The foregoing has outlined the main currents of scholarship regarding Aboriginality, the use of Aboriginality by administrators for conceptual and material control, adoption by Aboriginal political elites for leverage and institutionalisation in public policy. It has shown how policy is often inappropriate to minority individuals‟ disparate realities and can become counter-productive. Education is at the centre of the constitution of the lop-sided reality and the problematic, and potentially at the centre of its resolution.
The educational orthodoxy
Peak Aboriginal representative bodies such as the National Aboriginal Education Committee (NAEC), key Aboriginal researchers (such as Paul Hughes 1981, 1984), and national statements such as the Adelaide and Hobart Declarations and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy (NATSIEP) represent the dominant Aboriginal position with regard to Aboriginal education. They express the orthodox notion of Aboriginal sameness and difference, represent schooling as antithetical to continuing culture and propose that the key to educational success is accommodation of cultural particularity—as it manifests in learning styles, spatial facility, interests—and of their autonomy (see Hughes 1984; Budby and Foley 1998; Tamisari and Milmilany 2003; Hughes et al. 2004). Based on the argument that identity loss is a legacy of colonialism, the validation of culture inherent in self-determination is proposed as the way to build self- esteem and the confidence to engage with „alien‟ knowledge, and thence to better educational outcomes. Some advocacy (see Hughes 1981, 1984, 2004) has asserted exclusive Aboriginal capacity to know, ownership of knowledge about, and authority to speak of, Aborigines An element in this discourse (see Keeffe 1988; Folds 1987) valorises resistance as legitimate expression of Aboriginality.
This discourse dovetails with, and is a product of progressive research and wider educational discourse, which share the notions of Aboriginality and its incompatibility with formal education (RCAIDIC 1991a, 1991b; Partington 2002; Whatman and Duncan 2005). It holds that, as a matter of social justice and minority rights, adjustments should be made to education in order that it better accommodate cultural difference and that such adjustments will lead to improvements in Aboriginal attainment.
Thus, education authorities see Aboriginality „as both the target of specific Aboriginal education programs and … the means by which Aboriginal students could achieve success in schools‟ (Keeffe 1988: 68). Thus too, the Aboriginality of Arnhem Land (see Christie 1985; Harris 1990; Trugden 2000) is generalised so that Aboriginal students from „Port Adelaide, Wollongong and Launceston‟ are perceived, expected to behave as and are taught as Aborigines (Hollinsworth 1992a: 145). Departments of education, regions and schools around the country facilitate Aboriginal communal and parental engagement in, and enhanced control of, their education. Those agencies implement policies of affirmative action to increase the number and accelerate the advancement of Aboriginal staff, and provide other staff with cross-cultural awareness and anti-racism training. They aim to „enhanc[e] Aboriginal identity and self-esteem‟ (Hudspith and Williams 1994: page) and to empower Aboriginal students by Aboriginalising the curriculum (see Christie 1994; Morgan 1991) and teaching to difference (Tripcony 1995; Hudspith 1997; Partington et al. 1999; Stewart 1999). In Aboriginal Studies classes and cultural awareness camps (Keeffe 1988: 68-70), they teach Aboriginal students positive representations of Aboriginality and the history of its oppression. Remote schools implement „culturally appropriate‟ bi-cultural, bilingual „both ways‟ schooling (Harris 1980, 1990; Christie 1985), informing the approach to Aboriginal education around Australia, where best practice is to take advantage of putative cooperative learning styles and take a „warm demanding‟ approach (Fanshaw 1999; Mellor and Corrigan 2004: 22-4).
Governing oppositions
This approach to Aboriginal education has led to some improvement in school attendance and retention, but it has not in the main led to improved outcomes
(Neill 2003; Nakata 2001: 95). Critical scholarship reveals the accommodation as a means of gaining normalising control of native peoples and making them into good citizen subjects (McLean 1995; Luke et al. 1993; Grant 1997).11 It establishes and promotes through education a hierarchy of subject positions and equations and oppositions between them: notably authentic Aboriginality as an abnormal monolithic primitiveness, inferior and opposed to the educated subject, which is equated with normalcy, civilisation and whiteness. The „good student‟ and intellectuality are equated with whiteness and made incompatible with nativeness (Grant 1997; Tilbury 1998, 2001). These positionings problematise the possibility of being both educated and Aboriginal.
