Blak representation in schools is imperative

“It is 2019 and yet the number of Indigenous educators has not improved much”

Growing up and going through primary, secondary and tertiary schooling in the nineties and early noughties in Australia I was not, as far as I know, taught by a single Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander educator.

I know this reality is likely shared by many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. The teaching profession in this country has always been largely dominated by non-Indigenous Australians.

I often reflect on how different my educational journey and experience may had been if I had Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander educators in school.

How different my primary school years would had been if I had an ‘Aunt’ or ‘Unk’ in the school to counsel me and have my back when I experienced racial abuse.

How different it would had been if I had a Blak teacher in high school to push me to take up leadership roles within my school. To have a blak educator teach me about Australia’s true history instead of being failed for a history assignment on ‘who discovered Australia?’ in year 9 by a non-Indigenous teacher.

To have someone who just understood the complexities of being an Indigenous person navigating through the western education system.

The More Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Teacher Initiative (MATSITI) was a five year (2011-16) program to increase the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people entering and remaining in teaching positions in Australian schools. In 2015, MATSITI conducted and completed an ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Teaching Workforce’ report. The report estimated that there was only about 3,700 Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander teachers across the country. This represents only 1.2% of the total teacher workforce are Indigenous. A wide range of factors contribute to these low numbers.

One of which is that Indigenous people are simply not choosing teaching because of other passions or career directions and the lack of desire to go into the profession. I chose to teach Science and Math because it was an innate match.

Observation, inquiry and successful innovation are all living skills that has enabled our culture to survive for over 60,000 years. This is indeed the proud cultural heritage of Indigenous Australians.

Teaching is fundamentally sharing knowledge about our natural world with learners: our young ones, our community, our people. We teach every day without even realising it is a natural behaviour for our people.

So why are our people not choosing teaching if we are in fact natural born educators?

I double back to what the education system reflects. An education system that has been used as an agent of mass assimilation. An education system that, in its founding and conception, did not ask Indigenous Australians for their input on how they would like to receive education or let alone how they would like the system to be structured. An education system that still permits Indigenous Australians to still feel culturally unsafe because of the plague of institutional racism which is then further enforced by ignorant non-Indigenous teachers.

Each day as a teacher I acknowledge the tremendous wealth and richness the profession provides.

I celebrate the small to major successes I witness each day and am grateful for the rewards that I may or may not recognise initially.

No doubt about it, the profession brings me so much personal satisfaction. But it’s not always rosy. I experience clashes with non-Indigenous educators about their thoughts on how historic racist mandatory policies, like those that resulted in the Stolen Generation, were ‘good for the time’.

The burnout rate for teachers in general is high and, based on my own experiences, I can see why Indigenous people may not feel comfortable choosing teaching as career path. That being said, we need to ensure that the small minority of ignorant teachers remain a minority and eventually disappear altogether.

So I stress that Blak representation and Blak voices are imperative in schools. We need our people to reclaim our own narrative and ensure what is being said about us is no longer based on deficit discourse.

I stress that our roles in schools should be defined by us and not simply be perceived as the token Blak for all Indigenous affairs or issues. We will not and cannot represent every blackfella, but we can offer our own individual perspective and knowledge when asked in a culturally safe environment.

Our presence creates pressure for schools to be accountable and not box-tick that one NAIDOC event. Importantly, Blak teachers can strengthen young First Nations people’s pride and be that very Blak champion we needed when we were in school.

Blak representation in schools challenges the dominant white culture and destruction of racist and ignorant attitudes. Of course, I do not expect this to be the sole responsibility of Indigenous educators but rather a mutual conscious effort by all teachers.

I think we need to encourage Indigenous people to enter the teaching profession through efforts like MATSITI. I think we need to think beyond the ‘clearing the HECS debt’ initiative by Scott Morrison, which aims to wipe the HECS/HELP debt for 3100 teachers. Let our people decide how we can put in solutions to increase the number of Indigenous teachers. We need to do more in marketing and promote the teaching profession to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people by drawing on current Indigenous educators. This could be supported by state education departments and perhaps partnerships with universities and key stakeholders across the nation. The World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education (WIPCE) is being hosted on Kaurna country in 2020. This would be a great opportunity to engage with First Nations People from around the globe and talk to them about what they are doing to increase the number Indigenous educators in their respective education sectors.

We need to celebrate the efforts and presence of current Indigenous educators and teachers. We need to ensure that they are supported and valued inside and outside of schools. It is important to assess whether education departments and schools are doing enough to make sure their Indigenous teachers are being mentored and are working in culturally-safe environments. Surprisingly, there is no known nationwide Indigenous teacher network in Australia. Each state and territory has their own but there is no national group or cluster which connects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers together. Through the National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition (NIYEC), which a collective of Indigenous youth fighting to revolutionise our education, myself and another co-founder recognised the gap and created the Australian Indigenous Teachers Facebook page which seeks to connect and allow Indigenous teachers across the country to network, support each other and share experiences they otherwise might not have been able to. In addition, there was no real platform to celebrate the presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers in schools nationally, so the Indigenouseducatorlub Instagram page was also set up.

Indigenous people should feel confident to enter the teaching profession and that should be rigorously supported and encouraged. For teaching is a space where we have opportunities for influence and impact.