Non-Indigenous teachers’ understandings of relationally responsive curriculum through an Indigenous standpoint

Abstract

Australian schools routinely fail to deliver culturally responsive educational experiences for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. Educational structures, including the curriculum, are organised according to neoliberal, settler colonial epistemologies, which fracture and neglect Aboriginal and Torres Strait worldviews. In this study, research yarns were conducted with four non-Indigenous teachers working in an urban Sydney school, focusing on their experiences of responding to the curriculum’s cultural neglect through the enactment of relationality. Findings reveal that while teachers face major structural constraints when attempting to incorporate culturally responsive practices, they enacted relationality in their curriculum and pedagogies through the elements of relationships, place and curriculum concepts. A Relationally Responsive Curriculum Framework is proposed as a possible way for teachers to craft a coherent and holistic Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curriculum narrative. There is also scope for this framework to be further revised to centre Aboriginal voices and to be applied to the written curriculum to embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander worldviews in the very structure and values of education systems.