There is clear evidence that Indigenous education has changed considerably over time. Indigenous Australians' early experiences of ‘colonialised education’ included missionary schools, segregated and mixed public schooling, total exclusion and ‘modified curriculum’ specifically for Indigenous students which focused on teaching manual labour skills (as opposed to literacy and numeracy skills). The historical inequalities left a legacy of educational disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Following activist movements in the 1960s, the Commonwealth Government initiated a number of reviews and forged new policy directions with the aim of achieving parity of participation and outcomes in higher education between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Further reviews in the 1980s through to the new millennium produced recommendations specifically calling for Indigenous Australians to be given equality of access to higher education; for Indigenous Australians to be employed in higher education settings; and to be included in decisions regarding higher education. This paper aims to examine the evolution of Indigenous leaders in higher education from the period when we entered the space through to now. In doing so, it will examine the key documents to explore how the landscape has changed over time, eventually leading to a number of formal reviews, culminating in the Universities Australia 2017–2020 Indigenous Strategy (Universities Australia, 2017).
This paper introduces and provides comprehensive detail of a new theoretical framework termed ‘Indigenous Institutional Theory’. In doing so, the paper discusses ‘Western’ and ‘Indigenous’ methodological practices and examines two existing theories that influence the newly developed framework; Indigenous Standpoint Theory (Nakata in Disciplining the savages, savaging the disciplines, Aboriginal Studies Press, Chicago, 2007) and Institutional Theory. Illustrating a conceptual framework for Indigenous inquiry, the framework acknowledges the Indigenous perspective, with the intention of offering a new lens in which the Indigenous experience within institutions can be interpreted and analysed. It is anticipated that the framework will be utilised in the future research by Indigenous scholars as a powerful explanatory tool when examining a variety of organisational phenomena in modern society. While the theoretical framework articulated in this paper has initially been designed for an Indigenous research project, the framework can be adapted and utilised when examining the standpoint of minority groups within Western institutions and addressing the diversity gap in leadership. As such, the paper is also relevant to organisational and leadership scholars investigating ways in which discriminatory (e.g. gendered and racialised) structures are created and culturally challenged within Western institutions.
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