Aboriginal education policy

Aboriginal education policy has privileged an ennobled, radically different Aboriginal culture and self, and features many adaptations to curriculum, pedagogy, administrative routine, behavioural expectations and staffing to more effectively meet Aboriginal students’ needs. The approach is built on an Aboriginal culture imagined as a static isolable cultural bloc, and Aboriginal society as a highly integrated fabric of categoric kin relations, gender roles, marriage practices and social obligations. In this imagined Aboriginality, Aborigines belong to and are custodians of remote areas and exist in a finely balanced relationship with the land and in communal harmony. Individuals are unitarily Aboriginal and their cultural identity ‘thickly’ (Cornell and Hartmann, Reference Cornell and Hartmann1998: 73–7) determines their responses to the world.

This discursive framework is postcolonial in its attempt to ameliorate the effects of the colonial dispossession and recuperate the Aborigine from the inferiorisation of the colonial period. In the framework, the cause of contemporary educational failure is the ethnocentric insistence on Anglo-centric curriculum and literate culture pedagogy, and exclusion of alternative histories and oral learning styles. The attempt to recover Aboriginal culture and empower Aborigines is progressive in its intent to restore Aboriginal confidence and ability to engage successfully with the wider society, and thus to provide equal opportunity for educational success and social inclusion (e.g. Derkley, Reference Derkley2010). These conceptualisations of culture, identity and relationship, logic of cause and engine of recovery have been at the core of the policy framework since the 1970s, and, though contested, remain powerful into the present.

In education, Aboriginal culture is taken to produce a spatial giftedness and preference for non-verbal learning via trial and error in real-life situations under the guidance of others in a full relationship. The systemic response has been to adjust standard practice so that it is appropriate to that culture and will therefore help Aboriginal students recover their sense of self and self-esteem and achieve better educational outcomes. The approach is exemplified in Two Way schooling, Aboriginal Studies, cross-cultural awareness and cultural competency training, Aboriginalisation of the workforce and numerous support measures.

The concepts, logic and direction are evident in long-standing national policy frameworks (Commonwealth of Australia, 1985, 1989, 1999), curriculum guidelines and principles of cultural competence and cross-cultural awareness. Those instruments are consistent with the wider discursive paradigm evident in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991a, 1991b), which saw a fundamental dichotomy between schooling and Aboriginal culture:

The Commission advocated culturally appropriate services and self-determination to produce improved self-esteem and better outcomes.

The performance of Aboriginal education policy

The policy framework above is authoritative and, as found in the study on which this paper draws (Moore, Reference Moore2009: 145–64), educational institutions try to implement its prescriptions in good faith. This study was an interpretative ethnography focused on the governmental subjection of Aborigines through schooling and identity politics. It comprised nine months of intermittent participant observation in two urban and one semi-rural Tasmanian school, semi-structured interviews with twenty-four students in those schools and analysis of relevant school and Departmental policy and program documents (Moore, Reference Moore2009: 100–24, 125–65). This fieldwork was undertaken in the period between 2001 and 2002. A second phase of research comprised unobtrusive observation of Aboriginal political leaders in their face-to-face and mediated public interactions between 2002 and 2008, semi-structured interviews with nine Aboriginal adults (including some of those leaders) and analysis of relevant texts.

The study found that schools treat Aborigines as a group of special interest and, expecting special needs, allocate responsibility for their pastoral care and academic support to particular teachers, involve members of the local Aboriginal community in the development and delivery of curriculum, dedicate safe spaces and (consistent with federal programs and funding) facilitate the involvement of Aboriginal parents in the school. They erect public art, arrange exhibitions to showcase culture, adjust standard administrative routine, timetabling, pedagogy and behavioural expectations and preferentially employ Aboriginal education workers.

Teachers strive to make schooling amenable to Aboriginal students by modifying curriculum to match their supposed experiential background and interests, adapting pedagogy to suit their expected aptitudes and preferences and accommodating their notional sense of personal autonomy. Looking to foster students’ recovery of cultural heritage, they organise excursions to heritage sites, art and dance exhibitions and social events. In schools around the state, they situate learning activities in practical contexts like sporting events and restaurants. In these and many other ways, they interact with Aboriginal students, parents and communities with overt cultural respect.

This approach extends to the education of settler-Australians about Aboriginality and the proper ways to relate to Aboriginal people and issues. In Aboriginal Studies classes, teachers teach the imagined Aboriginality, include Aboriginal resistance in Australian history and environmentalism in geography. In pre- and in-service training, school and university staff learn affirmative notions of Aboriginal culture and critical interpretations of colonial history, as well as ideas for adapting their teaching practice in order that it accord with those cultural values and account for the historical legacy.

