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This paper discusses an Aboriginal cultural mentoring project for non-Aboriginal teachers that positions Aboriginal people front and centre as cultural and educational experts. In so doing it sets out to contribute to work in Australia that challenges 'common' understandings about mentoring in educational contexts where the expert is usually a western-educated non-Aboriginal teacher. In this project, non-Aboriginal teachers are supported in implementing culturally responsive curriculum and pedagogies into their classroom through building relationships with Aboriginal mentors and students. Analysis of thirteen pre and post surveys, four mentee interviews and one mentee focus group, illuminated the emergence of collaborative cultural mentoring processes, where teachers developed trusting, reciprocal and respectful relationships with Aboriginal people. We argue that a systematic, well-supported Aboriginal cultural mentoring program can be used to create and convert new knowledge into practice, and that this can have a positive impact on teachers' understanding of teaching/learning processes thereby contributing to Aboriginal student engagement in their learning.

In both academic and policy spaces, learning is often cast as lifelong, dynamic, constructive and in particular, agentic. Despite this focus students' voices are rarely privileged in these spaces -- especially in policy. We respond to this oversight by deploying Foucault's theories of knowledge to explore how students understand themselves as learners, considering this alongside dominant political and academic discursive constructions of learning. Using a metaphor card approach, we explored metaphors for learning articulated by students in longitudinal focus group interviews. Conducted over a two-year period with 47 students from four Western Sydney schools, student metaphors for learning were diverse and wide-ranging, frequently reflecting strategic approaches to learning that aligned with requirements of high stakes exit exams. Significantly, student descriptions of themselves as exhausted, passive containers of impermanent learning were at odds with national and international policy and higher education constructions of learning as 'lifelong and agentic'. This contradiction raises critical questions about students' experiences of learning in schools, the role of teacher education, and re-direction of university equity programmes aimed at increasing access and participation for educationally marginalised students.

Mandatory Aboriginal education units of study in teacher education programmes are often constrained by overcrowded curriculum, time and classroom-based learning which limit opportunities to engage with and learn from local Aboriginal people and communities. Recognising these issues, at an urban Australian university two of the authors introduced 'Learning from Country' (LFC) cultural immersion experiences led by local Aboriginal community-based educators. These LFC experiences are now integral in several Aboriginal education electives. Emerging from these experiences, we developed an organic, iterative conceptual framework to articulate and make visible what LFC looks, feels and sounds like. In this paper we explain the LFC framework and discuss how it can be used to support preservice teachers to incorporate LFC principles into their professional practice and become part of their personal and professional identities in order to affect change in Aboriginal education in the schools and classrooms in which they will work.

Shame is a 'slippery' concept in educational contexts but by listening to Aboriginal philosophy and Country, we can rethink its slipperiness. This article contemplates how multiple understandings of shame are derived from and coexist within colonised educational contexts. We focus on one positive example of Indigenous education to consider how these understandings can be challenged and transformed for the benefit of Indigenous learners. We discuss a mentoring program run by and for Indigenous young people that is successfully impacting school retention and completion rates: The Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME). AIME has a rule, 'No Shame at AIME', with the view to minimising shame as a barrier to engaging with Western education. But is this as beneficial as might first appear? Might this erode important cultural understandings of shame necessary in Indigenous education? Instead, could shame be repositioned to better align with original cultural meanings and purposes? We philosophise about the AIME rule with Yuin Country and stories from Country along with our observational and interview data. We argue AIME does not so much 'remove' shame as reposition it to better align with Aboriginal cultural educational practice, which positively impacts mentees.

There are well documented concerns with the imposition of high stakes testing into the fabric of school education, and there is now an increasing focus on how such tests impact children's "well-being." This can be witnessed in reports in the popular news media, where discussion of these impacts frequently refer to "stress" and "anxiety." Yet, there is no work that is able to tell us about what is happening in the bodies of the teachers and children who are living this schooling in the day-to-day; whether this is best considered through the languages of "stress"; or what the implications--emotional, educational, embodied--of these experiences might be. This paper develops a transdisciplinary approach that brings social and biological accounts together in order to address the "more-than-social" of the emotionality of childhood and schooling. We seek out opportunities for transdisciplinary connectivity and for new ways of seeing and knowing about learning. We consider what these ways of seeing and knowing might offer to education.

In this paper we respond to this special issue's critical focus on mental health in education by considering the medicalised and homogenising approaches to the mental health of young people and the severely negative consequences for young people. Our argument is underpinned by the need to destabilise the hegemony of the current dominant discourses and practices of mental health used in education. The problem with these discourses and practices, informed by particular forms of psychiatry and psychology, is precisely their dominance and their popularised proxy take-up of these. We firstly outline this problem, explore the emergence and saturation of a 'damaged self' in education and consider the impact on young people. We offer counter-narratives that involve a reframing of the self in relation to ethics, politics, capability and the arts and can assist in countering the psy-dominance in education. The paper concludes with some reflections on how teachers might work against the damaging effects of the psy-disciplines and instead support young people in finding their counter-narrative selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) is a national, extra-curricular mentoring programme that is closing the educational gap for young Indigenous Australians. So what is AIME doing that is working so well? This article draws on a large-scale classroom ethnography to describe the pedagogies that facilitate the teacher-student relationships in this programme. We use Shawn Wilson's theorisation of Indigenous ways of knowing in order to "unpack" how these approaches succeeded in creating the egalitarian and trust-filled relationships reportedly experienced in the AIME programme.