A partnership with Australia Post has enabled two uniquely Australian education providers to share teacher resources that launched during the recent National Science Week.
The resources are a collaborative effort between DeadlyScience, a not-for-profit that is driven by a vision to create STEM equity for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learners, and Wingaru, a leading Aboriginal education company that develops and delivers programs and resources to support schools and teachers in the classroom.
The resources were designed to support Australian educators sharing knowledge that aligned with the National Science Week theme: Species Survival – More than just sustainability.
The theme is an important lesson that takes student beyond the focus of the special week and helps them understand why it is so important to protect native species all year long.
The DeadlyScience Guide to Species Survival: More Than Just Sustainability resource is a practical and fun resource for educators from Foundation to year 10, that focuses on introducing the importance of science and innovation in ensuring not just the survival but the adaptation of countless Australian species, all through the lens of Australia’s First Nations people.
With the support of Australia Post’s vast network, DeadlyScience can easily deliver science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) pathways through innovative programs and resources to schools in remote and regional First Nations Communities throughout Australia. Since the partnership with DeadlyScience began in 2022, Australia Post has delivered 4,623 packages with STEM books and equipment to 1,172 schools.
Equitable access to STEM education
For DeadlyScience founder Corey Tutt OAM, it’s a proud achievement that means more young Indigenous students from right across the country have access to the important STEM education that can help them access jobs of the future.
Tutt was working as a laboratory manager when his frustration over the lack of representation of Aboriginal people in Australia’s STEM sector motivated him to launch DeadlyScience in 2018.
The 2020 Australia’s STEM Workforce Report highlighted that the percentage of the Australian non-Indigenous population with a university STEM qualification is 5.2 per cent. The percentage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander with a university STEM qualification is 0.5 per cent (or one tenth of the non-Indigenous rate). That’s a massive discrepancy. And the percentage is much lower than 0.5 per cent for people living in regional and remote communities.
To close this gap, Tutt knew the future generations of Australia’s First Scientists – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth – in regional and remote communities needed support.
“I wanted to do more with my life,” he told EducationDaily.
“I was 24-years-old and I wanted to make a difference wherever I could.”
The earliest days of DeadlyScience began with Tutt identifying one remote school that had just fifteen books for its entire student population.
“I felt like a jug boiling from the inside,” Tutt says.
“I was really cranky and I couldn’t handle that schools like this had no resources. I ended up going to Dymocks and dropping $1000 of my own money and I started sending books and resources to remote communities. That one school turned into 40 and it grew from there.”
The power of DeadyScience, he says, is that it aims to start conversations about Indigenous science in Australian schools.
“It changes the perspectives of First Nations children and how they see science.”
Tutt says that, for many First Nations students, the perception of scientists is white men in lab coats.
“The person they imagine is like Albert Einstein,” he says.
“But their own culture had 65,000 years of STEM they needed to know about and be proud of.”
Being recognised for his life-changing efforts as NSW Young Australian of the Year in 2020 was, Tutt told EducationDaily, both “a blessing and a curse”.
“I was like a deer in the headlights. I didn’t know how to handle it at the time. But to me, I ended up getting honoured in a way I never thought it was possible for a kid from Dapto, with a single mum. But to me, DeadlyScience was just the right thing to do.”
Being that “young Indigenous guy” who had become scientist and a science communicator starting a charity, was, Tutt says, “not what the world expected of me”.
He laughs when he says he “harassed Australia Post“ to partner with his dream.
“It’s been a blessing of a partnership,” says Tutt.
“Australia Post has unlocked deadly learners across the country. You can’t be what you can’t see.”
