The goals of education

Schooling in Australia is governed by the promise of something better. This is particularly true in Indigenous education, where a raft of compensatory programs have been proposed as the fulfilment of a promise that academic outcomes for Indigenous children will improve. Better outcomes in reading, writing and numeracy have become something of a national obsession, and over the last 10 years, talk of the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has sidelined the deeper discussions of the rationale for education in Australia. In 2008, all Australian Education Ministers representing federal and state governments set the national educational goal for young Australians “to become successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens” (MCEETYA 2008). However, since 2008, this desire to develop the social character as a foundation of how we come to define ‘ourselves’ as Australians has been replaced by talk of outputs and performance indicators.

One of the aims of a systematic literature review (SLR) is to test the weight of historical perception against the reality of research and practice. A second aim is to identify approaches to knowing in schools (defined as curriculum below) that might help us to see beyond the limits of NAPLAN. We will discover how researchers, for example, Verran (2010), Guenther et al. (2015), McCarthy (2010) and Guyula (2010) are working in Indigenous education to present different ontological designs that can stand beside one another, in a form of both-ways education. The so-called both-ways schooling hit the scene with enormous fanfare in the 1980s and 1990s, and we will look for something equivalent in this SLR. For example, Rioux (2015) and Ewing (2012) describe two very different learning contexts where students learn through Aboriginal knowledge. Like Maxwell et al. (2018), we are looking for an approach to knowledge production that does not ultimately constitute an assimilation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander values to the Australian Curriculum. Given that education is representational practice (Green 2018), this SLR explores various representations of the world and how these might be taught in the school in ways that support “successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens”. Does the curriculum allow for multiple stories to be told, in order to support the multiplicity of social and cultural identities? The question for this segment of the SLR is, how does curriculum govern learning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australia?

Three key findings arise from our SLR, first the research shows that what counts as knowledge in the Australian Curriculum contrasts significantly with the views of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people, and second, the SLR reflects on the very purpose of learning for Indigenous people living in urban, rural and remote communities. Thirdly, the research presented here demonstrates how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people throughout Australia understand Country as an enactment of curriculum. The very essence of what is curriculum, is called into question across the various studies.

What is curriculum?

Curriculum is more than the knowledge that is taught in schools. It is far more than a question of outcomes in reading and writing, with Green (2018) adding that “surely the more important question is, how should the knowledge be taught, and why this knowledge?” (p. 7). Atweh and Singh (2011) focus on the link between curriculum knowledge and the production of identities to demonstrate that “what knowledge is selected, how it is taught and how it is evaluated in schools goes to the very heart of issues of individual and social identity” (p. 189). One of the most significant western curriculum theorists of our time, Pinar (2012) observes “curriculum is what the older generation chooses to tell the younger generation… The school curriculum communicates what we chose to remember about the past, what we believe about the present, what we hope for the future” (p. 30). Curriculum is the culture’s epistemological legacy (Green 2018).

Once conceptualised as the culture’s epistemological legacy, we can then begin to recognize the problems of representation faced by the Australian Curriculum, particularly for the production of student identities. Green (2018) notes “epistemology has to do fundamentally with representation” (p. 37) and with how teachers can bring the world ‘out there’ into classrooms. Education is a representational practice (Green 2018), with Osberg and Biesta (2003), elaborating:

[a]n epistemology that holds that we can know things about the world by making representations of it and that the purpose of these representations of the world is to enable us to move towards an understanding of what the world is really like, once and for all (p. 85).

Our SLR investigates which world ‘out there’ is being represented in the classroom. This paper will examine the research that reports on how schools and teachers throughout Australia approach the representation problem to ensure that a rich and diverse epistemological legacy is taught to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students.

Method

This systematic review follows the same structure as all systematic reviews in the Aboriginal Voices project (see Lowe et al. 2019 this issue). Specific methodological details for this systematic review are outlined below.

Database sources

The review of the relevant literature was conducted through a search of seven (7) databases: A + Education via Informit online (inclusive of AEI ATSIS Australian Education Index and Theses); ERIC Ovid; PsycInfo via Ovid, Proquest Central, Web of Science, Scopus and Libraries Australia. While a central string of search terms was developed from the research question and more broadly from the field, variations were required as many of the databases had developed a different thesaurus structure for subject searches. This required to varying degrees, a change in the focus used by a number of the databases.

