Nakata Case

Nakata

The writer is concerned with how educators are going to make Indigenous content being taught to Indegenous students an engaging intellectual experience without bringing on feelings of alienation. The reason students are withdrawing from learning and are feeling alienated is because there is not enough Indigenous content and when it is taught it is treated as more of an add on to multicultural persepectives, there tends to be disrespectful treatment of some Indigenous content, no consideration of the Indegenous knowledge systems and a lack of accomadation of 'Cultural learning styles'.

There have been australian universities that are now more accomadating this area and have put great effort into establishing schools of indigenous studies to stray away from dispersing it. This move towards incorporating inclusive Indigenous studies into the curriculum calls for non indigenous research into indegeous issues and has encouraged the extraction of elements in of indigenous ways of understanding the world. This inclusion helps develop students understanding of Indigenous Australia and current predicaments.

All students that come into university programs are already influenced as to what position they will take this is influenced by the particularities of their prior experiences. Educators need to understand what constitutes and is constuitive of indigenous experience in order to re-theorise indigenous students as prospective learners. As indigenous content is taught from the Western perspective it often differs to what the individual Indigenous student was taught about their cultural background, Students feel the contradiction and tensions within having to align to one or the other. Indigenous students face a challenge when faced with the orthodox western and indigenous interpretations of their experience, but cannot gain a deeper understanding without being involved with one position of the other. This lessens the students opportunities for developing ways of reading, ways of critically engaging with accepted Indigenous discourse as this itself is constituted within wider sets of social relations, without betraying accepted positions within the indigeous body politic.

There are five teaching and learning issues for Indigenous studies.

1. Educators need to recognise that their students live and will work in a very difficult and complex space.

2. Educators can't fixate on severring the indigenous from the white on grounds of elevating the indigenous, nor do they serve their students if they allow them to reject Western Knowledge sources and their practices on the ground of them not being indigenous.

3. Future educators must be able to work in complex and changing knowledge terrains.

4. We need to draw and build on the capacities and experiences of Indigenous learners