When we become people with a history

Abstract

Aboriginal children learn a two-way pedagogy and most Aboriginal learners have to engage in bicultural and bilingual education to succeed in the dominant educational setting. Aboriginal Australians pride themselves on being Aboriginal, however Aboriginal epistemology and ontology are never considered as true methodologies within a dominant learning environment. Aboriginal children have to engage in the dominant paradigms, discourses and descriptives (in other words, the dominant language and ways of doing things) when reconstructing an historical consciousness. Aboriginal people, since the invasion of Australia by a dominant cultural group, have been forced to accommodate other ways of knowing and take these as fact. Aboriginal pedagogy has and is still being seen as primitive with no place in a modern world. Aboriginal pedagogy and theoretical discussion of history, ideas of time and place, and the evolution of knowledge systems form the bases for this paper.