Kinship Online: Engaging ‘Cultural Praxis’ in a Teaching and Learning Framework for Cultural Competence

Abstract

The article describes the teaching and learning framework that underpins a Kinship Online Module aimed at delivering online cross-cultural training at the university level. It is based on an existing workshop designed and presented to non-Aboriginal staff and students by Lynette Riley, a Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi woman from Dubbo and Moree. In doing so, this article reflects on the pedagogical framework and adopted learning environment, and describes how the project adopts a 'cultural praxis' approach that combines a social constructivist, problem-based immersive learning approach with five complementary pedagogical approaches. These principles underpin the designing of a program that embeds diverse Aboriginal knowledge into this online teaching resource.

Weaving First Peoples' knowledge into a university course

“…As Nakata explains: "it is not possible to bring in Indigenous knowledge and plonk it in the curriculum unproblematically as if it is another data set for Western knowledge to discipline and test" (2007, p. 8). Indeed, taking into account First Peoples' epistemologies in both methods and content offers a relevance that cannot be achieved through simply trying to fit First Peoples' culture into Western pedagogies and curricula (Riley, Howard-Wagner and Mooney, 2015).…”

Global Citizenship Through the Lens of Indigenous Pedagogies in Australia and New Zealand. A Comparative Perspective

“…The interactive face-to-face presentation was first developed in 1987 by Riley to assist understanding of traditional kinship structures and the impact of colonization. Riley consulted with Aboriginal Peoples widely (Riley et al 2015) and delivered her learning by dividing the participants into different family groupings. They were invited to group and re-group; exploring the learning space in physical ways and thereby enacting the different relationships, connections and associations that related to the kinship structures that Riley was teaching.…”

What do they need to know? Core skills for postgraduate development studies students

“…This is particularly surprising given Australia's geographic positionality between the north and south and our Indigenous population (Schech, 2012), which has the oldest continuous culture in the world. Development studies should join the push to add, to the traditional university focus on improving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander access to university, a focus on promoting the learning of Indigenous culture to become mainstream in Australian higher education (see Riley et al, 2015). Langdon (2013) also argued for a challenge to the power structure in which we teach, which is a difficult task.…”

“…Wiggins (2011) provides a range of inspirations from popular education for active learning techniques to use with critical pedagogies. Riley et al (2015) also offer very relevant inspiration with their approach to teaching Indigenous epistemologies within a Western teaching and learning system particularly focusing on Aboriginal standpoint pedagogy and a narrative teaching style. Petra Tschakert and her colleagues (this issue) offer quite a novel approach with their focus on affect and emotion in teaching development.…”