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Despite an expenditure of over $45 billion in the last decade aimed at meeting the "Closing the Gap" strategies, successive Federal and state governments have overseen a generation of Aboriginal students who have experienced a failure of promised improvements to their educational outcomes. Recent scholarship has highlighted the paucity of quality research that has often underpinned many State and Federal programmes designed to meet these cohorts' educational needs. This paper foregrounds student voice and contributes evidence-based scholarship to the experiences of schooling experienced by over 100 Aboriginal students across six schools in NSW, Australia. Data generated through yarning sessions across all secondary year levels (7-12) provide unique insights into Aboriginal students' educational, social and cultural aspirations for schooling. Utilising Moodie's (2018) Decolonising Race Theory framework, the importance of foundationally embedding education within Aboriginal students' onto-epistemological affiliations to Country and Place, and need to engage with Indigenous knowledges, emerged as critical factors for Aboriginal students experiencing success at school, as an Aboriginal student. Yarning revealed that while some students felt a sense of loss or shame about intergenerationally disrupted connections to Country and community, the sense of connection associated with their Aboriginal identity drove them purposively and actively to resist colonial process of assimilation and elimination. This enabled them to champion for greater recognition and appreciation for educational outcomes embedded within their Aboriginality.

This paper contributes evidence-based scholarship to how teachers understand the value of Aboriginal student-focussed programmes and how discourses of Indigeneity appear to influence those views. Interviews with n = 22 teachers across n = 3 secondary school sites in New South Wales highlighted teachers' understanding of Aboriginal programmes as primarily contributing to students' behavioural and academic improvement. The interviewed teachers spoke positively about Aboriginal students' current academic achievements and prospects for their bright futures as graduates, albeit from within deficit and colour-blind discourses. Utilising Moodie's Decolonising Race Theory framework, teachers' juxtaposing beliefs resonate with existing decolonising education research which indicates a performativity of cultural inclusion through adherence to settler-colonial practices, while at the same time, an intellectual desire to move away from the legacy of Australia's contentious colonial past.

When conversations about Aboriginal student educational success emerge, they are usually focussed on the high levels of underachievement and disengagement. School leadership is seen as critical to contributing to student outcomes. For Aboriginal students, creating inclusive learning environments that support culture and identity, and building trusting relationships with families and community members are also critical goals. As part of the Aboriginal Voices project, this paper uses Decolonising Race Theory (Moodie, 2018) to analyse interviews with four Principals in urban, regional, and rural locations to understand their perceptions and experiences of leading Aboriginal education in schools. From the interviews, three key themes emerged: leading culture, identity and school-community relationships, leading curriculum, pedagogy and teacher development, and leading student participation and achievement. Decolonising Race Theory (Moodie, 2018) is applied as an analytical tool to view these themes through a critical Indigenous lens to understand the Principals' discourses around Aboriginal student experiences at school and their role in improving outcomes. This revealed contradictory positionings within and between Principal comments, from blaming students and their families for their underachievement, to implementing cultural programmes to build confidence to become self-determining adults. This data provides new ways of thinking through discourses about Aboriginal students and their families, communities, schools, teachers and Principals, and challenges some of the 'regimes of truth' that position these groups in particular ways.

As the final piece of scholarship in the special issue, this paper pulls together data from the "Aboriginal Voices" project to analyse how Aboriginal students in Australia today experience schooling, particularly in relation to the futurity of their identity as sovereign First Nations Peoples. Using Decolonising Race Theory as a key methodological framework in this special issue enabled an assessment of the purpose and effects of coloniality to acknowledge the survival and innovation of First Nations Peoples in resisting and imagining a future otherwise. In doing so, the empirical data, and provocations, presented throughout this collection, opens up possibilities for exploring how the centrality of sovereignty impacts young Aboriginal students' interactions with and experienced success within the Australian schooling system.

