Neither this nor that: the challenge of social justice for non-indigenous English teachers in First Nations Australian education contexts

ABSTRACT

This article examines and critiques gap-based education policies that are based on statistical and reductive conceptualisations of success for First Nations students in Australia. The policy desire to achieve social justice underpinned by parity of outcomes across a range of life indicators (including standardised English literacy) between First Nations Australians and non-Indigenous Australians is embedded in programmatic approaches to pedagogy such as Accelerated Literacy (AL). We examine the experiences of Bruce, a teacher teaching English in the middle years of school in a school that mandated AL as a whole-of-school approach to English and literacy instruction. We show how intersecting notions of social justice can collide in the English classroom and how teachers in these contexts are in danger of re-colonising through English teaching practices that neither produce statistical improvement nor advance culturally responsive teaching based on giving primacy to Indigenous-authored texts in subject English.

KEYWORDS:

• Social justice
• teaching praxis
• critically reflexive praxis
• English teaching
• text selection
• First Nations education

Introduction

In this paper, we discuss and critique gap-based education policies that are based on statistical and reductive conceptualisations of success for First Nations students in Australia. The policy desire to achieve social justice underpinned by parity of outcomes across a range of life indicators (including standardised English literacy) between First Nations Australians and non-Indigenous Australians is embedded in programmatic approaches to pedagogy such as the National Accelerated Literacy Programme (NALP). We examine the experiences of Bruce, a non-Indigenous teacher teaching English in the middle years of school in a school that mandated Accelerated Literacy (AL) as a whole-of-school approach to English and literacy instruction. Bruce’s experiences teaching an Indigenous-focused text called Kimberley Warrior (KW), written by a non-Indigenous settler Australian, shows how AL is congruent with new managerialist and neoliberal discourses of teacher identity. These perspectives deploy reductive notions of teacher practice and teacher agency that deprofessionalise teachers and temper their ability to produce culturally responsive educational experiences (Connell 2013; Morrison et al. 2019). We outline the limits of non-Indigenous teachers attempting to produce more culturally responsive teaching in times when discourses of deficit, underpinned by gap-based thinking, contextualise efforts to reform pedagogy for First Nations students. The close-up analysis of Bruce’s reflections on praxis show how intersecting notions of social justice can collide in the English classroom and how teachers in these contexts are in danger of re-colonising through English teaching practices that neither produce statistical improvement nor advance culturally responsive teaching based on furthering Indigenous rights in Australia.

Authors’ positionality

We are all non-Indigenous authors and this paper was written on the unceded lands of Wurundjeri Country and Eastern Maar Country, and in the nation of the Czech Republic. We acknowledge the limits of non-Indigenous academics writing about social justice in First Nations education and the danger of re-colonising this space. We also foreground the importance of the ontological perspectives of non-Indigenous teachers like Bruce who are responsible for enacting socially just and culturally responsive educational practices for First Nations students. These ontological perspectives are important because most First Nations Australian students will be taught by non-Aboriginal people until the profession achieves greater representation of First Nations teachers. In the paper, we use “First Nations” to refer to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in an act of solidarity as a collective term recognising the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and collective rights to sovereignty and self-determination. Where a name is used in respect to a curriculum etc., we have used the original.

A performance-orientated context in first nations Australian education

Teaching in Anglophone countries like Australia, the United States of America and Great Britain is being diminished through an unrelenting focus on measurable performance that supports comparison between students, between schools and between nations (Fischetti 2014). This trend is reducing the autonomy of teachers over curriculum, producing in teachers an unwarranted and counterproductive focus on the results of standardised tests, and reshaping teacher professionalism to align with discourses and practices of accountability and compliance (Hardy 2018; Kostogriz & Doecke 2011). Teachers are feeling the pressure of this reductive global reform agenda (O’Sullivan & Goodwyn 2020). The politics of educational data and performance are evidenced by governments taking what Luke (2017) calls “the conventional neoliberal route” whereby government departments “put in the tests, mandate the packages, [and] monitor teacher compliance” (p. 9). The politics of performance – and the local practices that it gives rise to – are heightened in Australia for First Nations students because of the relative “underperformance” of these students in the national testing data. The presence of an “achievement gap” between First Nations Australian students and non-Indigenous students can lead to positions of moral panic such as when Pearson (2011) decries an “Indigenous Australian education disaster” (Pearson, 2011, 22). This hyperbolic language is a direct product of gap discourses (Lingard et al., 2012) that promulgate political blame games and scapegoating about the cause of educational disparity while often being accompanied by the next silver bullet offering to turn around results, such as Pearson’s advocacy for Direct Instruction (Pearson, 2011). These discourses also overshadow the important work of building a culturally responsive teaching workforce and culturally nourishing schooling for First Nations students in Australia.