The search was conducted using three primary concepts; first, identifying the cultural group, second, curriculum, and third, school types such as primary and secondary. Other search strategies utilised during the selection phase included a direct search with key journals identified in the search. These included Australian Journal of Early Childhood (where papers related to primary and secondary years of schooling), Australian Journal of Indigenous Education and The Australian Educational Researcher.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria (see Fig. 1)

The overarching project adopted a research protocol that set a range of search boundaries. The primary criteria focused on the inclusion of the academic research literature. This included peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, book chapters and reports—specifically, evaluations of school-based programs. Research items were included in this review on the following basis: (1) Peer-reviewed and published, including NGO reports, if they are primary sources, (2) Australian-based research in schools, (3) Research based in Australian schools that focuses on evaluating school-based policies, practices, interventions or programs including some form of data analysis and literature review analysis, (4) Explicitly linked to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and their education, (5) Set within the primary and secondary years of schooling, (6) Published during the period 2006 to 2017. The date 2006 was identified as the limit because research conducted prior to 2006 was deemed to be ‘out of touch’ with contemporary approaches to learning and teaching in Indigenous education.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Selection, inclusion and exclusion of studies. This highlights the sequence of strategies as identified in the review protocols, used to reduce the initial 886 studies to a review of 29 studies

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Critical appraisal of research quality

An appraisal was undertaken to assess the overall quality of the research in the selected texts using the framework developed by Ryan et al. (2007) and Long and Godfrey (2004). Six criteria (research design, sources, theoretical framework, ethical implications, methodology, contribution to field) were established for each item, where each element was scored as either 1 if the element was met, 0 if not and 0.5 if the element was located but not well described. All texts in this review employed qualitative methods; it should be noted that there were no papers employing a quantitative or mixed methodology in the final count. The evidential research conducted in this area over the period 2006–2017 has not employed quantitative or mixed methods.

Scores were aggregated across each element giving a final aggregated score out of a potential 6. Papers achieving a score of less than 3/6 were removed from the final included texts; in this review, five papers achieved less than 3/6 (see Table 1) and were therefore removed (leaving 34). There was one exception (Guyula 2010) which achieved less than 3/6 but was included because it made a significant contribution to our question on curriculum. There were another five papers which achieved a high rating according to the criteria employed, but were considered not to address the question at hand. These were papers that escaped the initial cull. That left a total of 29 texts for the study, all of which employ a qualitative methodology.

Table 1 Appraisal assessment and scores
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Reporting and interpreting the data

The question for this SLR is: how does the structure of curriculum govern learning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australia? Three key findings arise from our SLR. Firstly, the research shows that what counts as knowledge in the Australian Curriculum contrasts significantly with the views of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people, secondly, the SLR reflects on the very nature of learning and its purpose for Indigenous people living in urban, rural and remote communities, and thirdly, the research presented here demonstrates how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people throughout Australia understand Country as an enactment of curriculum. The very essence of what is curriculum is called into question across the various studies. We find that the learner and teacher are positioned in substantially different roles in a curriculum that has Aboriginal knowledge as its foundation.

What counts as knowledge

This section focuses on how curriculum is conceptualised in the context of the nation’s learning. Verran (2013) has long argued that Indigenous and western knowledge traditions are, at times, ‘irreconcilable’. This apparent conflict of values, for example, telling students what they should know and learn (Guyula 2010) tends to result in passive resistance among some Aboriginal students where they might attend school, but do not embrace the learning, or they adopt more active forms of resistance such as ‘voting with their feet’ (choosing not to attend). The introduction of the now well-known Both-ways pedagogy attempts to reconcile the two conceptual structures (Verran 2013) so that children become competent in both local Aboriginal and western curricula.

Verran (2013) further highlights how absolutely crucial it is to shift thinking about curriculum from ‘inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to recognising the knowledges and ways of learning of the first peoples of this land as a strong foundation for the entire nation’s learning’. She argues that all students need to be learning about how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people throughout Australia represent their knowledges to their children.

