A courageous conversation with racism: revealing the racialised stories of Aboriginal deficit for pre-service teachers

Abstract

Teacher educators continue to debate the most effective strategies to assist teachers to become confident educators of Aboriginal students, and Aboriginal content and perspectives. Recently, pre-service teachers have begun to be taught cultural responsiveness with varying degrees of success. The paper is created from (1) data gathered from ethnographic research; (2) the existing literature; (3) my lived experience of being an Aboriginal teacher educator; and (4) my own experiences with racism and oppression. The therapy narrative technique of externalising conversations is used in this paper to facilitate a conversation with the identified problem of racism. The resulting script is a dialogue between an Aboriginal teacher educator and the Master Storyteller Racism, with the ‘audience’ consisting of pre-service teachers. The paper seeks to bring together, in one location, a number of socio-cultural and socio-historical events and narratives regarding Aboriginal peoples and their cultures. It is argued that if the many guises of racism that continue to perpetuate a system that works towards under-educating Aboriginal students are not revealed and disrupted, then a counterstory of Aboriginal education success will remain silent.