Introduction
The current education system in Australia faces constant comparison of its student attainment standards both nationally and globally with high levels of testing in that various comparable nations have initiated a significant component of the educational terrain. Subsequently, education is highlighted and exemplified as a vital constituent of eliminating socioeconomic marginalization. Nonetheless, the focus on educational achievement, quality, and high standards usually strive to transform the features and results of educational non-performance associated with different social classes elaborated by race, ethnicity, gender, location, and class (Gaias et al., 2020). Matters surrounding race and ethnic education, especially racial and ethnic exclusion of the indigenous students, create a high level of concern in the education system, demonstrating a more comprehensive social issue on the rights and welfare of the native population of Australia.
The existing education system is oriented toward the Anglo-centric motives and objectives or a valued initiative dependent on the whiteness due to the colonial virtues. Educational attainment is today a consequence of effective assimilation into the system by actualizing specific trends of understanding and studies perceived as the norm. Maintenance of the norm does not vary the white experiences and concerns. This places whiteness as the ensembles of regional phenomena sophisticatedly entailed in the psychic, socioeconomic, and socio-cultural interrelations at the considerate center. Embedded frameworks into the whiteness perspectives and the individuals coordinating the frameworks can incur the variation in the inhabited space and avail remedies for the marginalization (Gaias et al., 2020). The white concept and experiential thus quietly prevails significantly and core while minimizing chances for the external personalities of the white value to undertake change, voice, and power. This paper, therefore, analyses mechanisms through which white superiority impedes indigenous educational prosperity and suitable mechanisms of mitigating the disadvantage.
Evidence
The indigenous populations of Australia, particularly in New South Wales, are severely marginalized according to a series of socioeconomic parameters that significantly relate to pre-market attributes. Specifically, educational achievement is vital resulting from input in the labor market excellence and minimizes the risk associated with various impeding social impacts, including substance abuse and criminality. Educational marginalization potentially begins at a younger age and is influenced by school mechanisms and family systems alongside racial and ethnic factors (Moodie et al., 2019). The native minority populations appear to be greatly spatially distributed, mostly living in remote societies or solidified in a specific urban region which is the typical picture of the native Australians. An estimated half of the working native population resides in the remote or rural regions as the urban native Australians are frequently concentrated in the lower revenue residential regions.
The spatial settlement manifests specific challenges regarding educational principles as the native Australians are usually educated in situations that significantly vary from other Australians. Moreover, English remains a second language for most indigenous kids, particularly for remote and rural children, possibly enhancing the marginalization of learning in a relatively disadvantaged school. Studies reveal that native students attain markedly lower performance in literacy and numeracy examinations at an early age of ten years than non-native students (Moodie et al., 2019). During this period, the native students are approximated to be a year behind national benchmark standards on numeracy and literacy performance. The revelations demonstrate that educational marginalization is influenced by prior achievement effects that capture prior school and family impacts together with endowed personal mental capacity.
Theory
The critical race theory is suitable for the Australian perspectives both to access the potentiality of its more excellent implementation in the New South Wales State and advance an involvement in this theory offering insights into race and ethnicity in education exceeding the disadvantaged dominant structures. The critical race theory was initiated in the United States in the 1970s, heavily impacted by the critical legal studies movements that denounced the neglect of ethnicity and race within the legitimate frameworks of the 1960s and focused on determining norms and values hidden within the policy (Crawford, 2018). Besides, critical race theory involves critical theory in feminine, ethnic, sociology, and historical studies. The theory borrows from several traditions and is associated with preparedness to move over epistemological margins.
The critical race theory engages in the complicated matters of ethnicity and racism, starting mainly with visualizing the issues and reinforcing them in debates and discussions. Increasing racial awareness is the emergence of white supremacy and whiteness ideology which is the single most aspect of critical race theory adoption. The aspect is particularly critical in investigating Australian education perspectives as it manifests the potential to conceptualize the indigenous educational experiential. Critical race theory endeavors to reveal the white supremacy context and assess the relevance of whiteness to power, oppression, and racism (Crawford, 2018). The theory provokes the traditional declaration that educational organizations advance towards equal chances, color-blindness, objectivity, race neutrality, and meritocracy. The critical race theory is not concerned with the objective truth but with social construct truth formulated to align with the intentions of a significant group or class.