However, Bat et al. (2014) conclude that an Indigenous curriculum must be grounded in a conception of mutual recognition, rather than simply including or inserting Aboriginal knowledges and perspectives into the dominant conceptual machine of the Australian Curriculum. They extend the both-ways approach to opt for a curriculum that privileges Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges and ways of learning. Bat et al. (2014) highlight the need for a shared learning journey and an approach that can strengthen Indigenous identity through, for example, Aboriginal language and culture. Hardy (2016) and Jorgensen et al. (2010) argue that inclusivity would challenge western epistemologies (e.g. dominant conceptions of life, telling children what to know and how to learn). For Indigenous people, curriculum represents ways of knowing and representing the world (epistemology), approaches to teaching this knowledge (pedagogy), as well as the knowledge itself.

Bat et al. (2014) are not alone in emphasising the necessity to move our conceptualisation of curriculum from inclusion to recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges and ways of learning. Disbray (2016) talks about ‘two-ways or both-ways strong’, where students are balanced in both worlds, strong in their western knowledge and English and strong in their own identity, cultural knowledge and language. In a Both-ways curriculum, the first or home language is positioned as essential rather than optional for learning in and through a second, additional language. It also creates space to recognise the role of Aboriginal teachers in their children’s education. Importantly, Disbray (2016) identifies in the study a fundamental divergence between top-down and local formulations of just what constitutes educational attainment, failure and success with respect to languages and goals of education.

In a series of papers based on Red Dirt Thinking, Guenther et al. (2013), Osborne and Guenther (2013) and Guenther et al. (2015) critique the language of disadvantage and advantage as they are presented in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy and curriculum (for example, Closing the Gap Policy, Australian Government, 2017) and the What Works: The Works Program, (National Curriculum Services, 2012). The team gathered and analysed qualitative data directly from over 230 remote education stakeholders and from more than 700 others through surveys. Guenther et al. (2015) argue that Aboriginal and western curricula are largely irreconcilable because of the ways in which concepts such as success are defined and applied in Aboriginal and western contexts. The ways in which ontological concepts are generated and applied in these teaching contexts mean that students come to think, see and feel in very different ways. Verran (2010) reminds us that curriculum is not only about new forms of cognition, it presents us with new ways of seeing and new structures, and new ways of feeling, with Deleuze (1995, p. 165) adding “you need all three to get things moving”.

Yet in recent years, curriculum writers have become increasingly focused on cognitive achievements, without presenting students with new ways of seeing and feeling. This almost exclusive focus on the reproduction of curriculum knowledge as a cognitive exercise (Verran 2010; Guyula 2010) has ensured one (western) way of knowing, and one way of producing knowledge. This in turn has established a normative measure of success (as achievement) for all students. In contrast to prevailing definitions of success as ‘achievement’ and outputs, the research from Guenther et al. (2015) highlights how remote Aboriginal communities conceptualise educational success in quite different ways to include any positive or negative personal, academic, social product of schooling, including educational attainment, citizenship, success or failure, identity, equity and empowerment (see Guenther et al. 2019). The work of curriculum then is much more closely aligned with the 2008 national goals of education, where young Australians “become successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens” (Melbourne Declaration 2008, p. 1). In other words, the Aboriginal parents in these particular studies measure “success” in quite different ways to those that have developed as the Australian norm in recent years. This means that the stories and legacies that the older generation are choosing to tell the younger generations (through the curriculum) contrast significantly across Australian schools. We have at least two quite distinct discourses, one that focuses on outputs and job readiness, and another that privileges active and informed citizenship.

Purpose of learning

Guenther et al. (2015) and Osborne and Guenther (2013) note how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are represented as the disadvantage in policy discourse and data. Seldom in the literature is ‘success’ defined or critically discussed. Success, we are told, is about better NAPLAN scores, improved secondary retention rates, transition into further education, higher education and employment. Guenther et al. (2015) and Osborne and Guenther (2013) posit that ‘success’ depends on perceptions of what education is for. This brings them to explore how alternative measures of success could be applied in remote contexts, where ways of knowing and living often differ considerably from what the educational system imposes (Guenther et al. 2015).

When people talk about education of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, the language used is often replete with messages of failure and deficit, of disparity and problems (Guenther et al. 2015). This language is reflected in statistics that on the surface seem unambiguous in their demonstration of poor outcomes for remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students (for example, see NAPLAN achievement data, school attendance data, Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data, and the annual Prime Ministers Closing the Gap Report, Australian Government 2018).

