Indigenous knowledge, Inclusive education, Curriculum practices

Culturally Nourishing Schooling and Indigenous Knowledge Integration: A Path Towards Inclusive Education

October 20, 2023

On September 11, 2023, Australian scholars Dr. Kevin Lowe and Dr. Greg Vass hosted a discussion and workshop on re-orienting teachers’ classroom practices through a Culturally Nourishing Schooling (CNS) approach to pedagogy. In the context of Australia’s First Nations, a CNS approach means “learning from country,” with cultural mentoring, affective professional change, and cultural inclusion rooted in country, community, language, family, culture, and kinship. CNS is both collaborative—bringing together educators, local Cultural Mentors, and researchers—and critical, interrogating current curricula and educational policies from Indigenous standpoints. As Lowe and Vass argue, a CNS approach is necessary to develop and enact critically informed teaching practices that improve the schooling experiences and outcomes of Indigenous learners.

Dr. Lowe is a Gubbi Gubbi man from southeast Queensland and currently Indigenous Scientia Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. He has researched policy and educational attainment for Aboriginal students that led to the development and subsequent leadership of the CNS program. Dr. Vass is a senior lecturer at Griffith University whose research interests are focused on investigating policy enactment through teaching and learning practices.

Their September 11 workshop focused on the research methods and findings of two interrelated CNS projects: “Conceptualizing Curriculum: The Inclusion (?) Understanding (?) of ‘Errant Knowledge’” and “Educators Engaged in Curriculum Work: Encounters with Relationally Responsive Curriculum Practices.”

The context for this research is the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content into the Australian curriculum—a cross-curricular mandate. Six learning communities in New South Wales were studied (two central and four high schools), including urban, regional, and remote locations, and 15 Cultural mentors and 48 teachers in math, English, geography, HPE, and history were interviewed. The researchers also analyzed policy and media materials and employed surveys. Their purpose was to investigate how teachers approach this mandate and to gain insights into the attitudes, beliefs, capacities, and the complex factors that act as barriers and enablers for successfully teaching this content. However, Drs. Lowe and Vass made it clear that these issues have “global relevance in the policy landscape of hyperdiversity.”

As a case in point, they compared First Nations content in the Australian curriculum with that in the BC curriculum and found common assumptions, elisions, and exclusions. Both curricula atomize First Nations content from other areas of knowledge and position Indigenous knowing as subservient to foundational or established assertions, such as notions of western progress. While the Australian curriculum fails to link Indigenous knowledge within and across subjects, the BC curriculum treats Indigenous content as “elaborations that support the overarching . . . ontologies and epistemologies of [the] provincial curriculum.”

Indeed, their study found that Indigenous content is “atomized” and positioned in ways that make it “subservient” to the disciplines. Further, their analysis of the policy interviews suggests “this is not an accident—but rather by design . . . The curriculum is operating as it is designed to do—marginalizing some knowledges and foregrounding others.”

Drs. Lowe and Vass argue that such failures are “disabling” teachers from developing “a coherent understanding of epistemic links to Indigenous thinking.” They propose Culturally Nourishing Schooling as a way to address these elisions and exclusions while enabling teachers to integrate, connect, and forefront Indigenous ways of knowing. A first step is to acknowledge dominant knowledge-making practices as socio-historically grounded and problematic, in that they deny, suppress, and extinguish the legitimacy and value of non-Western knowledge-making. Theoretically grounding CNS in concepts around multiple ways of knowing, Drs. Lowe and Vass propose “three sensibilities crucial to liberatory forms of disciplinary learning.”

The first is multiplicity: actively working with and valuing more than one knowledge system and rejecting knowledge hierarchies. This sensibility nourishes teachers by enabling them to recognize and purposefully engage with unlearning as the precursor to relearning; accept and learn to sit with the discomfort, complexity, and messiness of teaching and learning; and increase awareness and belief in the merits of drawing on positional power to resist and interrupt dominant practices of schooling.

The second is horizontality: meaningfully engaging with learning as fluid and porous across systems, not bound by time place or people. In this way, learners are nourished; notably, one of the teachers Drs. Lowe and Vass interviewed was able to see how an Australian music unit could “encourage and inspire my Indigenous students by using song lyrics (truth telling) as a catalyst to bring about knowledge . . . of Aboriginal sovereignty, autonomy, misrepresentation . . . About the need for us to learn about the loss of culture and Country.”

The third sensibility essential for culturally nourishing schooling is dialogicality: grounded by understanding learning as relational and how culture, language and knowledge-making are “socially and politically saturated.” This understanding nourishes schools by enabling them to shift “from the what to the how and why of Indigenous knowledge practices” and increasing awareness of schools’ role and responsibility to lead and mentor others. In these ways, Drs. Lowe and Vass maintain, it is possible for teachers and policy makers to recognize and renew their engagement with the purposes of schooling “beyond curriculum learning outcomes and/or academic achievement” and increase their “appreciations of curriculum as intertwined with student well-being.”

As Dr. Lowe emphasizes,  

Indeed, we feel that [the] research question [is] how in reality teachers can be asked to teach, effectively and authentically, content that is said to support Indigenous world views when the content is unable to speak for itself or provide opportunities to enhance student learning—when it is forced to support the primary assertions of the disciplines and their embedded notions of truth and knowledge.