Discourses
The discourses surrounding the indigenous Australian educational disadvantage encompass the five oppression faces: violence, powerlessness, exploitation, cultural imperialism, and marginalization. One challenge frequently encountered during the involvement of inclusion and equality issues is the analysis and conceptualization of difference. The difference ideology is usually neglected as rejected ted or negative with a mandate of ascertaining all persons have similar provisions and opportunities. The five faces create a mechanism for internalizing oppression and, subsequently, justice through processes that focus on mitigating the complication of difference (Moodie et al., 2019). Oppression is also a structural ideology and acknowledges its outcomes on social demographics inclusive of individuals.
Populations behave within socio-historical perspectives that advance determinate impacts on cultural and physical vicinity, streamlining future trends in a particular pattern. The consequence is a circumstance in which a group of individuals undergoes systematic risk of deprivation as others incur opportunities for exercising and developing capacities. Structural inequality recognition is critical; nevertheless, accounting for the production and reproduction of these patterns is essential. Cultural imperialism is the paradox experiential of an individual as invisible and concurrently marking one as invisible. Cultural imperialism manifests upon the neglect of difference, fostering privileged persons to prevail as universal and different. The difference, structural inequality, and group oppression in the social justice system assist in demonstrating and describing certain complexities in the mechanisms through which indigenous Australian students are perceived in the education frameworks (Moodie et al., 2019). The concept creates a theoretical anchorage for assessing the complicated matters of oppression encountered by the native students in the educational setup. This allows one to inquire about truth and race complexities by facilitating different considerations within specific groups and specific truths.
Power Influences
Multicultural education laws considered in Australia argue that official state law struggles to represent the globe in factual perspectives to enable the natural flow of certain aspects of practices. The naturalization mechanism is framed and mandated by inquiry arising from modernist policies and social science, formulating a seemingly impartial, seamless, coherent reality that lures the ordinary consciousness. Through this process, official laws master-narrate a legal concept of the world strengthened by the existing social misconceptions. Following the government’s closing the gap principle, indigenous information narrations are uncertain about veering from the well-worn content of deviation and disadvantage from the norm (Brown, 2018). Counteracting the normalized circumstances are the conflicting stories that can be advanced as recoding and decoding resources and otherwise collaborating or clashing with the official policy. Inside the Australian indigenous-mandated education principle, the educational disparity has been normalized through colonial mechanistic strategic severance facilitated by representations that classify disadvantage as an inherent component of Aboriginality.
Marginalization is therefore portrayed through a process of disconnecting its historical origin, focusing on situating it as not just as external to the social environment of the non-native Australians but as an entire burden and a challenge of the native populations. Scholarly studies have recognized the previous implications of the Australian indigenous students asserting that chronological principles of settlement and assimilation hindered adequate education for the Aboriginal populations, resulting in an intergenerational trauma legacy and marginalization that impedes educational success for the current native students (Brown, 2018). In official debates, there has also been minimum consideration for the educational consequences of forced child removal. Therefore, it is mandatory to recognize the implications of colonialism and progressive racism as a precaution to scoring elevated educational results for native Australians.
Existing Policy
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Action Plan, 2010-2014, is one of the formulated policies to mitigate the indigenous Australian students’ disadvantage. The Action plan recognizes the gaps between the educational attainment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and various students, with evidence all over Australia revealing that significant remoteness of a community leads to poor student performance. The policy further acknowledges that with sufficient experience, educational attainment advancements in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders learners emanate from partnership action with a remedy to the local demands (Teasdale, 2018). Evidence of the native populations taking part in the consultation, review, and planning process is a critical component toward vital inclusion of the native individuals, obliging to the concerns of the indigenous population and calling for advanced policy formulation.