Problematising the achievement gap

Educational “gaps” between First Nations Australian students and their non-Indigenous counterparts are socially constructed. While the numbers may be real, they are representative of a Western education system – imbricated in a global neoliberal policy setting – that does not consider the fact “under Aboriginal educational jurisdiction, Indigenous children …[were] successful in education for forty thousand years or more [and] … only in the last 200 years of colonisation [has] Indigenous failure occurred” (Rigney, 2002, 74). The Closing the Gap era in Australian education policy began in earnest in 2008 (Altman and Hinkson 2010). The premise of these policies at the Federal level is to direct fiscal resources towards initiatives to improve statistically the lives of First Nations Australians across several quality-of-life domains including education, health and employment. In education, literacy and numeracy levels – as measured through a national standardised testing instrument – have become lightning rods for debate in First Nations Australian education. Deficit discourses of First Nations students in Australia are propagated by policy texts that invoke terms such as “disparity”, “deficit” and “failure” (Hogarth 2018, 666) to describe the relative achievement gap between First Nations and non-Indigenous Australian students.

The prominence of NAPLAN-orientated¹ deficit discourses in First Nations Australian education is significant for several reasons. First, it pressures the different state and territory education jurisdictions to focus on practices that reduce the achievement gap, thus foregrounding NAPLAN and test performance even when policies and practices are designed to promote a culturally responsive workforce (Vass & Chalmers, 2015). Second, it obfuscates the importance of recognition and interrogation of the structural inequalities and other barriers to success for First Nations students in educational praxis and reform such as addressing racism (Burgess, Fricker, and Weuffen 2023; Rudolph, 2016). Third, it creates a climate where “negative representations of Indigeneity, Indigenous intelligence and academic achievement” are proliferated throughout the education system and in the media, making it harder for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to maintain high expectations of themselves (Moodie et al. 2019, 274)

An example of the prominence of “gaps” in First Nations education can be found in the Australian Curriculum: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures Cross-curriculum priority (CCP). As the name suggests, this curriculum is focused on First Nations Australian histories and cultures. However, in a previous iteration (version 8.4) (Maxwell et al., 2018) and in its most recent iteration (version 9.0), the achievement gap is cited as the purpose for teaching this content. In other words, the Australian Curriculum tells educators that underpinning the teaching of First Nations Australian histories and cultures is the desire to close the achievement gap. Gap logic underpinned deficit-orientated pedagogical interventions in English literacy in Australia over the past 20 years, including AL (Fogarty et al. 2018).

Redistributive justice and accelerated literacy teaching

The AL pedagogy was designed to apprentice so-called “underperforming” Indigenous students into the “literate discourse” (Gray 2007, 4) of written English texts, typically narrative texts. The programme reproduced the deficit logic of gap discourses by aiming to promote academic and, consequently, life success by scaffolding supposedly “marginalised and unsuccessful [Indigenous students’]” (Gray 2007, 1) comprehension of, and ultimately composition of, authentic texts containing literary features used by “successful” writers. The approach and its architects were focused on redistributive justice by purporting to uphold the rights of Indigenous to “access mainstream knowledge and language through the provision of empowering education” while neglecting the rights of Indigenous students to “sustain their own languages and cultures through culturally responsive education” (Kostogriz, 2011, 25).

