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Toward an Australian culturally responsive pedagogy: A narrative review of the literature.

This narrative literature review focuses on the theme of culturally responsive pedagogy, with an emphasis on the Australian context. Since the British colonisation of Australia, Aboriginal students have been significantly disadvantaged by an Anglo-European schooling system that requires them to leave their cultural assets at the school gate. After a decade of collective government failure to ‘close the gap’ on education outcomes for Indigenous students, urgent work is needed to inform the curriculum and pedagogical reform of state and federal jurisdictions. It is not only Aboriginal students who are impacted by Australia’s monocultural schooling system. With global population movements, Australian classrooms are becoming more culturally diverse. Recent changes in the educational landscape across the nation, including the release of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers in 2011, and the progressive implementation of a new Australian Curriculum since 2014, have challenged contemporary educators to respond to cultural diversity. Yet while ostensibly promoting cultural inclusion, Australian educational policy approaches are in reality directed toward assimilation, standardisation and a narrowing focus on the measurement of prescribed
Eurocentric learning outcomes.
Culturally responsive pedagogy, an approach that originated in the context of African American educational disadvantage, has shown promising outcomes among marginalised student populations internationally, yet has received very little attention in Australian educational policy or practice. For the purposes of this review, we use the term culturally responsive pedagogy to refer to those pedagogies that actively value, and mobilise as resources, the cultural repertoires and intelligences that students bring to the learning relationship.
To date, there is no substantial theoretically informed and empirically substantiated Australian version of culturally responsive pedagogy available to Australian educators working in schools, or to those preparing new teachers. While the emphasis of this review is on the educational experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, it is argued that under the current conditions of super-diversity in Australian classrooms, culturally responsive pedagogy offers a hopeful approach to improving the educational experiences of all students.