However, Guenther et al. (2015) draw on their extensive data to highlight how parent involvement and community engagement are the primary indicators of success (rather than NAPLAN and attendance figures). While they challenge the conceptual nature of aspiration and success in Aboriginal schooling, they also question how meaningful achievement might be built, arguing that high expectations of teachers might be a useful strategy in some contexts, but history will always work to undermine those expectations, particularly in cross-cultural contexts.

The identification of parent involvement and community engagement by Guenther et al. (2015) as a key pedagogical approach in education in remote communities (and not only attainment and success) is also supported by Ewing (2012, 2014) in her studies set in a Torres Strait Islander community in Australia. Ewing explores parents’ understandings of mathematics and how their children come to learn maths. A funds of knowledge approach is used in the study and is based on the premise that people are already competent and have knowledge that has been historically and culturally accumulated into a body of knowledge and skills essential for their functioning and well-being. Ewing (2012) emphasises how learning can be rich and purposeful when it is situated within that which already exists, namely the culture, community and home language of the group. Indigenous ways of knowing and learning are described by Ewing (2014) as relational and interconnected because they are seen from a holistic perspective. They are about preparation for life rather than a measure of achievement and control. A relational nature of Indigenous ways of knowing is a stark contrast to western ways of knowing which attempts to dissect, compartmentalise and measure nature to understand it (Whitehouse et al. 2014).

Teachers need opportunities where they can engage with parents to learn what funds of knowledge exist among their students. Knowledge is something that is shared and exchanged rather than disembodied and commodified. Meanwhile, Keddie (2014) presents an epistemology where community, kinship and family networks are at the centre of all relations, reflecting an ethos around a stable identity, and providing a cultural anchor that reflects the shared beliefs and behaviour of the Indigenous community (see Burgess et al. 2019).

Harrison (2013) asks what kind of education do we want for children? What style of student do we have in mind when we teach history? While the Australian curriculum ‘tells’ the story of preparing students for employment, the students in this study focus more on the wider relevance of school to their lives. Guenther et al. (2015) illuminate the parochial nature of this ontological design of the curriculum in finding that job readiness is not a story that can be successfully told in remote Aboriginal communities. Differences in approaches to the production of curriculum knowledge are framed and bounded by a western desire for outputs, and designed in and for urban locations, to ensure that just one ontological model prevails in the Australian curriculum.

A western methodological approach to research fails to gain traction in many Aboriginal communities. Treacy et al. (2014) focus on western mathematics to note how it has its origins in the autonomous existence of concepts and is oriented by a valuing of separation and objectivity in relation to the world. By contrast, an Indigenous world view generates a mathematics that is “characterised by a very personal view of the universe in which humans are seen as united with nature rather than separate from it” (p. 264). People themselves are included in the curriculum story.

These different representational practices govern what is valued and produced as knowledge, and what is included or excluded from the curriculum. Treacy et al. (2014) observe:

Being able to count is highly valued by Western cultures to the point where parents boast of the ability of their pre-schoolers to count to certain numbers. By contrast, Aboriginal parents might boast of the ability of their pre-schooler to find their own way home from a certain distance (note that Western cultures may be appalled at a young child begin out alone without an adult presence) (p. 13).

Approaches to teaching and learning are focused heavily on engaging students to speak abstractly about the world outside the classroom, but rarely are these students encouraged to situate themselves in the context of history and colonisation (Treacy et al. 2014; Harrison 2013; Yunkaporta 2009).

Goodson and Crick (2009) argue that the challenge for educators is no longer in instructing students to memorise and repeat ‘prepackaged’ ideas and concepts in a prescribed curriculum that is delivered in a classroom divorced from the places and contexts in which knowledge is constructed. Goodson and Crick (2009) observe how ‘life-long’ learning occurs in the everyday lives of people, though narrative, where people construct and tell stories about themselves and their lives. The production of the curriculum in these places is the reproduction of a living social practice that is not separated from the people who tell the story. The curriculum itself for these communities is a production, a creative intervention in the lives of the people telling the story. Curriculum that is produced in city offices and sent out to schools represents the cognitive detritus of only a small number of writers, and there is little sense of curriculum production as a social practice.

Again Guyula (2010) highlights the difficulties for Aboriginal students learning in western schools, where they are told what to learn, how and where to learn (in the classroom out of the wind, rain and sun). Instruction is highly verbal and takes place through the teacher, while the learning is theoretical and decontextualised. Guyula highlights how learning in western contexts is an individual pursuit, and children choose what they want to be when they grow up. These seemingly irreconcilable differences in approaches to the production of curriculum knowledge bring us to the third key theme for this section of the SLR, Country as curriculum.

