Why 8 Ways matters...

School attendance by young Indigenous Australians shows a significant - and sometimes increasing - gap between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians from Year 1 to Year 10 and with even lower rates of attendance in remote areas (Australian Government, 2015, p. 12).But,  as Riddle and Fogarty (2015, np) point out, “measures to Close the Gap in [Australian] Indigenous education outcomes aren’t working”. This simplistic analysis of the Australian Government’s Closing the Gap Report, 2015 shows that the key areas of access to education are “not met” and improvements for Indigenous students in literacy and numeracy are “not on track”. Only the halving of the gap for Year 12 attainment rates is “on track” (Australian Government, 2015, p. 5).

Riddle and Fogarty (2015) also highlight how geographical isolation, cultural and socio-economic factors all influence Indigenous children’s access to education. Indeed, Riddle and Fogarty (2015) and Watkins (2011) both show the interlinking and complexity of access to health, employment, incarceration rates and housing all impact [usually negatively] an Indigenous student’s equitable access to education. So, while those with power to make decisions about education and social policy may be seen to be attempting to ensure equity and access, at present in Indigenous Australian education, the programs are not achieving their goals (Australian Government, 2015).

Post-colonial ways of knowledge creation through power
This lack of efficacy could be [and usually is] attributed to Western Euro-centric understandings of learning pedagogies that often draw upon a (narrow) post-colonial approach to ways of knowledge creation and learning – and even the formation of the structures of the Australian education system.

Access to myriad social and life opportunities that rely upon, or at least are enhanced by, quality education are neither always readily accessible nor culturally appropriate to Indigenous students (Gibb, 2003, 2006; de Guevara and Hernández, 2012; Carey and Prince, 2015). Klenowski (2009) is especially critical of the equity and fairness of assessment for Indigenous Australian students and points to McGaw  who argues that Australian education is “high quality-low equity” (2005, p. 25) due to wide-ranging differences in social background, achievement and inequitable post-compulsory schooling among Indigenous Australians.

Indeed, Klenowski draws upon Murphy, Hall , McCormick and Drury (2008, p. x) in positing that there are “funds of knowledge” - or significant cultural capital - ignored or even discarded through the post-colonial approach to learning and specifically assessment – i.e. testing of students’ reading and writing. This results in Indigenous ways of learning through oral histories, symbols, value and belief systems – often transmitted by “practice, modeling and animation rather than the written word” (Battiste, 2002, p. 2) – becoming both irrelevant through a Eurocentric pedagogy which is insufficient and discriminatory in its cultural sensitivity - especially to Australian Indigenous knowledge/s and ways of learning and knowing.

Further, this perpetuates the ‘othering’ of Indigenous learnings through selective discrimination. Importantly, to ensure that Indigenous learnings aren’t treated as a ‘novelty’ but a pedagogy of value, difference and quality, Carey and Prince (2015, p. 270) argue that the valorising of a romanticised notion of Indigenous knowledges only reproduces and perpetuates the binary of Western/non-Western education epistemologies. As educators, it is up to us to de-colonise the classroom - and the 8 Ways Pedagogy is a great framework upon which to be based.