In its general politics and as it applies to education, Aboriginal political discourse inverts the hierarchy by adopting the positive and using the pejorative elements of colonialist and assimilationist discourse to motivate and position the Aboriginal subject. It retains the binary distinction for its own purposes of control, nation-building and subjection. Thus it prescribes, as evidence of “true identity”, a restrictive set of „behaviour[s], work, interests, endeavours, … ambitions, dreams, aspirations‟, and „dress[es] up anti-intellectualism and apathy as Aboriginal culture and the “blackfella way”‟ (Pearson 2000: 63). But in doing so it reinforces, and further enmeshes Aboriginal individuals within, the oppositional governing logic. It equates Aboriginal subjecthood with victimhood, and is at best „equivocal‟ (Pearson 2000: 62) about the relationship between indigeneity and education. It stifles students‟ „autonomy, individuality and creativity‟ (Pearson 2000: 63) and locks them out of intellectual and social development beyond the authorised Aboriginality. The politics then, serves to magnify the governing dilemma or double bind.12
This is a marginalising and subsequently self-marginalising trap of imagined authenticity. Moreover, it is constructed in the face of contemporary Aboriginal students‟ actual departure from the type. The so-called White and Aboriginal
11 This is consistent with the subjection of other populations. Through the organisation of space, time, routine and dress (Meadmore and Symes 1996), schooling constructs childhood, national identity and sexuality; see Israeli 1989; Ball 1990; Tamir 1992; Meredyth and Tyler 1993; Grundy 1994; Kirvinen and Rinne1998; Middleton 1998; McLeod 1998; Popkewitz and Brennan 1998. 12 The „double bind‟ in education was noted by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody; it refers to the notion that though both are necessary to Aboriginal social health, mainstream education and traditional culture are incompatible opposites. See Chapter Eight, pp. 243-44.
domains, thought to be separable, are internally differentiated and radically intersected (see McConvell 1994; Folds 1992), and individual participants in those domains are also immersed in global flows (Pearson 2000: 63; Nakata 2001: 94). They learn in the range of human ways, live diverse contemporary lives (Nicholls et al. 1995) and are capable of mastering English as well as vernacular language (Nakata 2000, 2002).
Despite their heterodox lived reality, the orthodoxy continues, overlaying and infiltrating it, making education another site of the imagining into being of the phantasmatic Aboriginality and lop-sided reality and contributor to the complexities and problematics which attend it. The combination of normalising pressure in progressive education and normative Aboriginalising pressure in the politics produces a reality more authoritative than discrepant demotic realities.
Accordingly, education institutionalises expectations which may be appropriate to the imagined, but are inappropriate to lived Aboriginality. Progressive attempts to respond positively to Aboriginality do not dislodge, but secure, the commonplace employment of notions of blood and descent, description of Aboriginal experience, culture and identity in essentialised ways, and the assertion „that only Aboriginal people can and should research, write or teach about Aboriginal subjects‟ (see Hollinsworth 1992d: unpaginated). Anti- racist teaching can re-impose normative Aboriginality with racist effect (Hollinsworth 1992b). And Aboriginal students are torn between competing authoritative discourses, one extolling them to be authentic and therefore not intellectual, the other urging them to be participatory citizens and therefore to cultural inauthenticity. The import is that they can be either real Aborigines or educated, participatory citizens, but not both, which can produce disengagement (see Gibson and Pearson 1987; Pearson 2000).
Efforts at reform following this critique exhibit the main ideological and political faultline of the multicultural accommodation. Progressive educators and activists retain their faith in the notion of external cause and inadequacy of response to difference, while conservatives retain their faith in public neutrality and personal responsibility. The former advocate better consultation, teacher training and greater cultural validation and autonomy, while the latter advocate mainstreaming and individualised citizenship (see Schwab and Sutherland 2001;
Novak 2006; Hughes 2007; Hughes and Warin 2005: 15-17). Both inadequately address, and remain within, the dilemma: the former privilege the orthodox Aboriginality that marginalises Aborigines while the latter ignore the structural asymmetry that marginalises. In the event, critique is made impossible, non- indigenous teachers opt out (Hollinsworth 1995: 92), and the status quo continues. Emerging transcendence of the dilemma
Some researchers, informed by poststructuralist, postmodernist, feminist and postcolonial theorising (for example, Giroux 1983, 1991; Lather 1991; McLaren 1995), are working at an educational „radical centre‟ which conceptually dissolves, and has the potential to help Aborigines actually resolve, the orthodox dilemma. They recognise the reality of cultural intersection and transformation and subjective complexity. They accept that oppressive structures continue, and that they pose difficulties for individuals, who must negotiate and transcend them. These researchers eschew simplistic communitarian or individualist responses, and aim instead at an education which is appropriate to, moderates the construction of, and builds individuals‟ capacities to manage, cultural and identity complexity.
