Our education list focuses on education policy and politics and the inequalities that are both built into education systems and perpetuated by them. It speaks to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education.
Our titles, including Arun Verma’s Anti-Racism in Higher Education, address the challenges in education, including those around technology and the digital divide. The list offers students and researchers internationally sourced evidence-based solutions that challenge traditional neoliberal approaches to learning.
Education
In this chapter, I use testimonio, which is a form of personal writing used to witness experiences, to reflect on efforts to create a critical community psychology praxis for anti-racism in Australia and elsewhere. I draw on my experiences as a migrant, researcher and educator in community psychology, a sub-discipline committed to empowerment and social justice, to show how we have sought to tackle racism, racialization and coloniality in teaching and within the practices and processes of knowledge production anchored in Eurocentrism, colonialism and white supremacy. I suggest that decolonial standpoints – that is, critical engagement with lived experience and subjectivity in and through racialized power relations – along with practices of deconstruction, recovery of collective memory and epistemic inclusion, are vital to anti-racist practice.
As Indigenous Australian scholars and lecturers positioned in Indigenous studies, we explore the increasing demands for more rigorous and critical anti-racism approaches to Indigenous pedagogy to combat contemporary manifestations of a decades-old anti-intellectualism and its racist proclivities that shape the settler-colonized white nation. To be ‘woke’ has become the most recent articulation of anti-intellectualism. Bringing together these parallel strands, the chapter highlights Indigenous peoples’ ongoing battle with racism, our ‘awakeness’ to certain aspects of anti-woke culture that directly affect us, and our persistence in practical and theoretical efforts to intervene pedagogically to foster critical racial and decolonial literacies that proscribe Indigenous futurity in defiance of attempts to silence us.
Since the beginning of colonization, the law has been weaponized against Indigenous peoples. The belief that Indigenous peoples were so uncivilized that we lacked any laws of our own precluded the recognition of pre-existing rights to the land. Although Indigenous peoples were entitled to the protection of the law, our ancestors were killed with impunity by the Native Police, a paramilitary force whose sole purpose was to eradicate the Indigenous presence from the land. Indigenous people are nothing if not resourceful, and in the closing decades of the 20th century, some blazed a trail by enrolling in Australia’s law schools. The first Aboriginal person to graduate from an Australian law school was the Kuku Yalanji woman Pat O’Shane, who would go on to become the first Aboriginal magistrate in Australia. Others used the law as a tool to protect their Country from the impacts of development. In 1982, the Gunditjmara women Lorraine Onus and Christina Frankland made history when they used the law to protect their Country from the construction of an aluminium smelter. This chapter will consider how the critical contributions of Indigenous women have been rendered invisible in Australian legal history. It will be argued that much can be learnt from the stories of such women who, through their actions, made the law accessible to some of the most marginalized people in Australia.
This collection offers a unique exploration of critical racial literacy and anti-racist praxis in Australia’s educational landscape. Combining critical race and Indigenous theories and perspectives, contributors articulate a decolonial liberatory imperative for our times. In an age when ‘decolonization’ has become a buzzword, the book demystifies ‘critical anti-racism praxis,’ advocating for critical and multidisciplinary approaches.
Educators from a range of disciplines including Law, Indigenous Studies, Health, Sociology, Policy and the Arts collectively share compelling stories of educating on race, racism and anti-racism, offering strategies that can be put into practice in classrooms, activism and structural reforms.
What were the pedagogical forces that were operating in the construction of my racialized subject positions with the context of the Australian white settler state? In this chapter, I attempt to answer this question by deploying critical race-decolonizing theories to trace a genealogy of forces that were operative in the constitution of my subjectivity. In the first instance, I proceed to unravel a genealogy that preceded my family’s migration to the Australian colony. I work to reconstruct this genealogy to materialize the prior forces of settler colonialism and race that already inscribed me as a subject and which were instrumental as push factors in my family’s migration. I then proceed to unpack the racialized pedagogy of the white settler state that I was compelled to experience as a non-Anglo diasporic-settler child. My personal account is located in the practice of critical race theorists, who use storytelling and counter-storytelling through personal stories as a critical method to recount experiences with racism. By examining two school textbooks that were part of my miseducation, I trace how these texts pedagogically laboured to inculcate a range of hegemonic values that normalized the racialized version of the settler state.
Universities are spaces where critical thinking is fostered, but they are also selfish institutions colonized by neoliberal logics, which can deprioritize the will to critique. Using personal narrative, affect theory and critical race scholarship, this chapter centres around emotional incidents involving death. These events provide touchstones for contemplating how race scholarship has emergently informed my orientation to teacher education and ‘what moves us’ to sustain commitments to race criticality within institutions hostile to discussing ‘race’. The chapter argues that affective encounters present opportunities for changes in subjectivity, that affective pedagogies can facilitate racial literacy education and that affective collegial bonds may support academics to sustain their commitments to race scholarship within and beyond the university.
There is considerable support in Australia and overseas (especially in the United Kingdom) for decolonization of higher education. Much of this support is based on continuing poor retention and attainment rates of Indigenous higher education students, along with decades of well-founded critique of Eurocentric, masculinist and colonial curriculum and pedagogy. Drawing from a range of Australian examples and first-hand reflections from my journey of writing and teaching on anti-racism within higher education since the late 1970s, this chapter provides an overview of my involvement in efforts to design and deliver Aboriginal higher education and Aboriginal studies, and critical anti-racism curriculum and policy as ‘decolonizing’ moves. I argue against the privileging of curriculum reform in isolation from critical race theory and serious forms of anti-racism amid naive assumptions about the nature of systemic and cultural racisms in Australian universities today. Several pitfalls are highlighted, including a lack of attention to power and governance, culturalist and essentialist representations of Aboriginal people, tokenism, what makes a university a safe and welcoming place for Aboriginal students, racial taxation on Aboriginal staff and becoming an accomplice rather than an ally. These failures point to a range of critical racial and decolonial literacies necessary for the task of decolonizing.
Decolonizing curriculum cannot occur without an intention to dismantle the colonial – its logics and its institutions that stretch across unceded sovereign lands, entrenching deep injustice. One of the urgent tasks of decolonizing curriculum across all disciplines in the imperial university is to expose the role and function of colonial law in performing and maintaining dispossession and racialized violence. As a system of law imposed upon First Laws, colonial law forms a nomopoly that lacks consent and so performs nomocide. This chapter argues for the necessity of a critical theorization of colonial law and provides an illustration of how such theory can be deployed in pedagogical practice across a range of disciplines.
