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This paper explores the transitional experiences and challenges faced by girls from the Torres Strait Islands when they leave individual communities to attend boarding school in regional Queensland. The paper presents original ethnographic research using a narrative enquiry approach, capturing stories as narrated by a broad cohort of girls from within these communities, both past and present students. The stories relayed in this article are integral to assisting parents and extended family, staff and administrators to better manage the transition process from one community to another. Identifying the cultural, social and academic challenges associated with the transition process will enable those involved in student support both within the community and the school system to do so with an enhanced awareness so that the students involved may be helped to negotiate this experience more easily. This paper will also inform, although not directly engaging with the topic, the ongoing debate about the advantages and disadvantages of girls leaving their communities to attend boarding school. It will also add weight to the call to improve current strategies to assist with the transition process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global standardization reform movement in education has seduced many Indigenous education policy makers in Australia, providing a powerful neoliberal discourse to further consolidate their focus on Indigenous educational deficit. A Share in the Future, the latest review of Indigenous education in the Northern Territory is an exemplar in this regard. This paper offers a brief exposition of this review, highlighting how an exclusive focus on comparative statistics and standardised testing of English literacy and numeracy works to maintain the coupling of 'Indigenous' and 'deficit', reifying colonial power relations and justifying technical and bureaucratic educational approaches, administered and monitored from afar. Such an approach is unable to adequately respond to the relational, cultural and linguistic complexities and nuances of local Indigenous education contexts. The educational assumptions and propositions of A Share in the Future will be juxtaposed with those of the Cross-Cultural Collaboration Project, undertaken in the Northern Territory in 2008, to consider alternative ways of successfully engaging these local educational complexities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous Studies can be both exciting and challenging for teachers and students. This article will examine how an existing learning theory can be harnessed to help teachers better understand these challenges and manage some frequently seen student behaviours. Much of the discussion in Indigenous Studies pedagogy to date has focused on the curriculum and what we should be teaching, with a growing body of literature, for example, related to the inclusion of Indigenous Knowledges. However, there is less written about how students learn in Indigenous Studies. Drawing on the notion of the Cultural Interface and the ‘zone of proximal development’ to highlight the complexity of Indigenous Studies classrooms as a site of necessary struggle for students, the article considers possibilities for reconceptualising and reorienting teaching. The paper explores using the threshold concepts framework to gather evidence about how students learn or indeed don't learn, in Indigenous Studies. Threshold concepts are key ideas, critical to mastering discipline specific knowledge, which facilitate students’ ability to think like a discipline experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC)-funded project ‘Exploring Problem-Based Learning Pedagogy as Transformative Education in Indigenous Australian Studies’ raised a number of issues that resonated with concerns we have had as professionals engaged in teaching and researching Australian Indigenous studies and Indigenous education. In this discursive paper we air some of the concerns we share which emerge from our collective research and teaching interests. We argue that Australian Indigenous studies and Indigenous education are too frequently collapsed or used interchangeably, and while there is tension between these areas rather than see as a problem we chose to interrogate this and argue for the potential for fruitful intellectual collaboration. This article problematises pedagogy and finds that sustained effort needs to be made to understand how pedagogical approaches to Australian Indigenous studies and Indigenous education are guiding and shaping each cognate area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The AIJE has an established tradition of publishing special Supplements to highlight papers on a particular topic. This special edition of the AJIE is an outcome of a 2-year curriculum renewal project funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, which focused on teaching and learning practice in Australian Indigenous studies. The project involved collaboration between academics of Australian Indigenous studies in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. The articles in this special edition comprise descriptions of pedagogical innovations and discussions or reflections on the issues engaged in the course of the project by some of the key participants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]