Kevin Kumashiro (2000a: 26) acknowledges the subjective mixedness and ambiguity of „students of colour, students from under or unemployed families, students who are female, or male but not stereotypically “masculine”, and students who are, or are perceived to be, queer.‟ Others also consider the negotiation of ambiguous identities in educational settings. Examples include différantly Jewish teachers who work, and must negotiate their relations across difference in, non- denominational schools (Haynes 2003); queer youth of colour who also identify as Native, and so stand at a blurred fluxion of multiple axes of difference, even as each is „profoundly formative‟ (Scholl 2002: 141); and Sikh-American students who accommodate but do not assimilate (Gibson 1988). These studies confirm the commonplaces of both „shifting mosaic‟ complexity (Horn 2003) and the „“pratique de métissage”‟ (Lionnet 1989: 96) that is required to negotiate it.
Like Pearson, indigenous academic Martin Nakata (2001, 2002, 2007) is cognisant of equivalent indigenous complexity and its relevance to education. He is concerned about Torres Strait Islanders‟ capacity to be both culturally
distinctive and citizens, and is critical of the status quo of narrow culturalism, culturally appropriate programs and identity politics which make that doubleness so difficult. He does not accept that education for the latter must erode the former, and is in no doubt that the way to achieve that desired state is via a rigorous, supportive, standard education and explicit engagement with the cultural complexity that Torres Strait Islanders do everyday. As the theorists of the African diaspora, he sees the future in the reality of a persisting but changing and adapting culture. Other signs of the same cognisance include Hollinsworth‟s stress on the relationality of Aboriginality (1992a, 1992b, 1992c, 1992d, 1995) and Aboriginal educator Chris Sarra‟s (2003) rhetorical transcendence of the opposition between Aboriginality and intellectualism with his mantra of „young and black and deadly‟, and „strong and smart‟.
These are signs of movement in Australian indigenous education towards the emancipatory pedagogy foreshadowed by Ellen Swartz‟s (1996) critical reading of normative American history and progressed by Kumashiro (2000a, 2001, 2002a) and the contributors to his (2002) edited collection. They work on an education which takes comprehensive complexity seriously. Kumashiro (2001) criticises anti-oppressive teaching which simply adds a sample of excluded others to the privileged normalcy, on the grounds that it does not deal adequately with ubiquitous differentiation and indivisible complexity, authorises minority normativity and discrimination against their margins, and does nothing to change the normal.
He (2000b, 2004, 2006) advocates a mix of „commonsensical‟ and „paradoxical‟ teaching that teaches and troubles established texts, knowledges, categories, stereotypes and frameworks. For him (2001: 5-7), it is critical that students know those knowledges, majority and minority, each for its own value, but also know that none can be a literal representation or transparent, stable mirror of reality. Students should become expert in the normative mathematics, science, academic writing and the like, but also develop the „critical reading capacities‟ to unlearn them, to avoid the state at which they become natural or taken for granted. They must consciously know them for what they are—normative cultural artefacts—with all their powers and traps. The end he envisages is the capacity to
enact métissage and with that, greater personal autonomy. This fits with Sen‟s (2006: 160, 162) critical education leading to „examined lives‟.
This aim also fits with the New London group‟s „multiliteracies pedagogy‟ (Cope and Kalantzis 2000) with which Nakata is involved. The project is dedicated to equipping all, but especially minority students with the capacities to participate fully in the dominant culture and to sustain changing same particularities. It proposes an „epistemology of pluralism‟ (Cazden et al. 1996: 72) that may be developed through a four-tiered pedagogy including: experiential immersion to develop meaning and intuitive expertise (say of languages, cultures and discourses); overt teacher instruction to develop conscious meta-level awareness (say of cultural differences); critical reflection to denaturalise social contexts; and extension to learn to abstract principles from situated practice and apply learned capacities in novel situations (Cope and Kalantzatis 2000: 30-6). This pedagogical structure ideally equips individuals with the capacities to critically examine the discourses which subject them and to navigate with agency the choices they impress upon them.