Unknown and Unknowing Possibilities: Transformative Learning, Social Justice, and Decolonising Pedagogy in Indigenous Australian Studies

Abstract

For tertiary educators in Indigenous Australian Studies, decolonising discourse in education has held much promise to make space for the diversity of Indigenous Australian peoples to be included, accessed, understood, discussed, and engaged with in meaningful ways. However, Tuck and Yang provide us with the stark reminder that decolonisation requires the return of Indigenous lands and does not equate to social justice. In this article, we take up Tuck and Yang’s concerns about decolonisation discourse into the terrain of transformative learning and pedagogical practice in Indigenous Australian Studies. We first position ourselves personally, professionally, and politically as non-Indigenous educators in the context of Indigenous Australian Studies in higher education and introduce the transformative learning environment of Political, Embodied, Active, and Reflective Learning (PEARL) in which we are currently involved. We then explore in more detail PEARL’s relationship to critical pedagogy, critical race theory, and decolonisation as praxis in the context of Indigenous Australian Studies. Ultimately, we enter into this discussion in a spirit of “unknowing” to question previously held assumptions about the transformative, socially just, and decolonizing potential of our educational praxis in Indigenous Australian Studies while at the same time exploring the possibilities, as Maxine Greene encourages, of decolonised vistas in this field as yet “unknown.”.