This presentation argues that decolonising open education is everyone's business. We outline approaches we have learnt from our own experiences, focusing on a project where non-Indigenous and Indigenous staff at La Trobe University collaborated to reimagine an undergraduate open textbook used in the health sciences. We demonstrate how cultural safety reviews can transform open educational resources (OER) to be universally accessible for diverse learners and act as tangible modelling of culturally responsive teaching practices for students to follow from.
Our presentation is from the perspective of non-Indigenous practitioners – from both academic and library cultures - who evolved and learnt how to engage in culturally responsive processes. We describe how these practices support mitigating the onerous burden of labour placed on Indigenous practitioners. Our perspective is distinctive in highlighting how empowering Indigenous open practitioners can cultivate active practices for everyone, in contrast to disempowering and passive practices.
These practices contribute to a paradigm shift that supports the conditions for culturally safe education. The broader significance of this shift is that it:
- Empowers Indigenous people to lead the agenda
- steps towards a holistic approach to incorporate Indigenous knowledges in normalising ways
- reduces the likelihood of tokenism
- values process as equally important to (and constitutive of) product
- embodies Indigenous methodologies into process, underpinned by centring Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing (Brodie et al, 2023)
- transforms non-Indigenous collaborators into accomplices through becoming culturally responsive (Finlay, 2020)
- carves out Third Spaces for generating culturally responsive ways of working that cultivate mutually beneficial two-way learning (Dudgeon & Fielder, 2006)
- enables advocacy to widen these ways of working to challenge to deeply rooted conventional ways of working
Our presentation will describe key challenges we encountered:
- Understanding the limitations of an “additive” approach that reduces Indigenous knowledges to inessential, extracurricular content
- Identifying how cultural safety is different to both cultural responsiveness and cultural awareness
- Distinguishing between Indigenisation and Decolonisation
- Recognising how power relations operate between non-Indigenous and Indigenous staff
We recommend emergent principles from our experience that can guide open education practitioners to widen culturally responsive practices for supporting knowledge Decolonisation projects. These include:
- Accepting the possibility of unintentionally “doing the wrong thing” as an active alternative to guilt-based paralysis
- "doing the work” independently without making reckless assumptions about one’s own knowledge of Indigenous knowledges
- thoughtfully approaching Indigenous collaborators – how, when, why, and what the “ask” is
- The meaning of yarns and how they cultivate open and respectful relationships between diverse groups
We will showcase the end product of these ways of working, highlight the culturally safe features of our open textbook, and explain how this benefits the health sciences curriculum. We conclude this presentation by outlining our next steps and posing key questions arising from our continuing learning for the community to discuss.
Included in
[Session 6E]: Anti-racismReferencesBrodie, T., Howard, N. J., Pearson, O., Canuto, K., Brown, A., & Advisory Group (2023). Enhancement of scoping review methodology to reflect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing, being and doing. Australian and New Zealand journal of public health, 47(6), 100096. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anzjph.2023.100096 Dudgeon, P., & Fielder, J. (2006). Third spaces within tertiary places: Indigenous Australian studies. Journal of community & applied social psychology, 16(5), 396-409. Finlay, S. (2020). Where do you fit? Tokenistic, ally—or accomplice. Croakey Health Media. Retrieved December, 9, 2022.
Author KeywordsCultural safety, Culturally responsive practices, Open educational practices, Indigenous, First Nations, Open textbooks, Health sciences
