In this paper we present findings of a four-year curriculum study which has provided new insights into how Indigenous Knowledges and ways of knowing interface with western education systems and the curriculum produced and valued within such systems. In our multidimensional research project, we have empirically investigated the long-documented challenges that teachers, school leaders and policy makers encounter when attempting to include Indigenous content in their classroom curriculum; these challenges persist despite there being mandated content provided within the official curriculum as is the case in systems like Australia. The project has filled a critical knowledge gap within the curriculum field by delivering a comprehensive empirical understanding of teachers’ approaches, attitudes, and capabilities regarding their teaching of Indigenous curriculum content. With little evidence available on ‘how’ this content can be effectively planned for and taught in situ, or the values, attitudes and beliefs of teachers across different disciplines that influence the effective uptake of this content, there has been limited focus on identifying, or indeed redressing, the issues impacting teacher practices in this work and how these factors influence student learning experiences.

We use the case of Australia, which has a national curriculum with dedicated and mandated Indigenous content included as a cross-curriculum priority, meaning this content sits  horizontally across eight school subjects. Thus, the study has implications for other systems where there is necessary impetus to provide culturally inclusive curriculum. By focusing on how teachers understand the task of teaching Indigenous content in the science and history secondary curriculum, we have built an evidence base to better understand how teachers plan for the incorporation of Indigenous content in their classrooms, and, in particular, how the disciplinary structures of curricula impact teachers’ practices, as well as hamper or support their capacities to foster genuine engagement with Indigenous content for their Indigenous students, and their non-Indigenous peers.

The study was framed by the following research questions:

RQ1: What does the positioning of Indigenous content within the official curriculum disclose about the evident epistemic, cognitive and socio-political inter-relationships?

RQ2: How do teachers’ personal beliefs and values impact on ‘how’ and ‘why’ they prioritise, plan, teach and assess Indigenous content?

RQ3: How do disciplinary structures impact on ‘how’ teachers are able to interpret, prioritise, plan, teach and assess Indigenous content across different curriculum areas?

The Australian education context is a cautionary tale for other culturally diverse contexts. Including Indigenous content in the curriculum has been a major policy initiative of successive governments in Australia for more than four decades. These moves have been a legitimate part of (perhaps) well-intentioned attempts to simultaneously improve schooling outcomes of First Nations’ students and supporting national reconciliation more broadly. The inclusion of this content is thus designed to achieve the dual goals of engaging First Nations students in schooling and improving the knowledges that non-Indigenous young people have about the rich First Nations’ Australian cultures and knowledges. However, evidence has demonstrated that despite its inclusion in the official curriculum, Indigenous content has largely failed to resonate within local school curricula. To date, educational authorities have largely responded to this problem through standardisation, developing decontextualized Indigenous curriculum content that removes the need to localise learning (Harrison et.al., 2019). We would argue that standardizing curriculum removes the nexus between Indigenous content and local communities and pays insufficient attention to how content is instantiated in classrooms Our point is that despite the official inclusion of First Nations’ content, the barriers teachers face in developing coherent programs and approaches that specifically address the needs and aspirations of First Nations’ young people and their families and communities have not been removed.

In order to improve our understanding of ‘how, when, and why’ First Nations’ curriculum content can be meaningfully enacted in the curriculum of classrooms, our study was designed to examine the interrelated structural and personal factors that contribute to the ongoing failure in education to meaningfully engage with First Nations’ content even within a system that mandates this inclusion, such as in the case of the Australian national curriculum. The study was conducted in three phases: • Phase 1: Various document analyses to map the official Australian Curriculum and its affiliated documents, and comparisons of associated State-based system iterations of these official policy documents. Interviews with State and Federal curriculum policy stakeholders were also conducted and analysed. In this phase we also analysed the media discourses of the popularised ‘history wars’. • Phase 2: Quantitative Survey of 400 teachers, across two disciplines (science and history) and two different education systems, to uncover insights into teachers’ beliefs about their subject disciplines and how these impacts on self-reported capacity to understand, plan and teach First Nations’ content into their classrooms. • Phase 3: Qualitative fieldwork and case studies of history and science teachers in 15 diverse schools, to consider the system and school curriculum structures that impact upon teachers’ work in this space. Across these three phases, the study has explored how teachers approach the mandate of including cross-curricular Indigenous content into their teaching and investigated teachers’ understandings and attitudes regarding the mandated requirement. To achieve this, the study has brought together perspectives across interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks in order to address sub-questions about the structure of official curriculum, teachers’ core beliefs, attitudes and values, and the interrelationships between epistemic structures and teachers’ actions in the classroom. By drawing on decolonial theorisations put forward by Indigenous scholars (for example Moodie 2018; Nakata, 2011) and understandings of epistemic cognition and how this relates to the core knowledge claims of the disciplines, the project comprehensively engaged with issues of colonial curriculum practices within western education contexts, disciplinarity, the connection between teachers’ beliefs and values and their reported practice and schooling curriculum structures.

Our analysis provided insights into the problematic ways that Indigenous content is included in the official curriculum. The analysis of Phase 1 interview data revealed that curriculum policy workers indicated a strong, individual commitment to genuinely and meaningfully embedding Indigenous content into the curriculum. Yet, at the same time, they conveyed an obligation to preserve the privileged elevation of western disciplines (Author et al., 2024). The analysis of the actual official curriculum (Author, et al. 2025) and the associated media discourses (Author, et al. 2025) determined that the atomised positioning of Indigenous Knowledges within curriculum works to ensure that these knowledges are powerless to challenge the colonial discourses in curriculum policy. Analysis of the Phase 2 survey data revealed differences and similarities in the beliefs and logics shared by science and history teachers (Author, et al. in press). Both groups could identify that teaching Indigenous content was socially valuable, but science and history teachers were different in the ways in which they saw the content as epistemically relevant to their subject area. Our phase three school-based fieldwork with science and history teachers and Indigenous colleagues identified how the curriculum itself is a constraining factor that negatively impacts on the potential to deliver curricular justice. Although our insights provide evidence of consistent challenge, we also find cause for optimism. We can now make informative claims that increasing the quantity of Indigenous content is not in and of itself enough, but what is important is that this content is mandated in the same way as it is for other school subjects. Our analysis indicates the value of teachers engaging meaningfully with Indigenous developed and controlled resources, media and cultural practices as a way to advance curricular justice. Our comprehensive findings have the potential to inform curriculum policy and teaching practice in critical ways.

Author et al. (2025). Author et al. (in press). Moodie, N. (2018). Decolonising race theory. In G. Vass, J. Maxwell, S. Rudolph, & K. N. Gulson (Eds.), The relationality of race in education research (1st ed., pp. 33–46). Routledge. https://doi.org/10. 4324/9781315144146-3 Nakata, M. (2011). Pathways for indigenous education in the Australian Curriculum framework The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 40, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1375/ajie.40.1 Author, et al. (2024). Author et al. (2026)