Exploring New Conceptualisations of Old Problems: Researching and Reorienting Teaching in Indigenous Studies to Transform Student Learning

Abstract

Indigenous Studies can be both exciting and challenging for teachers and students. This article will examine how an existing learning theory can be harnessed to help teachers better understand these challenges and manage some frequently seen student behaviours. Much of the discussion in Indigenous Studies pedagogy to date has focused on the curriculum and what we should be teaching, with a growing body of literature, for example, related to the inclusion of Indigenous Knowledges. However, there is less written about how students learn in Indigenous Studies. Drawing on the notion of the Cultural Interface and the ‘zone of proximal development’ to highlight the complexity of Indigenous Studies classrooms as a site of necessary struggle for students, the article considers possibilities for reconceptualising and reorienting teaching. The paper explores using the threshold concepts framework to gather evidence about how students learn or indeed don't learn, in Indigenous Studies. Threshold concepts are key ideas, critical to mastering discipline specific knowledge, which facilitate students’ ability to think like a discipline experts.

Critical Reflexivity in Indigenous and Cross‐cultural Psychology: A Decolonial Approach to Curriculum?

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Challenging Lecturer Assumptions About Preservice Teacher Learning in Mandatory Indigenous Studies

“…Their paper highlights the need for further investigation into the pedagogical, curricular and assessment decision-making processes of these cognate areas as Universities seek to develop graduate skills and knowledge across a range of professional domains (p. 20). Page (2014) has also noted that research has largely focused on what should be taught in Indigenous Studies rather than on how students learn in this area. These arguments prompt us to engage in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Indigenous Studies, a process that focuses on improving student learning by: (a) being informed about teaching and learning generally and in the teachers’ own discipline; (b) reflection on that information, the teachers’ particular context and the relations between the two; (c) the focus of the teaching approach adopted; and (d) communication of the relevant aspects of the other three dimensions to members of the community of scholars (Trigwell, Martin, Benjamin, & Prosser, 2000, p. 167).…”

Driving Transformative Learning within Australian Indigenous Studies

“…This focuses on a range of elements including cognitive maturity in relation to the capacity for CR (Merriam, 2004), the ethics of inducing potential identity transformation via the deep questioning of assumptions held (Taylor & Cranton, 2013), and even the validity of transformative learning theory itself (Newman, 2012). While debate remains on-going, transformative learning theory is implicitly acknowledged as relevant to Indigenous Australian studies through the growing use of, and call for, the theoretical framework in detailing the effects of courses in this space (e.g., Jackson et al 2013; Kickett et al, 2014; Page, 2014). This body of work, while not necessarily focused on transformative learning itself, approaches the context with a premise of understanding and affecting change, personally and socially.…”