The action plan elaborates on approaches adopted at the local, national and systemic levels. The strategies include schools focusing on fostering contextual, linguistic, and cultural amenities that students embed in the learning process alongside promoting and advancing pedagogies sensitive to and involving the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ cultures and languages. Nationally, within the policy, the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority ascertain minimal cultural biases of the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learners (Teasdale, 2018). The Australian government and curriculum providers also collaborate to promote family numeracy and literacy initiatives, such as multilingual family initiatives. Evidence prevails on associations between societies and learning institutions being advanced that allude to significant involvement and collaboration.
Informed Action as a Teacher
As a teacher, the adoption of comprehensive multicultural principles within classrooms to encourage the integration of racially disadvantaged groups is essential, which has been a factor of consideration in Australia since the 1970s. Education is one of the critical institutional sectors preferred to effect the policy transformations. Nonetheless, antiracism programs and initiatives were not broadly integrated within the New South Wales multicultural education until the 1990s, when the Department of Education incurred mechanisms and policies to handle antiracist motives in public schools (Forrest et al., 2017). The multicultural education framework develops a broad series of approaches toward obtaining two objectives: to provide every student with values, knowledge, and skills essential in successful involvement within a culturally vast community; and to foster the particular necessities for students with a non-English speaking background.
Education administrators in Australia are focused on ascertaining that schools and classrooms are safe surroundings for students to learn freely without bullying or discrimination, which is a mandate of the classroom teacher. The teacher should integrate the new National Curriculum in Australia that entails Intercultural Conceptualization as a constituent of the seven overall capacities taught from preschool to senior secondary school. Despite the lack of universality in adopting antiracism and multicultural education within learning institutions, New South Wales remains committed to this obligation at the state level (Forrest et al., 2017). The Multicultural Programs Unit2 fosters multicultural education within the country’s Department of Education, develops teaching amenities, policies, and campaigns, and avails regional tutors to provide in-service workshops to teachers to implement antiracism principles and multicultural education.
Conclusion
This paper has struggled to elucidate some significant conceptual strategies to investigate the existing educational laws in Australia to construct a critical internalization of the native educational marginalization. The paper sought to highlight the potentiality of mitigating challenges of fairness and race that are established through a commitment to discomfort and disruption, listening, and encouragement of responsibility and difference. The theoretical strategy involved uncovers suppositions and silences that regularly impact efforts to attain educational fairness for the native Australians. The indigenous learners are commonly perceived as deficient, with a possible remedy to the deficiencies thought to be exhibiting a significant component of the attitudes and behaviors of the non-native students. To conceptualize the equity matters of Australian native students, it is critical to carry out broader insights into the educational curriculum alongside its dominant objectives and values. Investigating policies associated with education for every student foresees educational attainment to be commonly determined and evaluated per the white norms. However, schools must advance a neo-liberal initiative, which is broadly supportive of sameness and standardization, and not feasibly tolerating difference. Teachers are potential agents of this transformation by embracing antiracism and multicultural education to promote cultural inclusivity.
References
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Forrest, J., Lean, G., & Dunn, K. (2017). Attitudes of Classroom Teachers to Cultural Diversity and Multicultural Education in Country New South Wales, Australia. Australian Journal Of Teacher Education, 42(5), 17-34. https://doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2017v42n5.2
Gaias, L., Duong, M., Pullmann, M., Brewer, S., Smilansky, M., & Halbert, M. et al. (2020). Race and ethnicity in educational intervention research: A systematic review and recommendations for sampling, reporting, and analysis. Educational Research Review, 31, 100356. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100356
Moodie, N., Maxwell, J., & Rudolph, S. (2019). The impact of racism on the schooling experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students: A systematic review. The Australian Educational Researcher, 46(2), 273-295. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-019-00312-8
Teasdale, J. (2018). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education: An Introduction for the Teaching Profession Kaye Price Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, 2012. Australian Journal Of Environmental Education, 34(1), 80-81. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2018.15
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