Burning Off: Indigenising the Discipline of English

Abstract

With the push towards ‘Indigenisation’ in Australian tertiary institutes, the discipline of English at the University of Newcastle undertook a pilot project to investigate what this could look like and what it meant for staff and students. This paper reflects our efforts to engage with notions of ‘Indigenisation’, based on national and international exemplars and presents one of our efforts to indigenise our discipline of English. We argue that our shifting and changing understanding of integrating Aboriginal ways of knowing into mainstream English courses is both difficult and essential.

Keywords

• Indigenisation
• literature
• pedagogy