in relation to each other to produce new ways of perceiving. Considerations of Massumi, Fish and Jameson’s (2002) notion of perception and how I experience affect through embodiment in the moment of re-crafting and re-assembling items is central to the practice. Emergent ideas occur through re-crafting found objects in conjunction with broader considerations of relational aesthetics.

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