Description:
Non-Indigenous-led organizations and education programs have long been criticized for sanitized teachings of Aboriginal perspectives in history, while scholarship touts the transformative benefits offered up via decolonial and immersive pedagogical approaches. In this case study, we explore the impact of a cross-cultural venture, titled Hidden Histories: The Wadawurrung People, between a living history museum, the local Aboriginal community, and a regional university on teacher preparedness to incorporate Aboriginal perspectives in history curricula. Through a cultural interface lens, we examine the ontological and epistemological developments of 112 preservice teachers postinteraction with an intercultural digital-kinaesthetic education tool. Our findings suggest that PSTs enjoy engaging with the tool, yet while on site, they prefer to immerse themselves in the museum environment. Our findings indicate also, however, that the tool is an accessible cross-cultural predatory tool that encourages a lifelong commitment to integrating Aboriginal perspectives in history curricula.
Description:
This paper investigates border-making dynamics in the two political arenas where my subjectivity is most acutely implicated across time—the Jewish Holocaust (as an intergenerational victim) and the Aboriginal genocide (as an unwitting beneficiary). Albeit that there are many differences between the drivers of antisemitism and racism against Indigenous Australians, I investigate both of these racist structures through the lens of border-thinking as theorised by Walter Mignolo as a method of decolonisation (2006). The article has been formatted as an example of discursive border-crossing by juxtaposing theoretical ideas (particularly inspired by Zygmunt Bauman and Deborah Bird Rose) with interjections from my personal journal. I explore my own performative storytelling as a means for me to take responsibility to question power structures, acknowledge injustice, and to enact the potential for ethical dialogue between myself and others. This responsibility gestures to the possibility of border crossing as an ‘act of liberation’ that resides in the acknowledgement of historical injustices and their continued impact on both the beneficiaries and the victims of coloniality in the present.
Description:
This paper investigates border-making dynamics in the two political arenas where my subjectivity is most acutely implicated across time—the Jewish Holocaust (as an intergenerational victim) and the Aboriginal genocide (as an unwitting beneficiary). Albeit that there are many differences between the drivers of antisemitism and racism against Indigenous Australians, I investigate both of these racist structures through the lens of border-thinking as theorised by Walter Mignolo as a method of decolonisation (2006). The article has been formatted as an example of discursive border-crossing by juxtaposing theoretical ideas (particularly inspired by Zygmunt Bauman and Deborah Bird Rose) with interjections from my personal journal. I explore my own performative storytelling as a means for me to take responsibility to question power structures, acknowledge injustice, and to enact the potential for ethical dialogue between myself and others. This responsibility gestures to the possibility of border crossing as an ‘act of liberation’ that resides in the acknowledgement of historical injustices and their continued impact on both the beneficiaries and the victims of coloniality in the present.