Negotiating Worldviews: Indigenous Place in Academic Space
This chapter describes and critiques, from the perspective of an Indigenous global scholar, the development and delivery of a series of degree courses of study designed to respond to the historical, social and cultural trauma consequent to colonial worldv
- PDF / 97,878 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 439.37 x 666.14 pts Page_size
- 97 Downloads / 198 Views
Negotiating Worldviews: Indigenous Place in Academic Space Judy Atkinson
Abstract This chapter describes and critiques, from the perspective of an Indigenous global scholar, the development and delivery of a series of degree courses of study designed to respond to the historical, social and cultural trauma consequent to colonial worldviews interfacing with Aboriginal Australian Peoples and the expressed need for healing – not a word commonly used in the academy. Indigenous pedagogical approaches have confronted the power and privilege of the academy, in a creative tension that has demanded negotiated space under principles of cultural safety and security. While that space was being negotiated (and continues to be), invitations to take our work to Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea, have provided opportunity to consider the international movement of Indigenous Peoples to negotiate place in the international academic domain, and for Indigenous Pedagogy to show its relevancy and transportability across cultures, with our near neighbours and others, who, while having diverse histories, often have similar worldviews.
4.1
Introduction
This is both an inner story and an outer journey. My work over the last 25 years, at the community level, into higher degree studies, and as Head of College and Professor of Indigenous Australian Studies at an Australian university, has had a primary focus on violence and its relational historical, social and cultural trauma.
J. Atkinson (*) Southern Cross University, East Lismore, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected]
C. Mason and F. Rawlings-Sanaei (eds.), Academic Migration, Discipline Knowledge and Pedagogical Practice: Voices from the Asia-Pacific, DOI 10.1007/978-981-4451-88-8_4, © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2014
41
J. Atkinson
42
The word healing entered my vocabulary after on-going discussions with Aboriginal1 Australian peoples, my countrymen and women, who used the word with a sense of longing, and a felt and expressed distressed necessity, in their lives; and at the international level with other Indigenous scholars and peoples. So when I am asked what my scholarly discipline is, my answer is ‘violence – trauma – healing’. And therein is the problem. By its very nature this work is inter and multi-disciplinary. I do not fit into any particular disciplinary box within universities. This story will explore the journey that took me into and out of the academy, as I struggled to negotiate a place for Indigenous worldviews and pedagogical practice, within a space that was, and continues to be controlled by a dominance that, too often, believes in its own superiority. In an attempt to create safe places of learning and healing, within academic space – I often found a continuation of colonial systems of power, perpetrated by the very institution(s) in which I was working. Underpinning all of this has been the deep struggle within myself, the choices I had to make each day – the path – or trail – I choose to follow, aware that finding my knowing depended
Data Loading...
