title: Coloniality, Education and Indigenous Nation Building
Creators: name: Meston, Troy A
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: decolonisation
subject: Indigenous underachievement
subject: education

description: This dissertation, “Coloniality, Education and Indigenous Nation Building”, is a post-qualitative meta-analysis that examines the continuing inability of the Australian schooling system to adequately service the needs of Indigenous learners. The concepts of coloniality, education and Indigenous nation-building are used to establish the distinct parameters of my research locale. These tropes outline diffuse subtleties orchestrated to constrain Indigenous self-determination. Coloniality signifies the shift of Australia toward a modern nation, with its continuing strength contingent upon the “large-scale economic, political, spatial and ecological marginalisation of First Peoples” (Middleton, 2015, p. 564). While Indigenous nation-building denotes the “political, legal, spiritual, educational, and economic processes through which Indigenous peoples engage in order to build local capacity” (Castagno et al., 2016, p. 242), I align these tropes to deconstruct the current Australian school system. My analysis is guided by the question, Why are Indigenous learners continuing to underachieve in Australian schools?, and three correlational research problems: (1) Schooling and its effect upon Indigenous learners; (2) Ineffectual Indigenous-themed education research; and (3) Australian education (coloniality) versus Indigenous nation -building (decolonisation). I interlink my research question with problems, so as to better disentangle subtle complexities I see associated with Indigenous learning in a constraining educational milieu. The question of continuing Indigenous underachievement anchors this work, as above all, despite inter-governmental investment and monitoring, and an ever- increasing corpus of educational research, large-scale Indigenous success fails to translate. Given the persistent failures of recent investments, monitoring and research, I argue that Indigenous researchers require new methodological tools to understand the persistence of failure. I argue that despite advancing access for Indigenous Peoples to the academy, we have, in a very short timeframe, shifted from objects of research to participants, and now increasingly, producers of research. Given the rapid shift across a diaspora of exclusion to inclusion and leadership, I advocate for more reflection, critique, and discussion to better understand if, and where, agency can be found within our institutional participation, and academic proximity. Primarily, this dissertation functions to resolve a range of methodological tensions associated with Indigenous learners and the relationship they share with school and educational research. Facilitating my examination of Indigenous learning is the development and application of Critical Indigenous Cartography, a multiple method innovation, that purposefully intertwines researcher within the world and the spaces of this research. I employ Critical Indigenous Cartography methodically, through staged, systematic processes, to chart intersections between Closing the Gap, the Australian Curriculum, the National Program: Literacy and Numeracy, and the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. “Coloniality, Education and Indigenous Nation Building” concludes with a ‘map’ of Indigenous underachievement, revealing how schools operate to deliberately acculturate and stratify the Indigenous body politic. Emerging from this study, is a reaffirmation for Indigenous communities and our allies, to view schools as apparatuses of power and deceit; as such, they should be viewed with appropriate respect and caution.