Inclusive, colour-blind, and deficit: Understanding teachers' contradictory views of Aboriginal students’ participation in education

Abstract

This paper contributes evidence-based scholarship to how teachers understand the value of Aboriginal student-focussed programmes and how discourses of Indigeneity appear to influence those views. Interviews with n = 22 teachers across n = 3 secondary school sites in New South Wales highlighted teachers’ understanding of Aboriginal programmes as primarily contributing to students’ behavioural and academic improvement. The interviewed teachers spoke positively about Aboriginal students’ current academic achievements and prospects for their bright futures as graduates, albeit from within deficit and colour-blind discourses. Utilising Moodie’s Decolonising Race Theory framework, teachers’ juxtaposing beliefs resonate with existing decolonising education research which indicates a performativity of cultural inclusion through adherence to settler-colonial practices, while at the same time, an intellectual desire to move away from the legacy of Australia’s contentious colonial past.

Toward culturally sustaining/revitalizing Indigenous family-school-community leadership

“…Indigenous families and communities, in particular, have been unjustly labeled as "deficient, deviant, or uncaring" when they have refused to serve as "compliance officers for schools enacting settler-colonial agendas" (Bang et al, 2018, p. 5). International scholarship has found that deficit views and assimilative stances toward Indigenous students and their families by educational system leaders and teachers have proved similar in several settler colonial countries, including toward First Nations families in Canada (Madden et al, 2013;Milne, 2016;Washington, 2021b), Aboriginal communities in Australia (Fleer, 2004;Mander, 2015;Fricker et al, 2023;Weuffen et al, 2023), and Māori whānau in Aotearoa New Zealand (Mutch and Collins, 2012;Hindle et al, 2017;Jacobs et al, 2021).…”