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According to standardised testing, Indigenous students are 2 - 4 years behind their non-Indigenous peers in mathematics outcomes. The educational gap is largely a systemic problem, where schools in remote Communities experience a high turnover of staff resulting in a lack of consistent education that connects with the students and the local Community. This innovation aims to create an inclusive and sustainable mathematics education for two remote schools: Purnululu School on Gija Country, East Kimberley and Yirrkala school and Laynhabuy homeland schools on Yolngu Country in East Arnhem Land. Each school has established a curriculum based on their culture so that students can learn their language, cultural practices and responsibility: we will refer to this as a cultural curriculum. Working with Indigenous educators, school leaders and teachers, this project will co-design a mathematics curriculum using the cultural curriculum as the foundation. We will then co-design mathematics lessons and trial them in the classroom to measure any shift in engagement and conceptual understanding. From these learnings, we will also create a transformability framework to further grow this approach in other Indigenous schools.
The team will be engaging in four weeklong visits for each school. In the first two visits, we will be working with Elders, Aboriginal educators, school leadership and teachers to co-design a mathematics curriculum and start the development of a mathematics program. Given it is a co-design process, it is not certain what the teaching and learning will look like in practice. However, from past experience, I would expect that students will move between Indigenous education processes and Western education processes to draw the connections between mathematics and the culture of the students.
This is a pilot focusing on schooling in two remote locations and assessing the educational benefits of teaching mathematics in connection to culture. From the learnings in this project, we will be looking to create a transferability framework to share ideas to other schools in Aboriginal Communities.
If you want to engage in a co-design process around mathematics education in Indigenous education, the first step is to work with local Indigenous Community and the School to draw connections between culture and mathematics. Understanding these connections needs to come from the conceptual level. For example, if you want to teach fractions and are exploring connections to the local culture, I would not start with asking questions like, do you have fractions as part of your culture or do you have language word for fractions or something similar. I would deconstruct what fractions are (e.g. groups and whole part relationships) and I would start to discuss groups and group dynamics. This process will also start your journey on understanding the epistemology that underpins the culture knowledge of the people. This will be a long journey but worth it.