The programme’s focus on English literacy as a gateway to “powerful knowledge” and full social participation premised on literacy competence positions teachers to reproduce deficit constructions of students in the classroom. The deficit logic underpinning AL is a supposed breakdown in the pedagogical exchange between teacher and students because, according to Gray (2007), many First Nations Australian students do not orientate their thinking “in a manner appropriate to engage with academic/literate discourse” (p. 7). The form of social justice teachers of AL are positioned to proliferate is highly paternalistic and laden with deficit constructions of First Nations Australian students, their languages, their families and their communities. AL advocates invoke Bernstein’s (1964) theory of language codes to suggest that the relative lack of English literacy success for First Nations students in school is due to their purported predilection for restricted codes. Restricted codes are typified in social contexts when “speech [has] limiting syntactic organization and there is little motivation or orientation toward increasing vocabulary” (Bernstein 1964, 65). In other words, students produce the grammatical structures and vocabularies typical of everyday speech. Through Bernstein’s theory of elaborated and restricted codes, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students can falsely be classified as deficient because of a curricular bias against restricted codes and towards “higher forms” of language (i.e. elaborated codes).

Proponents of AL present the pedagogy as a moral pursuit that goes beyond the desire of simply turning around NAPLAN results. Teaching students to be “fully participating members of a literate society” (Cowey 2005, 1) through explicit teaching that provides students with the hidden secrets of the English language and the elaborated codes of literary written texts is the goal of English literacy instruction in the AL programme. This assimilatory notion of justice is premised on giving “access” as opposed to constructing a pedagogy that is culturally responsive and aims towards First Nations self-determination. One of the many problems with “access” discourses being positioned as a proxy for social justice is the paradoxical nature of the discourses themselves. This is because “if you provide more people with access to the dominant variety of the dominant language, you contribute to perpetuating and increasing its dominance” (Janks 2004, 33) and perpetuating this dominance does not help to reduce racism or diminish the ongoing impacts of colonial practices in Australia today.

Recognition in Australian first nations education

The Australian Curriculum (AC) and the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers provide all Australian teachers with the impetus to engage First Nations content and perspectives through their teaching. In classrooms across the country, including rural schools with large First Nations student populations, like Desert Rose school, subject area teachers must embody positive dispositions towards reconciliation and implement inclusive and supportive practices for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students (AITSL, 2014). Through the AC, these same teachers have an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures Cross-curriculum priority which connects their subject knowledge to First Nations content and perspectives. These structural initiatives in the teaching profession appear a welcome change from the structural amnesia that Rose (2019) calls the “silent apartheid” where First Nations Australian perspectives, knowledges and experiences were systemically elided in our national consciousness that was, in part, shaped through the institution of schooling. These reforms position teachers to engage in questions about the relationship of non-Indigenous Australia to the traditional custodians of the land and how this relationship is shaped into the future. These two structures legitimate a conception of justice in First Nations Australian education premised on culturally responsive teaching that acknowledges the true histories of Australia and values the ongoing contributions of First Nations people, cultures and knowledges to the country. Subject English teachers are positioned by these structures to engage in recognitive elements of justice that connect English literacy to the disruption of mono-cultural curricula through acknowledgement of “Indigenous identities, knowledges and practices” (Kostogriz 2011, 26).

Locating Bruce’s teaching story

Bruce has been a non-Indigenous teacher in Aboriginal community schools with large First Nations Australian schooling populations since 2011. In 2012 he started as a classroom teacher, teaching out-of-field he was a physical education major, which is very common in smaller remote and regional schools serving majority First Nations Australian student populations (Weldon 2016). In 2017, he took up a new role at Desert Rose² school – a school with a majority First Nations Australian schooling population – where he was employed as the subject English teacher for the middle years of schooling (Year 7, Year 8 and Year 9). At this school, teachers were mandated to follow the AL approach and to use its accompanying teaching notes.

English teachers at this school had limited professional discretion when selecting texts, which is not common for subject English teachers (Watkins & Ostenson 2015). However, the practice of selecting Indigenous texts or Indigenous-focused texts is heavily influenced by “local school contexts and governance structures, with some considerations of personal practice and individual viewpoints” (Worrell 2022, 12). Bruce was required to choose four texts (one per school term) from a list of potential texts specified in the original National Accelerated Literacy Programme (NALP). The teaching notes accompanying the texts laid out the foci of the units, how to teach certain elements and even scripted some examples of expected teacher–student questioning interactions. In a meeting with a member of the school leadership, Bruce selected – from a list of supported texts – the Indigenous-focused text Kimberley Warrior: The Story of Jandamarra written by non-Indigenous settler Australian John Nicholson. At the time, he saw the text as an opportunity to raise themes of colonisation while covering the subject English curriculum. He did not consider the limitations of non-Indigenous authored texts and the potential to perpetuate “non-Indigenous misappropriations” (Worrell 2022, 13) through using these texts in the classroom. This paper uses excerpts from Bruce’s PhD research journal to interrogate his experiences teaching KW, showing the challenges for non-Indigenous teachers aiming for social justice praxis in First Nations contexts.

