Everyday Reconciliation at School: New Celebrations and Ongoing Silences

Abstract

Throughout its existence as a statutory body (1999-2000), the Council, with Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous members, positioned the education system central to the process of reconciliation. Schools were seen to have a critical role in unsilencing Australia's past by increasing children and young people's awareness of diverse Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives on social, cultural and historical matters. Schools also had a key role in supporting educational outcomes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and young people. At school, all children receive implicit and explicit messages about reconciliation, Australian history, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures, but also about race, racism and whiteness. These messages are delivered daily through a range of material, discursive and affective processes. Although the education system's efforts have been ongoing, there has been little long-term ethnographic research on understanding how reconciliation is experienced and engaged with schools in the everyday. I refer to this as 'everyday reconciliation'. This doctoral research set out to understand everyday reconciliation at the policy, school and classroom levels as well as through the perspectives of children. Through a qualitative multi-disciplinary inquiry it seeks to uncover how, why and for whom reconciliation is being (re)constructed in education settings. Throughout the 2016 school year I undertook a multi-sited school ethnography in two urban, culturally diverse primary schools on Ngunnawal Country in the education jurisdiction of the Australian Capital Territory. Using Indigenous Studies and decolonising approaches as a framework (Martin 2003; Moodie 2018; Nakata 2007; Rigney 1999; Smith 2012), I explore the types of messages children receive at school at multiple levels including observable symbols (artefacts of reconciliation), metaphors (beliefs and values about reconciliation) and underlying assumptions (schemas of reconciliation) (Ortner, 1973; Schein 1990). The research included school and classroom observations, as well as interviews and focus groups with 52 children in Years 3 and 4 (8-10 year olds) (including 8 who identified as being an Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander child), 25 educators (teachers, executives and Indigenous Education officers), 6 Directorate staff, and 12 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents from the region. A particular focus was on accounting for the diversity amongst often homogenised 'Indigenous' and 'non-Indigenous' peoples. The study reveals that in the main, schools reproduced forms of 'colonial storytelling' (Behrendt 2016) about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures. Thus, despite educators' strong commitment to engage in some form of reconciliation, policies and practices served to maintain the structures of the 'silent apartheid' (Rose 2007). Within the silent apartheid, cultural deficits are perpetuated through silencing racialised social, economic and structural disadvantages experienced by many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In some cases, this led to the creation of schools, classrooms, practices and policies as sites of what I refer to as 'settled reconciliation', in which good intent and celebrations of perceived Indigenous culture(s) silence diverse Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' experiences and agency, and ignore the ongoing settler colonialism. This includes assimilation, racism and a privileging of whiteness, all of which the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, educators and parents in the study experienced themselves. Some children and teachers did find ways to challenge and disrupt the normalisation and privileging of settled reconciliation. However, for the most part, children (re)constructed and embodied the same messages of settled reconciliation that they were exposed to at school. Show more