Aboriginal Pedagogy

Approaches to Aboriginal education include approaches to Aboriginal culture. Teaching within this context necessitates knowledge of Aboriginal culture and of Aboriginal ways of knowing. Teachers with little or no knowledge of Aboriginal culture may have difficulty teaching Aboriginal content. However, many guiding principles may be successfully applied in teaching Aboriginal content. Although the approaches suggested here apply mainly to science classrooms, they may have a more universal application to many different subject classrooms. Generally, the main points briefly outlined here include the general concepts of: including Elder teachings, involving the whole community, infusing Aboriginal content into the subject, and including the use of native language in the classroom. Further to these main approaches, many attending sub concepts can be developed. These approaches are included in the subsections that are available through the links in the left.

Greg Cajete (1999) suggests 10 key points in implementing Aboriginal epistemology in the classroom:

  1. Put young people in touch with their cultural selves and their inner sense of learning

  2. Facilitate student’s realization of the earth as the ultimate source of human, plant and animal life

  3. Get students to discover the beauty and complexity of nature

  4. Bring students back in touch with their cultural roots, the land plants and animals

  5. Get students to learn how various Aboriginal people made a ‘living” from the land which students call home

  6. Get students to learn practical skills of western and Aboriginal sciences in a sustainable relationship to the natural world

  7. Plan for student learning along the following lines: bonding, trust, storyline (relating to an aspect of western science), sharing and caring, looking inward, and self reliance

  8. Give students an opportunity to learn western science in relation to a cultural perspective and a worldview which mediates between students and their learning western science:

    • explore cultural roots

    • develop an historical perspective and empathy for the practices of Aboriginal science

    • build upon the inherent strengths of Aboriginal philosophy and environmental knowledge

    • participate in your community’s cultural activities where appropriate

    • learn and practice tribal arts

    • learn and play Aboriginal games

    • Investigate how students learn science ideas

Download Aboriginal Pedagogy — general approaches