Teaching for Country: Exploring transformative opportunities in initial teacher education through enacting Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing

This research project works towards the strategic goal of facilitating the enactment of Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing within initial teacher education undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate units (PG) at the University of Canberra (UC). This is a concrete contribution towards two current UC imperatives: Indigenising the curriculum (including graduate attributes) and creating a place-based university. For us, as chief investigators, this is an enactment of our cultural obligations to know and care for the places where we live and to use our knowledge and capabilities to assist others to do the same. This research contributes to a broader educational vision: preparing teachers to support schools in the ACT to rebalance their curriculum, teaching and learning in order for children to learn about the places they live and, ultimately, to come to know, love, and care for these places.

This project is using a number of methodologies, including:

• Self-Reflexive Journaling

There are exhaustive studies that argue for the effectiveness of journaling as a pedagogic tool (Finkel, 2000; Miller 2017; Watson, 2010). Our approach requests participants to take a self-reflexive (REF) approach to their journaling throughout the semester, so that we can better capture the personal aspect of participants’ learning journey. We believe that participants writing about their transformative learning experiences will give exceptionally rich data for a thematic analysis focussing on research questions and imperatives.

• Semi-Structured Interviews

Semi-structured interviews allows the researcher to respond to—and be shaped by—the interview situation as it unfolds and, therefore, fully explore the emerging worldview of the respondent. Fontana and Frey (2000, p.645) comment that these are “one of the most powerful ways in which we try to understand our fellow human beings.” It is clear that exploring personal learning journeys requires the use of interviews, both in focus groups and individually, as they provide the anecdotal and contextual evidence that is vital to an understanding of these interactions.

• Focus Group Interviews

The usefulness of focus group interviews to collect data in qualitative studies has been well documented (Atkinson & Silverman, 1997; Cresswell, 2014; Merriam, 2009). A key strength of the focus group in this study is that it allows the interaction and collective sense-making that yield the best results for a conversation on how high expectations manifest in the classroom. As Patton (2002, p.386) notes, “participants get to hear each other’s responses and make additional comments beyond their own original responses as they hear what other people have to say”.

What made a focus group particularly fitting for this research is that, “focus groups work best for topics people could talk to each other about in their everyday lives – but don’t” (Macnaghten and Myers, 2006, p.65). This voluntary disconnect from the discussion of Indigenous perspectives in teaching practice is of particular importance to this research project.

• Thematic Analysis

When exploring personal reflections and stories, an approach that gives insight into multiple perspectives, and one which treats each of them as equally valid, is what is needed. As a result, thematic analysis is being used to interrogate the project data. This approach is proving to be particularly important when considering the different roles and teaching experience of the research participants since thematic analysis successfully disables any perceptions of hierarchy that might disrupt other methods of analysis.

The research aims to:

1. Investigate the efficacy of combining immersion experiences, team teaching, professional coaching and Country-specific cultural mentorship, to enable academics in the Faculty of Education to enact Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing in undergraduate and postgraduate units at the University of Canberra.
2. Explore transformative learning episodes for academic participants, and the impacts on their capacity to enact Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing in designated units.
3. Investigate and evaluate the impact of these efforts on student experiences and learning through the modified units undertaken in Semester 2 of each year.