Christine Nichols concludes her discussion of Indigenous spatial concepts and its educational implications.

In February 2011 the Australian Institute for Teaching and Learning (AITSL), a contributor to the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), released a document titled National Professional Standards for Teachers. One of AITSL’s key categories was titled “Professional Knowledge”. Its Standard 2, which reads:
Know the content and how to teach it
has several subsections, of which Focus Areas 2.4 and 2.5 are relevant in this context.

Focus Area 2.4 reads as follows:

Understand and respect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to promote reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians

while AITSL’s Focus Area 2.5 has as its major thrust Literacy and Numeracy strategies. The idea of an integrated curriculum is thus intrinsic to the conceptual approach mandated by those charged with overseeing the writing of the as-yet not-fully-rolled-out (or even completed) Australian National Curriculum.

Nonetheless, educators contributing to, writing and implementing these national curricula will be expected to “embed” literacy and numeracy strategies as well as Indigenous knowledge/s into diverse subject areas, including English and the arts.

Such a cross-curricula approach means that into the foreseeable future Australian maths and science education will need to be conceptualised outside of what are often perceived as those disciplines’ own self-referential silos.

There is an opportunity here to include such Indigenous knowledge in the new mathematics and science curricula, especially. There are many potential applications for spatial analysis in fields beyond the playing field: in computer science, mining, astronomy and many fields of research. It will enrich all Australian children to learn a little about Indigenous mathematics in the new curriculum, and will provide Aboriginal kids living in “outback” Australia and others too, a real chance to shine.

We have a clear choice here. The easiest, most likely option is for teachers implementing the new national curriculum to pay mere lip service to such integrated curriculum approaches.

The more difficult pathway will involve taking these ideas and shaping them into a curriculum that goes beyond inclusion of “Indigenous perspectives” but foregrounds “Indigenous knowledge” at the level of the episteme.

This is from an article first published in The Conversation