Methodology

This paper reports on a teacher research project conducted as part of Bruce’s doctoral dissertation. The research was a reflexive inquiry into the nature of doing good teaching and being a good teacher in performative times in a school with both non-Indigenous students and a significant First Nations Australian student population. Through a practitioner research methodology (Cochran-Smith and Lytle 2009) combining Kemmis’s (2010, 2012) ideas about praxis and Bakhtin’s notions of ethical responsibility (Bakhtin 1993), Bruce set out to investigate his praxis over one school year. The main source of data was a research journal (Kennedy-Lewis, 2012) that enabled Bruce to document reflections, recount teaching episodes, highlight tensions and difficulties and plot paths for future action. Through both written and audio-recorded entries, the journal captured – through his self-talk – how the “good” in praxis is constantly negotiated by practitioners in light of changing circumstances, pressures and experiences. The ontological significance of practitioners’ thinking about praxis and specific praxis events is affirmed in Bakhtin’s 1993 assertion that

the active experiencing of an experience, the active thinking of a thought, means not being absolutely indifferent to it, means an affirming of it in an emotional-volitional manner. Actual act-performing thinking is an emotional-volitional thinking, a thinking that intonates, and this intonation permeates in an essential manner all moments of a thought(s) content (p. 34)

The 109,525 words of raw data after the transcription of the audio-recorded journal entries and inclusion of already written entries represented unique acts of thinking and noting about praxis that Bruce recorded or documented at home, many hours after the actual praxis events. In praxis research, it is impossible to capture the “happening-ness” (Kemmis 2012) or “event-ness” (Bakhtin 1993) of social praxis as it is lived, because as soon as we begin a thought about praxis, that thought becomes another “event” of “happening” in our ongoing becoming in social life that is dislocated from the events being reflected upon or described. Therefore, praxis research carried out by teachers through research journals, while having an intimate relationship to praxis events as they are carried out, necessarily reduces the unboundedness and complexity of experiences into a discourse about praxis. This study drew on Bruce’s discourse as he planned, described and reflected on teaching a unit of work on the text KW. All journal entries addressing the unit of work were subject to the analysis reported here. In the findings, we take you through three phases of Bruce’s teaching of KW—planning, teaching and assessment – and show how multiple notions of social justice were connected to his praxis when teaching this text in subject English.

The teaching context

Bruce’s class was a multi-aged middle years class with students from curriculum Years 7, 8 and 9. The students in the class were from a range of cultural backgrounds. The land surrounding the school is owned by Indigenous traditional landowners. The non-Indigenous students whose families resided in the area were employed in service industries, tourism, resources etc. Non-Aboriginal people could not own land in this region and access to accommodation was exclusively through employment. There were Indigenous students from different geographic regions with familial ties to the region surrounding Desert Rose school and there were students directly related to the traditional landowners of the regions surrounding the school. Several of the First Nations students spoke a minority Aboriginal language as well as English and some spoke only English. The non-Indigenous students by and large spoke exclusively English and some students had Southeast Asian heritage. In the class, around half of the students identified as First Nations Australian students and half were non-Indigenous Australian students.

Signalling intentions (planning)

While learning through the text KW was to start in Term 4 of 2019 (October), the planning started over three months beforehand during the July school holiday period. The practice of early planning supported Bruce to manage the workload of planning requirements in the school, which he described as “extremely time-consuming and ultimately a pretty painstaking amount of work … usually between 5,000 and 7000 words” (Research Journal, Thursday 18/07/2019). During this early planning phase for the KW unit, Bruce read the text, took notes, thought about the purpose of the text and stated what he wanted students to learn from it:

I think one of the key learnings for kids to understand is that settlement in all parts of Australia involved different forms of resistance and conflict between Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people … how do I move [the students] into a space where there is an acceptance of conflict? And acceptance that settlement was … littered with violence and conflict throughout and people didn’t just say “yes, here, please take my land”. (Research Journal, Saturday 06/07/2019)

