Investigating the implementation of an authentically Australian, ‘both-ways’ education: Creating and enacting a Country as Teacher curriculum framework and pedagogy in ACT schools

This project investigates a cohort-based (eg. stage of schooling, KLA etc), collaborative approach to co-designing and implementing a Country as Teacher curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, testing a whole school approach with outcomes for student learning and school culture. This project extends upon the research evidence from our first ASRP project, Building Cultural Integrity with ‘Country as Teacher’: Investigating teacher engagement with pedagogies of Indigenous knowledge and being (CaT1).Based in Indigenous knowledge and ways of being, the ‘Country as Teacher’ program aims to embed classroom practice in deep place-focussed communication, through Country-centric pedagogies that have been part of teaching and learning in Australia for tens of thousands of years. In the initial CaT1 project demonstrated that most teachers were able to overcome various challenges to begin cultivating a personal practice of ‘Relating with Country’, with an array of transformative impacts for themselves and their teaching practice. Many were then able to design and facilitate similar learning opportunities for their students, again with positive outcomes for wellbeing, engagement and learning. This project, ‘Investigating whole school approaches to enacting a Country as Teacher (CaT) curriculum and pedagogy’ (CaT2) will again beginning with teacher professional learning and support for teacher’s cultivation of their ‘Relating with Country’ practice, before examining the effects of undertaking a cohort-based approach on co-designing, implementing and evaluating a Country as Teacher curriculum and pedagogy in the classroom.

This project uses an action research approach that engages teachers and schools in adopting new teaching practices applying Country as Teacher. Research findings are then generated using narrative inquiry through individual interviews and within yarning circles to enable collective sense-making reflective conversations. These intensive conversational methods are supplemented by classroom observations.

This project aims to implement and evaluate a teaching and learning approach based upon Indigenous knowledge systems.

Outcomes will be investigated in three phases:

• Phase 1: Professional learning and mentoring has been offered to support participating teachers’ cultivation of a personal practice for ‘Relating with Country’. Such direct experiences of connecting with—and learning from—Country are essential to teachers for them to be able to facilitate significant learning opportunities for their students.
• Phase 2: Participating teachers are then required to co-design or modify an existing unit of work to offer their students regular, direct experiences with Country.
• Phase 3: Participant teachers implement and evaluate unit of work.

The following papers provide further detail regarding the approach taken in— and the rationale for—this research project:

• Spillman, D., Wilson, B., Nixon, M., & McKinnon, K. (2022) Reinvigorating Country as teacher in Australian schooling: beginning with school teacher’s direct experiences, ‘relating with Country’. Curriculum Perspectives. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-022-00176-6
• Karulkiyalu Country, Paul Gordon, Spillman D. (2021) Embracing Country as Teacher in Outdoor and Environmental Education. In: Thomas G., Dyment J., Prince H. (eds) Outdoor Environmental Education in Higher Education. International Explorations in Outdoor and Environmental Education, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75980-3_18
• Wilson, B., & Spillman, D. (2021). Country as Teacher: Using stories from and for Country in Australian education for social and ecological renewal. In S. Riddle, A Heffernan & D. Bright (eds). New Perspectives on Education for Democracy (pp. 52-63). Routledge.
• Karulkiyalu Country, Gordon, P., Spillman, D., & Wilson, B. (2020). Re-placing schooling in Country: Australian stories of teaching and learning for social and ecological renewal. Australian Aboriginal Studies Journal, (2). AIATSIS, Canberra.
• Spillman, D., Wilson, B., Nixon, M. et al. ‘New localism’ in Australian schools: Country as Teacher as a critical pedagogy of place. Curric Perspect 43, 103–114 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-023-00201-2