The performance of these policy prescriptions contributes to the constitution of an Aboriginal ideal-type and the categorisation, typification and subjection of Aboriginal students who can come to believe over time that they are that Aborigine. A prominent footballer, for one, reportedly became aware and proud of his Aboriginality and realised a shared subjectivity with a previously unknown cousin through an Aboriginal Studies course.Footnote ¹ This positive subjection is merely one dimension of the subjection of Aboriginal students, as Aborigines, through education.

Schooling is also a nationalist endeavour, constituting an Australian imagined community, national identity and ideal civic subject (for example, Grundy, Reference Grundy1994). Through the positioning of honour boards, timetabling, administrative routine, exhortations to self-responsibility and standard pedagogy, which have teachers base learning in contemporary life (and act as ethical exemplars; see Hunter, Reference Hunter1988), schools inculcate a bourgeois, Christian, heterosexual, White normality. In tourism classes, students learn that Australia is characterised by fairness, tolerance and freedom; in history, that the British heritage is central and the Australian federation united the white races of the Pacific; and in sociology the nature of the normal household, food and parenting styles (Moore, Reference Moore2009: 131–2). Those values are normalised as those of the ideal Australian citizen, and students are routinely subjected as such.

Much of this subjection is realised through routine Othering and inferiorisation of the poor, unemployed, homeless, delinquent, homosexual and Aboriginal, who are represented as odd, deviant and ‘outside the regime of civility’ (Rose, Reference Rose1999: 88). In the Tasmanian schools observed, normal Australianness was constituted by favourable contrast with the limited freedom of Singapore, child labour and poor hygiene of Indonesia, sexist parenting of Greeks, Italians and Spaniards and sexual intolerance of the US (Moore, Reference Moore2009: 135–6). In the process, children of migrants are simultaneously included as normal and, to the extent of their identification with their parents’ heritage, marginalised as odd.

Aboriginal students are similarly contradictorily positioned. In one instance of normalisation (Moore, Reference Moore2009: 133), two Aboriginal students making a promotional documentary of the city's youth were editing footage they had shot the previous day of a number of young people telling their stories, but were guided by their teacher to edit out the less articulate, leaving the documentary to feature only the more desirable bourgeois youth. The boys’ comments indicated that it was with those who were excluded that they identified. In another instance (Moore, Reference Moore2009: 130–1), an explanation for global development patterns asserted that ‘we settled the temperate forests and grasslands . . . that were ideal for humans’, and that other places were ‘unfavourable to human habitation’. In this, the ‘we’ included all members of the class as of the West, and marginalised the humanity of Others. In this class, three fair-skinned Aboriginal students were included as ‘us’ but may also have felt excluded to the extent of any affinity they felt with people from the deserts or tropics. And the same Aboriginal students witnessed their teacher's routine valorisation of pre-modern culture and unwitting constitution of its contemporary forms as degraded when she said:

Pedagogy demands that teachers use their ‘discretion’ (Lipsky, Reference Lipsky1980: 13–26) by including personal anecdotes, jokes, banter and asides in their teaching and informal relationships with students. In their discretionary talk, teachers often express the progressive discourse and the conservative and neo-liberal discourses that continue within it, and thereby reinforce the normal and marginalise those who depart from it. Some imagine, for example, that their nurturing of students’ Aboriginal culture (as they know it, and thinking it lost) helps those students to heal the scars of colonial denigration to become once again the whole, self-esteeming persons they are thought to have been before colonisation. Some impose standard expectations tentatively for fear of transgressing culture. Others think that Aboriginal students are not very different and so disregard ‘culturally appropriate’ practices or, fearing error or political incorrectness, opt out of engagement with Aboriginal issues or teach a safely bland Aboriginal Studies that kills interest (Hollinsworth, Reference Hollinsworth1992b; Clark, Reference Clark2008: 64–88).

In aggregate, interventions such as these, built on a master discourse dominated by incommensurability, but also the contrary master discourse of the good Australian and competing minority discourses, ‘work’ to press Aborigines to self-normalise. They propose an authentic Aboriginal and Australian citizen as desirable but opposed prime subject positions, position individuals equivocally between them and impose conditions that press them to choose identity with the latter. The conditions of choice are as follows. The idealised Aboriginality is respected but unequal to the idealised Australian, and individuals conforming to it (dark skin, remote location, traditional language or pre-colonial culture) are valued and supported in their difference but regarded as marginal. Other Aboriginalities are less respected, and light-skinned, urban, English speaking individuals with ‘non-Aboriginal’ cultural habits are offered remedial support to recover a modicum of Aboriginality but also to achieve normality, equality and inclusion. This discursive dilemma proposes a choice between either marginalisation as authentic or inclusion as a less Aboriginal/more normal citizen. Everyday reality, desirability and necessity push individual choice in the direction of the latter. Though ‘merely’ discursive, the dilemma has real-world effects.Footnote ²

