Abstract:
The paper provides a theory and pedagogy to assist students to identify, ethically reflect, and work through racism to overcome resistance to Indigenous history. The theory and the pedagogy developed have been used successfully in two universities. The context of the paper is Initial Teacher Educators (ITE) in Australia but the relevance is broader; Australia is one of the AANZCUS (Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada and the US) settler-colonial nations. The AANZCUS group is defined by British dispossession of Indigenous people where the ‘settler’ has not gone home (Veracini, 2008). The AANZCUS nations are places of ‘cultural interface’, where Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures meet and contest meanings (Nakata, 2008). In AANZCUS nation-states history had largely been written from the perspective of the settler-coloniser and frequently in ways that disparaged Indigenous people. Revised histories privileging Indigenous perspectives have been slow to penetrate the academy and the school systems. The revised histories were frequently met with racism and resistance from all education levels: from the Prime Minister to the general citizen and including pre-service teachers (ITE) (Aveling, 2006). It is vital that this resistance is overcome if ITE are to change the ongoing injustice and racism in society. The theory developed draws on international literature on historiography, particularly post-structuralist historiography (e.g. Thijis, 2010) to enable students to understand the story in ‘his-story’ and reflect on the ethics of nationalism. It theorises racism and resistance as arising from a ‘master narrative’, the foundational history of the nation-state which has commonality across western nations. The master narrative privileges one’s own nation and people as superior to other nations (Berger, 2008). This nationalist history is critiqued for fostering exclusion and is linked to racism, aggression and war across Europe (Berger, 2008); it is extremely relevant in understanding settler-colonisers in AANZCUS nations’ resistance to Indigenous history. In theorising how to teach ‘history pedagogy in the cultural interface’ ITEs’ national-personal identity is not undermined but scaffolded to reduce resistance by focusing on how identity is constructed internationally and, only then, nationally. The theory informed the pedagogy and fostered ITE’ personal ethical perspective arising out of deep reflection on the consequences of nationalist history. ITE were motivated to engage in identifying silences and hegemony and to challenge nationalist non-Indigenous construction of history. They were enabled to identify enduring social penetration of nationalism in e.g. media, film, poetry and art. Approaching resistance to history as one form of many forms of ‘racisms’ (plural), this paper provides a theory and ‘History Pedagogy for the Cultural Interface’. Students’ satisfaction moved from a low 30- 50% approval before this pedagogy to 85% plus when it was implemented.