Since contact, there has been a foundation of inhospitable interactions between the original sovereign peoples of the Australian continent and Eurpoean arrivals. Despite government policies appearing to shift from assimilative practices to reconciliation processes in the latter half of the 20th Century, ongoing interactions continue to be factious, caught up in discourses of power/knowledge, and, perhaps provocatively, couched primarily in misunderstandings. In the Australian schooling space, while there has been increased attention paid to the academic success of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students, and greater inclusion of their families, communities, and cultural practices, non-Indigenous led schools continue to be hamstrung by their epistemic inertia -- the cognitive inability to move beyond the fear of getting it wrong, offending, or being labelled racist. In this paper, we argue that the major impediment to ongoing and unresolved discord is concealed in the onto-epistemological foundation of what it means to respect, accept, and work with. To address this, we take up Welcoming to Country practices and Derrida's concept of hospitality to interrogate how more nuanced conceptualisations of reciprocity may be used to move beyond performative acts of reconciliation. The outcome of which may be a reimagining of practices that are relational and responsive for embracing and nourishing Indigenous cultures and languages.

Despite their position as providers of tertiary education, universities sit beyond normalised discourses of education where qualifications, registration, and continuing professional development are concerned. In this case study, we explore how participation in an academic induction program (AIP) builds foundational andragogy knowledge and skills and fosters individual commitment to continuing professional development (PD) for the critical engagement, maintenance, and enhancement of quality teaching practices. Through a poststructuralist lens, we gathered triangulated evidence via surveys (n=32) and attendance data (n=190). Our findings indicate a positive correlation between AIP attendance and initial PD engagement but identifies a 35% decline in PD uptake six-month post-AIP. Survey responses indicate that while an AIP is a valuable tool for prompting initial engagement in learning and teaching PD, the role and function of teaching within universities needs to be elevated in order to support a career-long commitment to academic enhancement.

The purpose of this article is to present a problematising and exploration of how teachers educated within settler-colonial systems are positioned to analyse critically and resist whitewashed curriculum when planning for school-based learning. Since the 2013 implementation of the Australian Curriculum: History, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies have been a mandatory, albeit subsidiary, focus area of study. While publications have explored the purpose of, the need for, and the possibilities offered up by cross-curriculum education, very little attention has been paid to how curriculum is enacted within schools. Through a poststructuralist lens, and a non-Indigenous researcher positioning, this article illuminates a discursive analysis of ways in which six history teachers in Victoria, Australia, perform their subject positioning along a continuum of compliance-resistance within the Australian education system.

Contemporary scholarly critique in Indigenous research spaces has tended to focus on binary dualities, including the purpose of Indigenous-focused research, and the legitimacy of researcher identity, research knowledge and truth. Yet, perhaps unintentionally, such interrogation has led to the continued (re)construction and maintenance of false race-based dichotomies. In this paper, one way in which we seek to step beyond binary race-based discourses is by advocating for the advancement of cross-cultural research practices that interweave traditional and contemporary communication practices. We put forward the case that by knitting together Eurocentric and Indigenous research methodologies, Lawrence-Lightfoot's (2005, "Qualitative Inquiry" 11, 3-15) portraiture method, and Aboriginal practices of storytelling/yarning, the cross-cultural oral narrative portraiture method enables co-construction of more holistic, culturally nuanced and responsive stories, where meaning, context and reason resonate. In the 21st century research space, we open dialogue for thinking about data as stories, and advocate for contemporary intercultural research processes that are inclusive, engaging and promote co-construction of narratives for storying.

While no major change in relation to student attrition and retention data has been recorded over the past 20 years, the increasingly neoliberal agenda imposed on Australian higher education institutions has led to increased scrutiny around such data. In this case study, we explore discourses of attrition and retention to understand better the unique needs of students, and influences of targeted student support programs, as they transition to a regional higher education learning environment. We applied a mixed methods approach via a poststructuralist lens to identify frequency of nodes in relation to dimensions of the Kahu's "conceptual framework of engagement," "antecedents and consequences model" and present staff (n=6) and student (n=7) perceptions about the tangible value of knowledge, engagement, participation, and reportable outcomes of student support programs. Our findings indicate that staff tend to view student support programs from deficit discourses, whereas students view them as empowering.