This learning intent demonstrates the active stance Bruce took towards dismantling Rose’s “silent apartheid” (Rose 2019) by focusing on European pastoralists’ invasion of Aboriginal lands. In the past, the themes of violence, resistance and conflict were silenced by dominant colonial narratives of land that was fought for and won by settler invaders through grit and will (see O’Dowd and Rushbrook 2012 for examples). The teaching intent was however limited because it constructed these struggles as part of history and did not extend the learning intent into how the ongoing legacy of dispossession affects Bunuba people today and how the story of the Bunuba connects to other stories of dispossession and resistance across the country. At the same time as Bruce was considering the potential learnings for his students, he was aware of the demands of the English curriculum as well as the impetus to tangibly improve reading and writing outcomes for students. In the same journal entry, he foreshadowed the performance-orientated demands that would seep into his praxis throughout the unit when he said:

… at some stage I am going to have to put the English curriculum hat on and think about what this looks like in terms of kids’ reading, writing, speaking and listening skill and knowledge development but I want those to come in really sort of generative and engaging ways and not in tick-box ways (Research Journal, Saturday 06/07/2019)

In this entry, Bruce has narrowed the English curriculum to the need to improve students’ reading, writing, speaking and listening. In Australia, the subject English curriculum is more than this: its breadth requires the development of diverse knowledges, skills, texts and modalities. In Bruce’s planning, he only uses the “skill and knowledge development” aspects of the curriculum with respect to reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Bruce does foreground the importance of developing this knowledge and skill in “generative and engaging ways” and non “tick-box ways”, which signals his commitment to the ideal of student-centred teaching and distances himself and his praxis from performance-orientated subject English teaching that is narrowly connected to the imperative to improve outcomes through AL pedagogy. Later in the school holidays, Bruce recorded a journal entry while reading the AL text notes for the KW text, capturing his instant reactions to the teaching imagined in the programme. Concerning the section about teaching writing, Bruce wrote:

… when we get to the writing part, all of a sudden, we have descended into this technical practice of replicating language features and text structures without capturing any of the intent around why we are using this story in our writing. There is nothing in the students’ production of the text that engages them in the “why” and that’s the most important part of this text really.I think I need to capture some way of taking the writing plan, well this one (the NALP notes), throwing it in the bin but still providing some way of improving kids’ technical skills but I want some kind of authentic, genuine writing engagement that is not only enjoyable but challenging and will do justice to the intent of the unit (Research Journal, Wednesday 17/07/2019)

When mapping his intentions for the unit, Bruce has to connect his own motivations and desire (Kelchtermans 2018) for teaching in engaging and authentic ways about conflict in the colonisation of First Nations Australia with the performance-orientated, skill-based, technical writing programme prescribed in the AL teaching notes. Bruce’s planning praxis is beginning to show how intersecting notions of justice are colliding within his thoughts about teaching. His focus on “technical skills” demonstrates his desire for his teaching to improve literacy performance in measurable ways and his preoccupation with writing is a direct product of the bias within AL for developing elaborated codes (Bernstein 1964) and the production of “literate” texts. At the same time, Bruce is craving genuine and authentic engagements in the English curriculum that are difficult to achieve given the constraints of a standardised English literacy pedagogy.

Juggling justices (teaching)

Bruce started teaching the text KW in October of 2019, over three months after he had begun the planning phase. As the teaching phase began, pragmatic concerns over differentiation and “ability levels” were foregrounded. The tensions he began to construct in his praxis were born at the intersection of the desire to support students’ improvement in reading and writing at the level of the individual and the workload demands of carrying out this task. Through this focus on performance and improving outcomes, Bruce began to reproduce deficit constructions of students that are prominent in the gap discourses discussed in the literature review of this paper. About the challenges of differentiating practice, he reflected:

I suppose in a lot of contexts [the text] would be accessible for a Year 8 cohort, but given the diversity of where the kids are at in their reading abilities and skills and knowledge – we have five or six kids who are reading at a grade three level, so for them, it is just complete overload right from the start and I can’t slow down the pace for the whole group to a snail’s pace just on account of those six kids because then the rest of the class who can access it are probably thinking – what is going on here? This is boring, why do we keep repeating this? Why are we doing fluent reading? I can read this already (Research Journal, Wednesday 16/10/2019)

