We are very pleased to bring you Volume 49 Issue 2 of The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education. Part one of this Special Issue of AJIE is guest edited by Chelsea Bond and Helena Kajlich and draws on findings from a Lowitja Institute funded project ‘Moving Beyond the Frontline’. The project examined critical success factors for enabling Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership across the health system as demonstrated by alumni of the University of Queensland's (UQ) Bachelor of Applied Health Science (Indigenous Primary Health Care) or Indigenous Health Program (IHP) that ran from 1994 to 2005. The articles reflect on the role of higher education in building an Indigenous health workforce across Australia. As Bond and Kajlich highlight in their introduction, the articles tell ‘a very different story in a very different way’ by centring the experiences of Indigenous peoples who occupy varying positions across the health workforce education pipeline.

Part two of this volume is a scholarly dialogue about the role of Direct Instruction (DI) in very remote schools. Published here in sequence, the conversation begins with an article by Guenther and Osborne published originally online in January 2020. The dialogue then continues with a critique of Guenther and Osborne's paper by Buckingham as well as a response by Guenther and Osborne to further contribute to the dialogue. We hope that this provides a way for scholars to engage with the evolving scholarship in Indigenous educational research. We hope you enjoy reading the papers in this Special Issue despite these challenging times and hope that we continue to have ongoing conversations across research and practice internationally.