How Ngarrngga works with Curriculum

Imagine an Australian education that fully embraces opportunities to know, hear, and understand Indigenous Knowledge – one that invites us to reimagine and revision how we teach, learn and grow together as a nation.

Embedding Indigenous Knowledge into Australian education is not just an opportunity but a necessity to create culturally safe and relational learning environments. Showcasing this knowledge in classrooms enriches students’ learning experiences and acknowledges the contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people while fostering ongoing, respectful relationships with knowledge, people, and Country.

Ngarrngga is a Taungurung word meaning to know, to hear, to understand. It is an invitation for us all to imagine many possibilities for what we can teach and how we can learn in respect to Indigenous Knowledge.

Everyone working in and with Ngarrngga embraces this invitation to bring Indigenous Knowledge into conversation with curriculum and discover ways to articulate and situate the outcomes of these conversations into education contexts.

This blog introduces the foundation of one part of Ngarrngga’s transformative work; its approach for bringing curriculum to life through the practice of designing and creating educational resources.

Guided by Ngarrngga’s Principles, our approach for working with curriculum is underpinned by a commitment to engage in relational and developmental dialogue.

Ngarrngga’s approach for engaging with curriculum

In Australia, curricula frameworks are moulded by societal, cultural, and political forces that influence how authorities decide what educators should teach and what students should learn (Ross, 2024).

Our approach to working with curriculum shifts away from positioning knowledge as something to be acquired, and into encounters that invite relational learning dialogue (Biesta, 2013) - a space where educators feel empowered to showcase and learn about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures alongside students in flexible and personalised ways.

In our work, our purpose is to ensure all Australian students have opportunity to understand the richness, diversity and ingenuity of 65,000 years of Indigenous Knowledge, histories and stories, and how this contributes to our shared past, present and future (Shay et al., 2023).

We attune our thinking to how curriculum is made, defined and understood by teachers in diverse ways and specific contexts by considering the many ways curriculum is experienced (for example: the dynamic dialogical encounters between educators and learners in education settings).

Bringing Indigenous Knowledge into conversation with curriculum

An important part of Ngarrngga’s approach is to listen and be guided by Indigenous Knowledge experts to identify and foreground Indigenous Knowledge as the basis for making specific and meaningful connections with curriculum.

As a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators, we adopt an approach that respects and upholds the holistic, dynamic and interconnected nature of Indigenous Knowledge.

Together, we strive to meet the needs of educators seeking curriculum-attuned educational resources while piquing curiosity and motivations to continue building one’s knowledge and understanding.

To enable this, the Ngarrngga team engage with a breadth of Indigenous people and knowledge as well as Indigenous and non-Indigenous philosophical, curricula and pedagogical scholarship and frameworks.

Our approach is underpinned by a shared curiosity to better understand what happens between intended and experienced curriculum (Ross, 2024) where students and educators engage with each other, but also with those not actively present (Pinar, 2005; 2022). This is where our ongoing conversation, consultation and collaboration with Indigenous Knowledge experts and advisors play an important role in Ngarrngga’s engagement with curriculum.

Our approach takes into account the intentions that curricula frameworks set what should be known, heard and understood, and how this actively shapes the experience of coming to know, hear and understand.

This involves careful discernment of what knowledge and histories are included, omitted, situated and presented in curriculum, and a commitment to relational interpretation and enactment of curriculum for showcasing Indigenous Knowledge in educational resources.

Through this relational approach to working with curriculum, we strive to develop resources that bring content, capabilities and priorities of Indigenous Knowledge and curriculum imperatives into conversation, congruence and context for educators.

We anticipate these educational resources, developed through this approach, can empower educators to create authentic, diverse and engaging learning experiences that benefit all students.

In our next blog piece, we explore how Ngarrngga’s approach for working with curriculum feeds into the development and use of our framework for curriculum interpretation and enactment.

References:

• Biesta, G. (2013) Knowledge, judgement and the curriculum: On the past, present and future of the idea of the Practical, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 45(5), 684-696.

• Hogarth, M. (2024). Australian teacher shouldn’t be afraid to teach Indigenous Knowledge. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/australian-teachers-shouldn-t-be-afraid-to-teach-indigenous-knowledge

• Ngarrngga (2024). The vision: Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Declaration. https://www.ngarrngga.org/the-vision

• Pinar, W. F. (2005). The problem with curriculum and pedagogy. Journal of curriculum and pedagogy, 2(1), 67-82. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15505170.2005.10411529

• Pinar, W. F. (2022). A praxis of presence in curriculum theory: Advancing currere against cultural crises in education. Routledge.

• Ross, E. (2024). Teachers' interpretation of curriculum as a window into ‘curriculum potential’. The Curriculum Journal, 35(1), 38-55.

• Shay, M., Sarra, G., & Lampert, J. (2023). Indigenous education policy, practice and research: unravelling the tangled web. The Australian Educational Researcher, 50(1), 73-88.