Indigenous Education in Comparative Perspective: Global Opportunities for Reimagining Schools

Abstract

Despite the striking parallels in the educational experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, very little research of an explicitly comparative nature has actually been conducted. These modern states are all are products of European colonizing projects which marginalized Indigenous peoples, and currently members of Indigenous groups are among the most disadvantaged in terms of educational outcomes in all four jurisdictions. Closing the educational achievement gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous learners is, consequently, a shared and urgent policy priority. While the uniqueness and diversity of Indigenous groups militate against any simple application of global solutions to local circumstances, each country has much to learn from initiatives, both successful and unsuccessful, which have been developed in other jurisdictions. From a macro-analytical level it appears that educators in all four jurisdictions are moving away from deficit approaches and embracing cultural congruence and evidence based-practice as theoretical underpinnings for educational policy with respect to Indigenous students. Recent national, state and provincial-level initiatives have typically been informed by cultural congruence theory, by the School Effectiveness and School Improvement movements and by insights from research around "schools in challenging circumstances". The discourse of post-colonialism is exerting an increasingly powerful influence on educational policy in all four countries and serves as a strategy of state legitimation by liberal democracies to foster social cohesion. In all four jurisdictions publicly-funded schools are seen as the institutions with the greatest capacity to foster shared understanding and respect among different cultural groups and remain possibly the best hope for forging harmonious and prosperous futures in these increasingly diverse and globalized societies.