Bruce felt a sense of overwhelm when trying to support struggling English literacy learners in need of extensive support. As Bruce ruminated on this challenge, he reinforced deficit constructions of a group of five or six students that are embedded in performance-orientated practices that focus exhaustively on impact measurable outcomes. He also foregrounds a tension in the mandated AL pedagogy because the teacher-centricity of the prescribed practices makes it difficult to meet the students at their point of need. The mandate in AL to scaffold students within their zone of proximal development (Gray 2007, Gray 2014, Vygotsky, 1978) produced an impossible praxis of differentiation that influenced him to increase his workload as he committed to using more time and expending more effort on work in his co-opted leisure time:

I am also thinking about on the weekend I have to prepare all of these materials and resources for these texts, which haven’t been done and then I have to prepare differentiated resources for all of the students … . It feels like already the pace is picking up and the expectations are starting to come thick and fast (Research Journal, Wednesday 16/10/2019)

Bruce has abandoned the prescribed teaching notes for AL and has committed to the time-consuming process of producing resources to support students’ understanding of the text while simultaneously facilitating their improvement in reading and writing outcomes. The intent Bruce mapped out during the planning phase of the unit still carried throughout the teaching of the unit alongside the performance-orientated considerations of praxis. Reflecting on a writing activity that required students to shift perspective from the Bunaba peoples’ description of the foreign invaders on their Country to writing a descriptive piece from the perspective of the encroaching white pastoralists, he expresses his discomfort as the activity strays away from the learning outcomes he set out to achieve in the unit:

I want to keep that really strong fidelity with the intention and the purpose of the text overall. So I think doing writing activities where we are jumping across and becoming colonisers by switching to the [coloniser’s] gaze and how they saw the Aboriginal people in those times, it is problematic because the kids just don’t have the critical understanding to see that we are doing that as an exercise in writing and they might misconstrue it as this was the perspective we should be holding. … I just had this [horrible] feeling about today … - the joint construction³ we created on the wall – it was just a bit gross. (Research Journal, Wednesday 06/11/2019)

During the teaching phase, Bruce was reproducing deficit constructions of students when aiming to tangibly improve their reading and writing abilities. He was also trying to enact socially-justice-orientated teaching through the content of the Indigenous-focused text he had chosen. In trying to achieve this latter aim, Bruce, through critical reflection, was able to problematise his own teaching praxis to make gestures towards a more culturally responsive teaching that did not explicitly act as a form of re-colonisation. While Bruce did critically reflect on his cultural responsivity in teaching and the limitations of the AL teaching notes, he did not interrogate the limits of the non-Indigenous authored text itself and its potential to misrepresent, misappropriate or distort Bunuba stories and accounts. Critical analysis of the text itself as a choice for subject English was a blind spot in Bruce’s attempts to enact deeper recognition as a social justice principle in his teaching.

Assessment and reflection

As the unit drew towards its conclusion, Bruce was focused on assessing students as part of his requirements for reporting. While assessment can be formative for learning in the subject English classroom (Thinking through Assessment, 2002), Bruce’s assessment practice had an evaluative focus as he signalled the importance of students’ writing considering the Australian Curriculum Achievement Standards for subject English.

We have the assessment piece due this week and it now feels like we are in the mad rush phase. … we are now at week 6 and I have only just finished reading the abridged graphic novel version of the story. … I feel like I can’t get the picture of what is achievable for this group of students within a certain timeframe and especially when I am trying to teach content – where I am trying to teach Year 7’s how to write a particular assignment, Year 8 kids to adjust theirs to make it fit with the Year 8 achievement standard and then I have to try and prepare other kids for a Year 9 level assignment, which is a completely different curriculum and achievement standard to the other two, all while teaching the same book and trying to have explicit lessons. One of the students after an explicit lesson on how to write the Year 8 assignment said after two days “it all sounded good in theory, but I just don’t know where to start”. (Research Journal, Monday 18/11/2019)

