Decolonising schooling practices through relationality and reciprocity: embedding local Aboriginal perspectives in the classroom

Indigenous communities share concerns related to power, tokenism, and the reproduction of patterns of privilege and discrimination within formal schooling systems. These are issues that were central to ambitions of the Culture, Community and Curriculum Project (CCCP), the focus of this paper. The CCCP was a three-year ‘pilot’ study that accepted from the outset that Aboriginal parents and community members should have a genuine and meaningful role in education-related decision making and practices. We report on the processes and experiences of community members and teachers as they drew on local expertise to embed contextually responsive perspectives, knowledges, and ways of teaching that met national curriculum requirements, while concurrently fostering learners’ critical social consciousness. We hope to illustrate how and why the embedding of local Aboriginal perspectives has enriched the learning experiences for all involved, whilst highlighting some of the challenges of such an approach being genuinely taken up more widely.