Building Connections in Classrooms Through Understanding Country

Culturally Nourishing Schooling is a project that takes teachers out on Country in order to build connections and confidence to incorporate cultural knowledge in the classroom. The project engages teachers, school leaders, cultural mentors, and community members, and aims to improve the education and engagement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

The University of NSW’s Associate Professor Kevin Lowe is the project’s lead. A Gubbi Gubbi man from southeast Queensland, A/Prof Lowe is a Scientia Indigenous Fellow at UNSW, and has worked with Aboriginal community organisations to create Aboriginal language policy and school curriculum implementation.

The project builds on previous studies, searching for what A/Prof. Lowe calls the ‘silver bullet’ – a good solution for a difficult problem. While they didn’t find that, they were able to build upon good practices that underpinned good programs.

“One of the things we’ve learned is you can’t change what happens in classrooms unless you look at what happens across the whole school. We know that school leaders are absolutely paramount. We need to find and support and build the resilience of our school leaders to be a really good leader in school, where there’s either low [socio-economic status] kids or Aboriginal students, or other non mainstream students in their schools. They need to think differently about being a leader in our schools.”

Eight schools in NSW are taking part in the Culturally Nourishing Schooling project, which A/Prof. Lowe hopes will expand to include more schools should they receive funding following the end of the project’s initial trial period.