Country as enacted curriculum

Using a land education approach, Calderon (2014) demonstrates how schooling, through social studies curriculum, transmits a settler colonial land ethic that must be made explicit in order to decolonise settler colonial relations attached to current pedagogical models of place. The author insists land education—like environmental education—must take place across the curriculum (k-6). However, land education implies a commitment to begin to understand the process of decolonisation that takes seriously the impact of colonialism on student learning.

Calderon (2014) argues that dominant settler ideologies of land leave little room for Indigenous-informed frameworks and little to no possibility for decolonising work in education. She argues that land education must start from the supposition that all places were once Indigenous lands and continue to be. The question raised is: how has one’s identity been constructed from and within that place?

The research of McKnight (2016a, b) in teacher education is included in this paper (even though our search is limited to primary and secondary schooling) because it provides an exemplary model of how Country is enacted in teacher education at the University of Wollongong. McKnight (2016b) argues that for Aboriginal perspectives to be embedded in the curriculum, academics are required to work with relevant Aboriginal knowledge holders. In this relationship, Yuin Country is introduced through ceremony to assist academics to form a new site of knowledge within themselves as self. A cultural experience with Yuin Country plays a central role in connecting and separating social justice to provide a balance in relatedness, disrupting the colonial emphasis of Western binary thinking that only separates. McKnight (2016a) concludes that when academics are willing to learn Aboriginal ways of knowing, learning and behaving with support from Aboriginal people they can start to disrupt their own colonial mindset.

McNamara and McNamara (2011) report on a study designed to document and synthesise local knowledge of environmental conditions, including seasons and climate, and transfer this to the younger generation in the local primary school. This research project sought to document, collate and analyse local knowledge from Elders into a seasonal calendar specifically for Erub Island, located in the eastern group of islands in the Torres Strait. The knowledge was gathered through a number of in-depth, unstructured interviews with Elders on Erub Island. The knowledge collected ranged from information about wind directions, wet and dry seasons, patterns in bird migration and nesting, and plant and cropping cycles. Moreover, knowledge about major totems, and other plant and animal species that are seasonal indicators have also been important inclusions in the final seasonal calendar, as their inclusion provides a more holistic understanding about Islander knowledge of their environment. The collected knowledge was then transcribed, collated and synthesised into tables, with the final product being a seasonal calendar.

Reading seasons and environments has been a long-held practice for Torres Strait Islanders through their close relationships with their islands and seas. This research project with Elders on Erub (Darnley) Island documented and synthesised their knowledge of seasonal patterns and indicators, and climate change. This knowledge varied from details on the migration and nesting patterns of the main totem birds, to the movement of the Tagai star constellation, to the onset of wind patterns indicating certain planting or fishing cycles. The importance of documenting and transferring such knowledge is that it continues the task of generating interest among the younger generation to ‘read’ their landscape, which is especially pertinent given the projected impacts of climate change. The ability of Islanders to identify indicators and ‘read’ their country is an important tool in monitoring and adapting to environmental change, as well as maintaining culture, livelihoods and environment.

Important and ongoing research (McNamara and McNamara 2011; Ewing 2014; Verran 2013) demonstrates the ways in which Country is the curriculum for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Country tells stories of the land and its history, the seasons, the plants and trees and transmits these to the younger generation through the social practice of life, rather than through a didactic form of classroom teaching.

Country is the teacher as Harrison (2013) suggests, but not through representation and distance. Country is itself an enactment of place-based relations between animals, plants and humans, and students will learn if they have the skills to listen and recognise these agentic relationships. Agency is applied here as an enactment rather than something that somebody or something has (Barad 2007). Country is the enactment of curriculum when we decentre the role of the human individual in learning.

Rioux (2015) explores the effectiveness of the Montessori method in teaching zoology to Year 8–9 students in an Indigenous independent high school at Koora in Queensland and develops a theory that explains the impact of the approach on their learning about vertebrates. The echidna and other animal narratives in the curriculum have reconnected students to their forebears, and to a kinship alliance with the Elders and with history (Rioux 2015). Culturally appropriate stories, locally produced and inserted in the school curriculum govern engagement and learning of Indigenous students.