In this entry, Bruce’s focus has shifted to complying with reporting timelines and not on the quality or depth of student learning. The seeming impossibility of differentiation in the multi-grade classroom produces a sense of panic as Bruce describes being in the “mad rush phase” of the unit on KW. As these assessments and reporting timelines approach, the focus of the entries shifts from deep engagement with the multiple dimensions of justice connected to teaching KW in subject English, to a stance where the students are again constructed in deficit because of their non-conformity with prescribed standards. In performance-orientated teaching discourses, teachers are impelled to understand their “effectiveness (and efficiency) … by providing evidence that [their] professional actions have been productive” (Kelchtermans 2018, 234). Bruce’s deficit constructions of students could have arisen because the students became a barrier to his achieving a sense of self as a teacher that was effective, efficient and productive. In this way, Bruce’s description of the challenges presented by students normalises the achievement standards of the Australian Curriculum and problematises the students who do not neatly map onto these constructed levels. This practice could be understood as reproducing gap discourses at the level of classroom praxis.

After the assessment process had been completed, Bruce reflected on the intentions for the unit he had mapped out earlier in the year rather than the unit the performative goals and lens of the mandated AL pedagogy. The focus on teaching students about the history of conflict, violence and dispossession from a First Nations Australian perspective was achieved by some of the students. Speaking on the importance of the text itself, Bruce reflected:

bringing that text to the classroom … and introducing the concept of perspective was really important … I briefly read a few of the assignments today and I didn’t tell kids what to say in terms of their opinions. I told them they could hedge it and how they could do different things. One student … did a whole summary paragraph about how the book was quite educational because it taught us, from the Bunuba⁴ perspective, about how it would have felt to have all of these different things happen. They basically, without me telling them, just nailed the purpose of why we would teach that text and why it is a good text to engage with. … … I never said you have to feel sympathy, I didn’t say you have to feel empathy, we didn’t have any of those normative “you have to” conversations. But from the assignments I have read, they have pretty much all got there themselves because I think they can see what is reasonable and what is not. … When I am thinking back on my teaching, not instrumentally, [I am seeing] the importance of having those texts as strong and foundational to the curriculum.

Bruce believed teaching KW in subject English helped him to achieve a more just educational practice because the false histories and settler fantasies that were promulgated through the institution of education in Australia (see O’Dowd and Rushbrook, 2012) were challenged. While the text was a welcome departure from explicitly false narratives about land being conquered by gritty settlers, it still represented a non-Indigenous voice speaking to the experiences of the Bunuba people. Indigenous-focused texts like KW might provide teachers with Bruce a sense that they are recognising First Nations histories and cultures and advancing reconciliatory agendas through their praxis. However, these texts lack the ontological depth and authenticity of Indigenous authored texts in subject English (Worrell 2022). In the end, Bruce’s teaching, KW in subject English neither achieved the redistributive promise of AL teaching as he lamented students’ performances on assessment tasks relative to the Year level achievement standards; nor did it do justice to efforts to promote recognition of First Nations histories and cultures or promote reconciliatory agendas because of the shallow ontological depth and potential for cultural bias inherent in the settler-written text.

Discussion

We titled this paper neither this nor that to highlight that subject English teaching that strives to advance social justice goals in First Nations Australian contexts is in danger of leaving both redistributive goals and recognitive goals unrealised. The unrelenting focus on performance that Bruce enacted in his teaching can be directly connected to the effects of performance politics and gap discourses that overcrowd discussions around First Nations education in Australia. This is despite the fact empirical research shows that the links between discourses of quality teaching and improvement in results are tenuous at best (Burgess et al. 2023). Subject English teachers in majority First Nations Australian student contexts must grapple with mandated programmatic approaches to instruction that aim to standardise their teaching in the interests of improving literacy results. This is despite the fact these programmatic fads have never produced the type of results they set out to (Fogarty et al. 2018). This standardisation of English literacy teaching in the interest of quality control is concomitant with reductive conceptions of teacher professionalism characteristic of new managerialism in education (Lynch 2017). For Bruce and the specific case of AL, the original NALP programme was defunded over a decade ago after a review by Robinson et al. (2009) highlighted that the approach had a muted effect on results for “all but a small minority of Indigenous students in remote and very remote communities” (p. 216). Despite research indicating the limitations of the AL programme, it continued to be mandated practice for subject English teachers and literacy teachers at Desert Rose School in 2019. Bruce’s English teaching was not and never would be the answer to overcoming the achievement gap and providing First Nations students with the “higher forms” of English language competence that AL proponents argue comes through engagement with written “literate texts”, because the standardised approach had already been proven inefficacious.

