A new partnership with the Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) is helping pre-service teachers at the University of South Australia explore new ways to work with First Nations dance in the Australian Curriculum. The initiative also aims to help those trainee teachers gain the confidence to include it in the classroom.
All schoolchildren should have the opportunity to engage with Aboriginal knowledge and cultures. But with 95 per cent of pre-service teachers currently at university coming from Anglo-Australian backgrounds, and only two per cent of teachers identifying as First nations Australians (Australian Bureau of Statistics data – 2021), delivering culturally responsive First Nations content can be challenging.
First Nations dance has been located in the Australian Curriculum since its publication in 2013. It is already there as a mandated learning area in the curriculum and the most recent Version 9 goes further to highlight its integration across multiple years of primary and secondary education – from Foundation to Year 10.
Understanding and incorporating Aboriginal knowledge
But UniSA arts education lecturer Kerrin Rowlands says that pre-service teachers must be equipped with the confidence and knowledge to transform teaching practices and integrate First Nations dance appropriately and effectively into school curricula.
“Dance is a central element in the diversity and continuity of local and global cultures, particularly the cultures of First Nations Australians,” Ms Rowlands says.
“Dance is woven into First Nations Peoples’ stories, songs, ceremony and connection to, and responsibility for, Country and place, and a means to explain ways of knowing, being, doing and becoming. While dance is a learning area in primary school arts curricula, it is dominated by Western approaches.”
Rather than celebrate First Nations Australian dance, this meaningful form of creative expression and storytelling has been disregarded – or completely absent. To transform the way this is approached, Ms Rowlands says teaching practices “must be overhauled through a lens of culturally responsive learning design and curriculum delivery”.
Culturally responsive content is critical
“Our program can help by increasing pre-service teachers’ confidence and knowledge to appropriately work with First Nations dance in the Australian Curriculum in a school environment,” she says. “Teachers play a pivotal role in fostering respect and awareness of diverse First Nations knowledges with young people, and as such they must consider how to approach dance teaching from a culturally responsive perspective.”
To work with First Nations dance in the school curricula using culturally responsive pedagogies, Ms Rowlands told EducationDaily we must:
- support pre-service teachers to consider their own funds of knowledge, including what they understand as dance and what they understand as First Nations dance. This can include learning facts, terminology and cultural protocols about First Nations dance – including the historical prohibition of cultural practices, including dance. It also involves learning about dance more broadly to understand historically dominated dance practices in schools and the broader community.
- build pre-service teacher confidence and knowledge through coursework and practices that include intentional and relational pedagogies, such as working with First Nations dance practitioners, fieldwork experience in schools, and learning about real-world examples of quality dance projects in schools, and, importantly, engaging with quality teaching resources from reliable sources.
- develop curriculum content that draws from children’s prior knowledges, experiences and socio-cultural context.
Pre-service teachers, says Ms Rowlands, need “the dialogic meaning-making opportunities to develop and apply these approaches to working with First Nations dance as part of their university experience”.
“In doing this work, we move pre-service teacher engagement with First Nations dance beyond tokenistic celebrations of culture that are disconnected from classroom learning, towards experiences that provide depth of engagement and responsiveness to diverse individual needs, including the needs of Aboriginal children,” she told EducationDaily.
“By working with First Nations dance practitioners and having the opportunity to engage with these ideas in a school environment, our pre-service teachers are delivering on this acute need.”
Movement can make thinking and feeling seen
ADT’s learning manager and dance practitioner Adrianne Semmens is a descendant of the Barkandji People of NSW and says pre-service teachers have started to engage with notions of connection and place. Understanding how to make thinking and feeling visible through movement, drawing, expression and reflection, is also important.
“While there are explicit content descriptions and elaborations investigating and exploring First Nations artists and dance practices, many pre-service teachers are without the understanding and confidence to engage students in effective learning experiences,” says Ms Semmens.
“This project has provided an important starting point for pre-service teachers to deepen their understanding.”
