'You Get to 'Feel' Your Culture': Aboriginal Students Speaking Back to Deficit Discourses in Australian Schooling

Despite an expenditure of over $45 billion in the last decade aimed at meeting the "Closing the Gap" strategies, successive Federal and state governments have overseen a generation of Aboriginal students who have experienced a failure of promised improvements to their educational outcomes. Recent scholarship has highlighted the paucity of quality research that has often underpinned many State and Federal programmes designed to meet these cohorts' educational needs. This paper foregrounds student voice and contributes evidence-based scholarship to the experiences of schooling experienced by over 100 Aboriginal students across six schools in NSW, Australia. Data generated through yarning sessions across all secondary year levels (7-12) provide unique insights into Aboriginal students' educational, social and cultural aspirations for schooling. Utilising Moodie's (2018) Decolonising Race Theory framework, the importance of foundationally embedding education within Aboriginal students' onto-epistemological affiliations to Country and Place, and need to engage with Indigenous knowledges, emerged as critical factors for Aboriginal students experiencing success at school, as an Aboriginal student. Yarning revealed that while some students felt a sense of loss or shame about intergenerationally disrupted connections to Country and community, the sense of connection associated with their Aboriginal identity drove them purposively and actively to resist colonial process of assimilation and elimination. This enabled them to champion for greater recognition and appreciation for educational outcomes embedded within their Aboriginality.