Aboriginal political discourse in education

Thus far, education policy appears as if conceived, developed and performed with its Aboriginal objects as ‘billiard balls’, acted upon and reacting predictably, without comprehension or will. But these objects – political leaders like Pearson but more critically those who are invested in the culturalism and victimology that he critiques – are active participants in education and wider policy and political debate. Despite their rhetoric of victimhood and the reality of structural weakness, they are politically powerful, and, despite their rhetoric of opposition, they assert the same culture, subject, logic of victimhood and route to recovery as the policy actors of the state. The Aboriginality of policy imagination is as they want: distinctly different, more spiritual, environmentally attuned and in touch with human values lost in the Western world. The innocent Otherness garners political leverage, and lures them into establishing the desired socio-cultural and identity credentials, in part via a reverse Othering that reprises its colonial equivalent (Moore, Reference Moore2009: 171–95, 285–9). This is the political context within which the politics of education sit, of which the small cohort of Indigenous political actors led by Pearson (e.g. Langton, Reference Langton2008a, Reference Langton2008b) and non-Indigenous scholars (e.g. Sutton, Reference Sutton2001, Reference Sutton2009) and journalists (e.g. Neill, Reference Neill2002), are critical.

In Tasmania, Aboriginal political leader Michael Mansell (Reference Mansell1989: 50–1) claims cultural particularity and incommensurable difference and, as in the following comment, asserts that schooling alienates Aboriginal students from that particularity and that its accommodation is key to their educational success:

In a letter to the editor of the local paper the following year, Mansell said:

This rhetoric manipulates the binary difference from ‘them’, the white oppressor, to pit culture against education and secure ‘we’, the Aboriginal victim. It accords with national Aboriginal advocacy that has ‘advanc[ed] the notion of Aboriginal Learning Styles and call[ed] for an Aboriginal Pedagogy for all Aboriginal people in Australia’ (Hughes et al., Reference Hughes, More and Williams2004: 10), even when that advocacy acknowledges that it is driven by purely political motives:

This politics exaggerates the binary choice between national subject-hood and inclusion in the nation, and Aboriginal subject-hood and inclusion in the Aboriginal community, though it uses the choice as a means of motivating individuals to opt for loyalty to their Aboriginality. If the governmentality (see Foucault, Reference Foucault1979; Dean, Reference Dean1999) of the state constructs the structured dilemma, then the governmentality of this politics secures the Aboriginality on which it rests and the dilemma itself.

Aborigines' post-ethnic intercultural everyday

The policy and political discourses are increasingly at variance with Aborigines’ lived reality. The imagined unitary national culture incorporates pre-colonial cultures, Enlightenment ideals, post-industrial Western romanticism and human rights discourses (Kymlicka, Reference Kymlicka2009: 88–92). In Aborigines’ everyday lives, Aboriginal and White domains are thoroughly interpenetrated: Aborigines choose to live in the suburbs, partner and socialise with settler-Australians, consume soap operas, speak Standard Australian English, dream dreams made elsewhere and adopt middle-class habits (Kral, Reference Kral2010; Pearson, Reference Pearson2000; Sutton, Reference Sutton2009: 163–93). Their behaviours indicate a growing depth of affiliation with cultural worlds beyond the Aboriginal, including gender, sexuality, class, nation-state, age/generation, profession and faith.

Following Hollinger (Reference Hollinger2000: 3–8), this reality is conceived as post-ethnic to highlight its increasing cosmopolitanism, multiple connectedness across difference and movement away from the bounded ethnicity of pluralist policy and politics. The term captures the contemporary intercultural reality in which Aboriginality is neither unbridgeable difference nor universal sameness. The universal and the particular coexist in Aboriginal and national imagined cultures; the borderzone between the two is indistinct (see Adams, Reference Adams2009; Adams and Janover, Reference Adams and Janover2009; Kurasawa, Reference Kurasawa2004; Marotta, Reference Marotta2009; Smith, Reference Smith2009). Post-ethnicity imagines the possibility that the structured dilemma can be dissolved as it is by individuals in their relations across the zone. These understandings recognise that Aboriginal culture continues, but as neither an integrated whole nor as individuals’ sole locus of identity. Rather, they conceptualise that culture as comprised of numerous intersecting and interanimating cultures, and so as permanently evolving, and Aborigines as subjectively complex, growing individuals.