Non-Indigenous-led organizations and education programs have long been criticized for sanitized teachings of Aboriginal perspectives in history, while scholarship touts the transformative benefits offered up via decolonial and immersive pedagogical approaches. In this case study, we explore the impact of a cross-cultural venture, titled "Hidden Histories: The Wadawurrung People", between a living history museum, the local Aboriginal community, and a regional university on teacher preparedness to incorporate Aboriginal perspectives in history curricula. Through a cultural interface lens, we examine the ontological and epistemological developments of 112 preservice teachers postinteraction with an intercultural digital-kinaesthetic education tool. Our findings suggest that PSTs enjoy engaging with the tool, yet while on site, they prefer to immerse themselves in the museum environment. Our findings indicate also, however, that the tool is an accessible cross-cultural predatory tool that encourages a lifelong commitment to integrating Aboriginal perspectives in history curricula.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to posit a possible reason why non-Indigenous educators are seen to be 'cautious' in their pedagogic engagement with First Nations perspectives in curriculum, why interventions and programmess around reconciliation and truth-telling have limited traction in affecting change in school culture, and why the Australian education system is constructed to be, and remains, largely hostile to First Nations Peoples and perspectives. Despite several decades of studies exploring these phenomena and concerted efforts to 'fix the problem', there has been a systemic failure to shift discourses and practice beyond the completely absent, tokenistic, or superficial inclusion of First Nations narratives in Australian education. We argue that power-knowledge relations of settler-colonial discourses are fundamentally at play and that by examining how disciplinarity and settler-colonial frameworks of knowledge control operate in education, we conceptualize a possible reason to the pedagogical challenges faced in the decision-making and integration of First Nations narratives in curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a cross-cultural pedagogical approach, couched in a theory-practice nexus, used at a Victorian regional university to guide non-Indigenous pre-service teachers' (PSTs) engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives and cultures. We have drawn on qualitative and statistical data, and current issues in Australian and international literature, to explore the relevance and success suggested by data from this cross-cultural pedagogical approach, in particular the notion of teacher ethnicity in racialised spaces. In doing so, we have addressed recent sentiments about a lack of quantitative and qualitative research that explores inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content and discussions of ways in which tertiary educators construct and influence teachings about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. It is anticipated that this paper will generate further dialogue and research-based evidence on ways in which other tertiary education providers may draw on cross-cultural theories to guide inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content and perspectives in PST education courses.

The aim of this article is to provide teachers with knowledge of ways in which Eurocentric (re)naming practices inform contemporary pedagogical approaches, while providing understandings pertinent to the mandatory inclusion of the cross-curriculum priority area: "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures" (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2015). While we have focused on Eurocentric naming practices, we have also been conscious of names used by Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders to name themselves and others and as non-Indigenous Australians we acknowledge that it is not our place to explore these in detail, or offer alternatives. In this article, we have explored the history of nomenclature as it relates to original inhabitants, the connotations of contemporary (re)naming practices in Australian education and discussed the importance of drawing on cultural protocols and engaging local communities for teaching and learning of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. It is anticipated that discussions arising from this article may open up spaces where teachers may think about ways in which they approach Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures.

While no major change in relation to student attrition and retention data has been recorded over the past 20 years, the increasingly neoliberal agenda imposed on Australian higher education institutions has led to increased scrutiny around such data. In this case study, we explore discourses of attrition and retention to understand better the unique needs of students, and influences of targeted student support programs, as they transition to a regional higher education learning environment. We applied a mixed methods approach via a poststructuralist lens to identify frequency of nodes in relation to dimensions of the Kahu's conceptual framework of engagement, antecedents and consequences model and present staff (n =6) and student (n =7) perceptions about the tangible value of knowledge, engagement, participation, and reportable outcomes of student support programs. Our findings indicate that staff tend to view student support programs from deficit discourses, whereas students view them as empowering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]