Education systems across global contexts continue to fall short of providing equitable education for First Nations children, and broadly children of diverse cultural backgrounds.  As an example, in the Australian education system an ongoing challenge is the inability to alleviate the socio-cultural and economic inequalities experienced by First Nations school students (Morrison et al., 2019). In this paper we detail one practice-research project that brings together Community Elders and educators, with school leaders, teachers, and researchers working to improve schooling for First Nations students and their non-Indigenous peers. Known as the Culturally Nourishing Schooling project (CNS), a foundational premise is that if education systems are to achieve improved outcomes and experiences for learners, then this will require fundamental changes to the dominant practices of schooling. We contend that a crucial element in this transformation of practice is meaningful involvement of local First Nations communities and parents in school decision-making. A basic principle is that teachers and students, parents and families, schools and systems, are all located within particular communities, places, histories – and all situated in and on ‘Country’. Fundamental to this understanding of the interconnections between peoples and places is the knowledge that connections to Country, language and culture, community involvement in decision-making, and quality teaching are all critical elements in the pursuit of educational success for First Nations learners, parents and communities (Moodie et al. 2021). While CNS is focused on Australian First Nations education, concerns with the schooling experiences of learners and communities that are marginalized and minoritized continues to be a major problematic for education systems globally, and as such what we have learnt in the CNS project is relevant to diverse international education contexts.

The CNS project is organised around five intertwined professional learning strategies: Learning from Country; Curriculum Workshops; Professional Learning Conversations; Culturally Nourishing Pedagogies; and Cultural Mentoring. This paper focuses on the second strategy, Curriculum Workshops, analysing data collected during workshops run with teachers. During the Curriculum Workshops, participating teachers, local First Nations Cultural Mentors and researchers used three complementary analytical frameworks to appraise existing, and develop envisaged, curriculum materials. Teachers were encouraged to engage with a ‘relationally responsive standpoint’ (Yunkaporta & Shillingsworth 2020) as a way of centring First Nations Peoples’ values, knowledges and practices, and unsettling dominant colonial narratives in the development and delivery of curricula.

To frame this dimension of the research, we ask: What professional learning practices support teachers to re-envisage their curriculum to centre First Nations ways of understanding and being, and to take account of the local context or Country upon which they are teaching? The theoretical framework utilized draws on the work of Warren et al (2020), who suggest that there are three intertwined political and ethical commitments required of education and educators: to critique/refuse ‘settled’ disciplinary knowledges, to delink from the colonial matrices of power, and to imagine, articulate and enact alternatives. It is with this in mind that they offer the three sensibilities. Firstly, Multiplicity, is premised on the understanding that multiple knowledge systems are circulating, and attempts to impose or (re)establish a knowledge hierarchy is unhelpful and indeed harmful. Secondly, Horizontality, accepts that learning occurs across multiple systems simultaneously, so that ‘learning is infinitely deeper and broader than school’ (p. 280). Hence, learners and learning require drawing on the cultural and linguistic resources that students bring to school. Thirdly, Dialogicality, which is grounded by the principle that learning is relational, and requires an understanding that culture, life and language are socially and politically saturated.

Data analyzed in this paper includes audio and image recordings of teachers’ presentations of revised units of work to their colleagues, and in some cases Community members and families. As part of these presentations, teachers were expected to explain/justify changes to their curriculum practices with reference to the three analytical frameworks presented as part of the curriculum professional learning. Recordings of teachers producing a shared oral reflection, and individual written reflections, as well as copies of curriculum plans and resources were also collected and analyzed. Our data set consisted of 31 audio recordings of teachers presenting their revised units of work and 29 written reflections, which were generated across six participating schools. The thematic analysis of this data set indicated that teachers viewed their involvement in the workshops as providing theoretical and applied strategies to assist with positively nourishing (1) the involvement of learners in knowledge making practices, (2) opportunities to resist or interrupt constraining processes and structural arrangements within their schools, and (3) the teachers’ socio-political consciousness and resistance to deprofessionalisation. A further theme regarding (4) ongoing challenges was also noted, with teachers wary of fatigue, the difficulties of unlearning, and systems that remain rigid and resistant to change. In our engagement with the workshop data set we were guided by the principles of hybrid thematic analysis (Clarke & Braun, 2012). This method involves searching for “repeated patterns of meaning” across a data set (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 86). For coding, we made use of the NVivo 12 software to organise, tag and categorise files and pieces of data. We used a coding framework that we developed deductively, based on the three sensibilities outlined by Warren et al (2020). Working inductively, we added the theme ‘ongoing challenges’, because of the recurrent references to these in the data set. Two researchers conducted several rounds of coding together, in order to establish a shared understanding of the analytic concepts and what constituted examples of their use in practice by teachers in the curriculum workshops. During the analytic process, we viewed dialogicality as being mainly related to the creation of culturally nourishing schools. Horizontality, on the other hand, was understood as predominantly concerned with creating culturally nourishing learning environments for learners, whereas multiplicity was understood to involve nourishing the emergent decolonial understandings and pre-existing cross-cultural abilities of teachers. Notwithstanding, these distinctions and separations were not always clearly delineated.

Inspired by Warren and colleagues’ ‘sensibilities’, our thematic analysis focused on examples that gesture to professional learning on the part of teachers, and an expansion in their pedagogical and relational repertoire. Along with communicating burgeoning creativity, inspiration and desire to take steps toward ‘delinking from the colonial matrices of power’ (Warren et al, 2020), the teachers also remained wary of the constraints of moving in this direction. The research draws attention to the potential that is currently perched on the periphery for many educators that want to meaningfully and respectfully embed First Nations knowledges, histories and cultures in schooling. It also offers a reminder of the challenges that require addressing. Our analysis has also allowed us to arrive at some conclusions about the preliminary effects of the CNS project. For instance, we observed far fewer instances of multiplicity, while horizontality was the most heavily present, and dialogicality was more evident than we anticipated. In theory, multiplicity and horizontality should converge to foster conditions in which dialogicality is enabled, but this is not what we found. These insights allow us to understand this if we consider the foundations underpinning multiplicity as fostering a critical self-awareness. It is this reflective awakening that supports deeper and nuanced engagement with the colonial matrix of power, and it is to be expected this will sustained engagement. Whereas horizontality invites considering how and why learning extends beyond the school gate, and that cultural and linguistic resources travel with students into school. It is less surprising that this is an intellectual understanding that teachers can more readily connect with. By extension, dialogicality, which at its core is about relationality, may be appealing for many educators – it is the sort of ethos that may explain why many became teachers in the first place.

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