Teaching indigenous perspectives in the 21st century classroom

Teachers across Australia are now required to include Indigenous perspectives in their teaching for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. Most teachers know little or nothing about Indigenous people and so they present a pedagogy that fantasises about the lives of Indigenous people before the British invasion rather than confronting the historical and political controversies of the present. Non-Indigenous children learn to think about Indigenous people in the past tense, while many teachers overlook the myriad resources available that narrate and explicate the contemporary lives of Indigenous people for children. I suggest in this chapter that teachers in Australia have a powerful role to play in how the future relationship develops between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, and this future will depend on whether teachers are prepared to reassess their own place in history. The impetus for this was created recently through the Australian Prime Minister's apology to the Stolen Generations.