In a northeast Arnhemland context, Guyula (2010) notes that we (Yolŋu) have never learned in classrooms, and we have never asked questions about what we want to learn. Our children have just participated in normal lifestyles for how to survive in hunting and living in the bush, to be able to grow up and get the knowledge, and then as they grow up, they are ready for another level of education in the bush, according to the old men, the wise men, and the land and the trees, and the birds that talk with the land. Guyula notes how Yolŋu students learn out there under a tree, highlighting that the hills, trees, the land, the air are always communicating, teaching you. Learning is a social practice, and highly contextualised, rather than an individual pursuit. Yolŋu students are not told what to learn, and unlike Balanda, they don’t choose what they want to be when they grow up.

When I’m teaching in classrooms and when I’m studying in classrooms reading books, Guyula (2010) observes, it’s just not in the part of my culture, it just wasn’t the way that my ancestors, the ancestral predecessors, when they created the land. They never wrote on the land, they never wrote on books. They told stories through the landscapes, sculptures. They told stories through paintings. They told stories through looking at the first thunderstorm of the year, standing tall and straight when it calls out, and I feel strong, stand up strong and the tears run out from my eyes remembering the land, where I am.

Whitehouse et al. (2014) describe the Torres Strait Islander concept of Sea Country and Torres Strait Ailan Kastom. Their inquiry looks at how Sea Country is positioned within two contemporary Australian examples of environmental education: firstly, within the Australian Curriculum cross-curriculum priorities, and secondly, within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s Sea Country Guardians programme. Their aim is to have the concept of Sea Country guardianship become established, over time, as a way of thinking and acting in these regional and remote coastal communities. The pedagogies employed involve learning, developing respect for and practicing tradition, law and lore. They also include outdoor education practice, ‘learning on country’, in which children gain knowledge through a ‘Look, Listen and Learn’ process.

Sofa (2014) also explores outdoor learning, but in a Western Australian context to discover whether an outdoor learning pedagogy can respond to disparities in learning outcomes and offer alternative early learning opportunities. The outdoor learning experiences involved Aboriginal children in deepening their cultural knowledge. Taking into account that traditionally Aboriginal people had a close connection to nature, referred to as ‘country’, learning in the outdoors enabled these Aboriginal children to connect with their culture on country. The outdoor learning experiences also provided the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal pupils with opportunities to sharpen their social skills, to connect to and understand the curriculum in the outdoors, and how to protect and appreciate the environment.

McCarthy (2010) notes how it is “impossible to conceive our being or even to imagine ourselves to ourselves, much less to others, except through relations which link us to the other” (p. 304). Our culture needs to be decentred verbally and ideologically if we are to break out of the enclosure of our self-sufficiency and become conscious of ourselves in relation to other cultures and languages and thus other ways of being human. McCarthy (2010) and Guyula (2010) both identify the need to decentre the role of the individual in learning, including the role of the teacher.

Conclusion

This section of the SLR demonstrates how success has become defined over the last 10 years through national assessment regimes and performance indicators. These performance statistics have relegated the 2008 Melbourne Declaration to a past era, while ensuring that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students continue to be measured against a concept of success in education which, in every way confirms that they can only succeed on non-Indigenous terms.

This SLR highlights how the conceptual structure of curriculum governs the nature of learning and teaching both inside and outside the classroom. This is achieved through the conceptual underlay of the curriculum, through for example, definitions of success, what constitutes ‘learning’, what counts as knowledge and how it is taught. The literature presented here demonstrates how curriculum looks very different for Indigenous and western societies. The SLR illuminates how many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people throughout Australia understand Country as pedagogical. This understanding is crucial to how we conceptualise curriculum. When Country is conceived as the ‘enactment’ of curriculum, humans are already learning about the seasons, winds, tides. Learning from Country positions the ‘student’ as an affect of learning rather than agent, so we are already implicated in the network of relations that constitutes Country. McCarthy (2010) reminds us that it “is impossible to conceive our being or even to imagine ourselves to ourselves, much less to others, except through relations which link us to the other” (p. 304). What ultimately emerges from this section of the SLR is the need for Australia to consider how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can come together in the name of the nation’s learning. What will it take for a nation of people to focus on a reconciled history? We have suggested that a reconciled history will be governed by our capacity to recognise ourselves in others.