The national imagined Aboriginal culture is increasingly an artefact of the relationship with settler-Australia and global cultural ‘presences’ (see Hall, Reference Hall and Rutherford1990: 230–7). In remote areas, pre-colonial traces persist, overlain by the imaginary Aboriginality. In urban centres, where such traces are gone, and lived reality is radically different from the pre-colonial, the imagined dominates. Post-ethnicity recognises that each individual's identification with his/her Aboriginality is of ontological importance, but is coexistent with other identifications, each varying in salience according to context (Jenkins, Reference Jenkins1996). As all people, Aborigines negotiate the intersection of these affiliations, and each is always someone other than the Aboriginal ideal-type and so ‘almost the same but not quite’ Aboriginal (see Bhabha, Reference Bhabha1994). Post-ethnicity implies that Aborigines are similar to and different from each other, and similar to and different from settler-Australians.

Many successfully negotiate their nuanced difference and are not ‘lost between two worlds’, subjectively torn or lacking self-esteem as the structured dilemma proposes. They do not disidentify with their Aboriginality in order to be intellectuals or bourgeois, nor do they switch into and out of distinct cultural codes (see Merlan, Reference Merlan2005: 167–72; Paridies, Reference Paridies2006; Moore, Reference Moore2009: 249–70, 298–304). They use intercultural competencies to negotiate the dilemma, navigate the intersectional ambiguities, ‘softly’ exit their various communities (Rowse, Reference Rowse2000: 1528; see Kukathas, Reference Kukathas1992; Kymlicka, Reference Kymlicka1995: 121; Moore, Reference Moore2009: 309, note 30) and resolve the dissonances the dilemma creates. Like du Bois and Fanon (Posnock, Reference Posnock1997), and unable to entirely escape its thrall, they know the dilemma and can transcend the dichotomies and sense of diminished Aboriginality it produces. In so doing, they gain release to be Aborigines in their own expansive ways, equal participants in civic life and socially successful. They indicate the potential ends of post-ethnic public policy, as below.

Aboriginal performance of the subject of policy

Everyday post-ethnicity coexists with the ethnicised imagined Aboriginality, and, though the imagined infiltrates the lived, the discrepancies are increasingly evident and there is mounting popular scepticism and scholarly critique. There is, too, Aboriginal disquiet about the consequences of the ‘liberal consensus’ (Sutton, Reference Sutton2009; see Moore, Reference Moore2011: 429–30) that has prioritised culture over individual rights. The revelation of discrepancy is strategically threatening, since any dissipation of distinction, groupness and victimhood threatens political leverage. Thus, state and Aboriginal governing interests align to sustain the imagined Aboriginality, albeit for different purposes: the state to sustain the social control it affords, Aboriginal elites their bargaining capacity with the state.

Accordingly, the latter bring social pressure to bear on their constituencies to have them performatively comply with the preferred Aboriginal culture and self (see Moore, Reference Moore2009: 205–13, 293–6). As Pearson (Reference Pearson2000: 63) says, those interests ‘prescribe, as evidence of “true identity”, a restrictive set of ‘behaviour[s], work, interests, endeavours . . . ambitions, dreams, aspirations’, and demonstration of loyalty to those attitudes and behaviours can result in embrace within the community (see also McNamara, Reference McNamara and Hocking1990; Gibson and Pearson, Reference Gibson and Pearson1987). The social pressure is applied to those who show interests beyond the prescribed, in their speech or engagement with schoolwork; they are teased about being a ‘whitefella’ or thinking they are better than others, their loyalty and membership of community is questioned, their claim to Aboriginality challenged, they are called ‘coconuts’ and/or marginalised in social interactions.

With the discourse thus policed, many Aboriginal students come to believe that their Aboriginality inheres in practical interests, environmental knowledge, connection to kin, oral learning style and ‘emotional straightforwardness’ (a euphemism for the resort to physical resolution of disputes). They come to believe that schooling frustrates and oppresses those characteristics and needs, and to perform their Aboriginality through irregular attendance, eschewal of intellectualism and early exit (Keeffe, Reference Keeffe1988; Folds, Reference Folds1987). Many parents, teacher aides and advisory teachers blame student failure on educational failure, demand certain teaching approaches, are ambivalent about their childrens’ engagement in school Footnote ³ and pressure those who are interested in schooling to balance it by engaging more fully in their ‘culture’.Footnote ⁴ This performance adds an estranging rider to relationships with other Australians.

Thus, through collective politics and individual performance, the Aboriginal objects of policy are partners in the policy equation. Both corporate interests contribute to the confection of the mythic Aboriginality and its incompatibility with education, and the combined discursive and social pressures produce a ‘reality’ that urges individuals to be one or the other, not both. The story of Aboriginality and the inducements provided for its expression and non-expression lock individuals into ceding much of their individual decision-making capacity in the negotiation of social life to governing interests. The dynamics lock individuals into their subaltern position even as they are actually capable of negotiating the everyday difficulties of post-ethnic Aboriginality. As Pearson (Reference Pearson2007) says, the politics of ‘minoritisation’ (Cowan, Reference Cowan, Cowan, Dembour and Wilson2001) in this case limits the access to education won through earlier civil rights activism.