Culturally responsive pedagogies: Australian colonial logic of the centre and Aboriginal refusal

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2023

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Rigney, L.I.

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Mikulan, P.
Zembylas, M.

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Book chapter

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Source details - Title: Working with Theories of Refusal and Decolonization in Higher Education, 2023 / Mikulan, P., Zembylas, M. (ed./s), Ch.5, pp.77-92

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Abstract

This chapter considers the connection between refusal, teachers work and Aboriginal Australian students as an important basis for cultivating new culturally responsive pedagogies. Huge discrepancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous student success at school and university, by any measure, is an urgent international problem. This chapter explores the specificity of culturally responsive pedagogies for refusing deficit views of Aboriginal students and Australian colonial knowledge hierarchies through the work of Stephen Ball. It begins by outlining Indigenist epistemologies and its theoretical refusal of the way settler Australian “logic of the centre” positions culture and diversity as peripheral, privileging homogenization as normative mimicry of the dominant group. In this chapter this is called “education allegory”. Finally drawing on Ball, three more elements are added to complicate the work of culturally responsive pedagogies. These are: (1) teaching synthesis; (2) Aboriginal child as competent knowledge producer; and (3) a commitment to the politics of refusal and culturally responsive pedagogies.

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Copyright 2023 selection and editorial matter, Petra Mikulan and Michalinos Zembylas; individual chapters, the contributors

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