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The study examines how white teachers talked to children about national identity and cultural diversity by drawing on qualitative research with eight- to 12-year-old students and their teachers from four Australian primary schools with different racial, ethnic and cultural demographics. Despite a range of explicit and implicit approaches that fostered different levels of critique among students, teachers often communicated Australian national identity as commensurate to white racial and Anglo-Australian cultural identity. We identified three main approaches teachers used to talk about national identity and cultural diversity: cultural essentialism, race elision and a quasi-critical approach. We conclude that the wider education system needs to develop a more formal curriculum structure that guides teachers in developing a better awareness of the power of white normativity, and to critically and explicitly counter discourse and practice that centres whiteness as foundational to dominant conceptualisations of national identity.

Ethnic-racial socialisation is broadly described as processes by which both minority and majority children and young people learn about and negotiate racial, ethnic and cultural diversity. This article extends the existing ethnic-racial socialisation literature in three significant ways: (1) it explores ways children make sense of their experiences of racial and ethnic diversity and racism; (2) it considers ways children identify racism and make distinctions between racism and racialisation; and (3) it examines teacher and parent ethnic-racial socialisation messages about race, ethnicity and racism with children. This research is based on classroom observations, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with teachers, parents and students aged 8-12 years attending four Australian metropolitan primary schools. The findings reveal that both teachers and parents tended to discuss racism reactively rather than proactively. The extent to which racism was discussed in classroom settings depended on: teachers' personal and professional capability; awareness of racism and its perceived relevance based on student and community experiences; and whether they felt supported in the broader school and community context. For parents, key drivers for talking about racism were their children's experiences and racial issues reported in the media. For both parents and teachers, a key issue in these discussions was determining whether something constituted either racism or racialisation. Strategies on how ethnic-racial socialisation within the school system can be improved are discussed.

Some Indigenous Australians have embraced developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) and epigenetic discourses to highlight the legacies of slow violence in a settler colonial context. Despite important differences between Indigenous and scientific knowledges, some Indigenous scholars are positioning DOHaD and epigenetics as a resource to benefit their communities. This article argues that time plays a crucial role of brokering disparate knowledge spaces in Indigenous discourses of postgenomics, with both Indigenous cosmological frames and DOHaD/epigenetics centring a circular temporal model. Drawing on interview data with scientists who work in Indigenous health, and broader ethnographic work in Indigenous Australian contexts where epigenetics is deployed, this article explores how different circularities of space and time become entangled to co-produce narratives of historical trauma. We use the concept of biocircularity to understand the complex ways that Indigenous and postgenomic temporalities are separated and connected, circling each other to produce a postcolonial articulation of postgenomics as a model of collective embodiment and distributed responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous Australians are underrepresented and considerably disadvantaged within the Australian system of higher education. The various measures taken by Australian universities over the past decades have produced varying levels of success in increasing Indigenous participation and completion rates. In order to continue improving Indigenous Australian participation in higher education, it is important to understand the current patterns of participation and factors within universities that are associated with participation and success. In this article we analyse higher education student and staff statistics available from the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) and information sourced from the web sites of 40 Australian universities to examine correlations between various Indigenous student support mechanisms and Indigenous students' higher education participation rates. Our results indicate that there is a dual system of Indigenous higher education, with one group of universities excelling at attracting Indigenous students, and a different group of universities demonstrating high Indigenous student completion rates. We argue that challenges remain in determining how to increase commencements at universities with high Indigenous completion rates without compromising entrance requirements or further diluting the level of student support, and how to increase completion rates at universities with higher numbers of Indigenous students.