'This book provides a guide to research and teaching in an Australian Indigenous Studies that is oriented toward the diverse, contemporary world. Central to this perspective is a sensibility to the intercultural complexity of that world - particularly its Indigenous component - and an awareness of the interactional capabilities that the Indigenous (and others) need to successfully negotiate it. These capabilities are important for facilitating Indigenous peoples' goal of equality as citizens and recognition as Indigenous, a goal which this book seeks to address. The Indigenous Studies presented in this book rejects as unproductive the orientation of orthodox Indigenous Studies, which promulgates the retention of old cultures, positive stereotypes, binary oppositions and false certainties. It adopts a more dialogical and process-oriented approach that highlights interactions and relationships and leads to the recognition of cultural and identity multiplicity, intersection and ambiguous difference. The book covers key topics such as ancestral cultures, colonisation and its impacts, identity politics, interculturality, intersectionality, structural marginalisation, unit development and teaching complexity. The focus of the book is the development of a sensibility that can shape readers' perceptions, decisions and actions in the future and guide teachers in their negotiation of intercultural classroom relationships.' (Publication summary)
'Australian Indigenous studies: research and practice is an important and timely intervention into the scholarship currently informing the design and delivery of Indigenous studies in school curricula. Aimed primarily at school teachers and guided by the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority and the Australian Institute for School Teaching, the book offers a critical response to the ideological orthodoxies evident in both contemporary Indigenous studies curricula and approaches to teaching Indigenous students and their dependence on one-dimensional, culturally over-determined representations of ‘the Indigenous’ as they are promulgated by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. These representations and their continued reproduction — across various educational, governmental and other sites — typically construct indigeneity as radically different from and incommensurate with its non-Indigenous other, and it is this static binaristic notion of indigeneity that Australian Indigenous studies challenges. In making its alternative case for intercultural Indigenous studies, the book calls upon readers to complicate conventional understandings of indigeneity as a mode of identity construction and to recognise that it is simultaneously informed and made ambiguous by location-specific cultural, historical and other experiences, diverse intersubjective interactions and other intersecting layers of identity.' (Introduction)
'Australian Indigenous studies: research and practice is an important and timely intervention into the scholarship currently informing the design and delivery of Indigenous studies in school curricula. Aimed primarily at school teachers and guided by the Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority and the Australian Institute for School Teaching, the book offers a critical response to the ideological orthodoxies evident in both contemporary Indigenous studies curricula and approaches to teaching Indigenous students and their dependence on one-dimensional, culturally over-determined representations of ‘the Indigenous’ as they are promulgated by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. These representations and their continued reproduction — across various educational, governmental and other sites — typically construct indigeneity as radically different from and incommensurate with its non-Indigenous other, and it is this static binaristic notion of indigeneity that Australian Indigenous studies challenges. In making its alternative case for intercultural Indigenous studies, the book calls upon readers to complicate conventional understandings of indigeneity as a mode of identity construction and to recognise that it is simultaneously informed and made ambiguous by location-specific cultural, historical and other experiences, diverse intersubjective interactions and other intersecting layers of identity.' (Introduction)
