Ngaga-dji, a call to action: education justice and youth imprisonment
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Ngaga‑dji, a call to action: education justice and youth imprisonment Sophie Rudolph1 Received: 25 October 2019 / Accepted: 9 September 2020 © The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc. 2020
Abstract This article takes up the challenge offered to educators, researchers and policy-makers in the Ngaga-dji report, to reflect on the ways in which services and institutions need to change to better support and work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people and their families and communities. Ngaga-dji, which means ‘hear me/hear us’ in the Woiwurrung language of the Wurundjeri people, was launched by the Koorie Youth Council in August 2018 and reports on the experiences of 42 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people from across Victoria who have had contact with the criminal justice system. With a focus on education, the article engages with the Ngaga-dji report to examine how educators and those involved in education might seek to change their practices. The solutions put forward in the report are also connected to international research on education and youth justice. Keywords Indigenous education · Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education · Racism · Youth incarceration · School-to-prison pipeline · Australia
Introduction Indigenous education has become a national policy focus in Australia within the last ten years, while ‘Indigenous educational disadvantage’ has been a prominent political concern since the 1960s (Gray and Beresford 2008; Parbury 2011). The institution of education’s response to Indigenous disadvantage has tended to be assimilatory into a white middle-class Australia (see Marsden 2018; Beresford 2012). This is most clearly seen in the national bi-partisan policy of Closing the Gap in Indigenous Disadvantage, where the education targets are wholly focused on English literacy and numeracy, school participation and completion (see Rudolph 2019), however, progress on all the Closing the Gap targets has been limited across its ten * Sophie Rudolph [email protected] 1
Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Level 7, 100 Leicester Street, Carlton 3010, Australia
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year lifespan (Conifer and Higgins 2019). Recent discussions have suggested that a new target needs to be added to the Closing the Gap policy to address the high rates of Indigenous incarceration. While this attention to the disproportionate rates of Indigenous people within the justice system is indeed welcome, it is argued here that the issues of high incarceration and educational exclusion/disadvantage need to be addressed with an emphasis on understanding the ways in which they are related. There is a growing body of international research—particularly from the United States context—that addresses what has become known as the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’. This research is concerned with the relationship between school disciplinary measures that exclude students, such as suspensions and expulsions, and involvement in th
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