Community of Practices and Decolonising the Curriculum
Channel: AusPLAT Conferences and Roundtables
Date: 2022-04-12

Creating a Community of Practice to embed Indigenous knowledges and develop cultural responsiveness in Psychology education and training has emerged as a national imperative The Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project (AIPEP) 2 is an initiative that aims to bring about positive change by utilising several different strategies. Most important is to establish a community of psychology educators and practitioners with the same values, aspirations, and goals. Recommendations from the original AIPEP OLT Research, called for the psychology curriculum to evolve to include Indigenous knowledges as epistemologically equivalent to western knowledges. Incorporating Indigenous knowledges into psychology education and training achieves three key outcomes: 1) it demonstrates respect for the oldest living culture on the planet; 2) provides a mechanism to increase the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students studying psychology and 3) allows non-Indigenous students to develop cultural responsiveness. However, evidence suggests there is a need for educators to be trained effectively to implement this initiative.  In December 2020, Professor Dudgeon launched the next stage of AIPEP – to create a Community of Practice that offered collegial support for educators to examine and adjust their curricula to effectively include Indigenous knowledges and Indigenous psychologies. To date 24 universities have partnered in this as have the principle regulatory bodies, The Australian Psychological Society (APS), Australian Psychology Accreditation Council (APAC), Psychology Registration Board (PsyBA) and the Heads of Schools and Departments of Psychology (HODSPA). In this presentation, we discuss the process of building a community of engaged scholars and ways in which different universities approach the task of building curriculum to meet the desired outcomes.