Nor was Bruce’s teaching a path towards a deeper sense of recognitive justice. Limited by text selection (an Indigenous-focused text as opposed to an Indigenous-authored text), his own Western non-Indigenous lens and the institutional push towards standardised practice focused on performance, Bruce – despite being well-intentioned – was in danger of oversimplifying and even distorting the history of colonisation in Australia and its ongoing impacts today. By uncritically accepting a non-Indigenous authored text that purported to represent the history of colonial invasion in the Kimberley region from the perspective of the Bunuba people, Bruce failed to grasp the inherent paradox of the text itself. To teach about the Bunuba peoples’ experiences of colonisation he used the voice of a settler Australian–risking the re-colonisation of the curriculum. In Australia several Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academics and non-Indigenous academics have made concerted efforts towards decolonising education by privileging Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices in practice and research (Moodie, 2018, Weuffen et al., 2023). Using Indigenous-authored texts is a way subject English teachers can further efforts to decolonise the curriculum and promote a conception of justice premised on First Nations sovereignty and self-determination. Bruce’s restricted agency with respect to text selection and his uncritical acceptance of the settler-authored Indigenous-focused text limited the extent to which his teaching could achieve recognitive justice. Knowing that Bruce’s teaching was neither this (redistributive) nor that (recognitive) we show the enormity of the challenges for both the teaching profession and the education system in Australia. We need to aim towards an English teaching that is socially just because it empowers First Nations students with important skills and knowledge in English literacy and simultaneously privileges the ontological perspectives and truths of First Nations peoples.

Conclusion

This “close-up” analysis of one subject English teacher’s attempts to realise socially just teaching has revealed the tensioned and messy nature of this work. Teachers are beholden to institutional structures and accountabilities that determine not only what they do but how they see themselves as teachers and how they understand their students. Bruce’s journal showed how deficit discourses were entangled in his praxis and his reflections on practice. While Bruce resisted the standardisation of his English literacy pedagogy, he invoked similar deficit logic when discussing assessments and students’ learning. Further, the uncritical promotion (through AL) and adoption (through Bruce) of a settler-authored text created the potential for Bruce’s teaching to re-colonise the English classroom with non-Indigenous misappropriations of Indigenous voices (Worrell 2022). The challenges for teachers and the education system in Australia are deep. There is the need for a more culturally responsive workforce and simultaneously, there is the need for policymakers and system leaders to give these same educators the professional space and autonomy to create culturally nourishing curricula in the English classroom. The standardisation of English literacy pedagogy for First Nations Australian students is an ongoing threat to socially just education in Australia because it restricts teachers’ necessary professional autonomy and entrenches deficit narratives of First Nations Australian students.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was approved by the Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee (DUHREC) project reference number 2018-292.

Notes on contributors

Tim Delphine

Tim Delphine is a practising English literacy teacher and school leader who has over ten years of experience in rural and remote education contexts that serve majority First Nations student populations. He has published in the fields of First Nations education, literacy education, school leadership and educational policy and practice.

Glenn Auld

Glenn Auld is an uninvited guest living and working on unceded lands researching social justice in literacy education. His research is filled with paradoxes seeking out the good life in literacy learning while knowing justice can never happen on stolen land.

Julianne Lynch

Julianne Lynch is a transdisciplinary researcher and teacher educator who studies everyday technology practices, innovation, and change—in and out of school. She is passionate about affirming the expertise of young people and teachers working in circumstances associated with disadvantage.

Joanne O’Mara

Joanne O’Mara is a Professor of Education at Deakin University. She is chair of the secondary subject English Curriculum Inquiry units. Her research interests include practitioner inquiry, language, literature and literacy teaching, learning and curriculum.

Notes

1. NAPLAN – National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy is the standardised testing programme for students in Australia. It is undertaken by students in Year 3, Year 5, Year 7 and Year 9.

2. Desert Rose is a pseudonym.

3. Joint construction is an AL practice like “shared pen”.

4. The Bunuba people are the traditional owners of a region in the Southwest of the Kimberley in Northern Western Australia.