Disruption and Understanding in Professional Teaching Contexts

Introduction

Much of my teaching career has been devoted to disrupting and reconfiguring hegemonic educational decision-making practices to embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ knowledges (also referred to as Indigenous knowledges) into the disciplines at all levels of schooling and tertiary education. I do this from a non-Indigenous standpoint, with a personal, political, and professional commitment to doing so defining my teaching philosophy and professional teaching practice. The theories that have shaped my approach to embedding Indigenous knowledges include Nakata’s (2007) theory of the Cultural Interface, Ladson-Billings (1998) application of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in education, bell hooks’ (1994) philosophy of engaged, transgressive pedagogy and, more recently, Todd’s (2014) educational philosophy for personal, moral, and ethical relations and liminality in classroom experiences. Perhaps, more conventionally, Bernstein’s (1990) social construction of...