An ecosystem of knowledge: relationality as a framework for teachers to infuse Indigenous perspectives in curriculum

ABSTRACT New data is presented from two studies involving thirteen practising secondary teachers and twelve pre-service early childhood, primary and secondary teachers in Australia. The first study explored how non-Indigenous practising teacher identities, shaped by external and policy discourse, create obstacles to teachers’ willingness and confidence in infusing Indigenous perspectives in curriculum. With this knowledge in hand, the researchers utilised a Design-Based Research methodology to conduct a second study with pre-service (ITE) teachers, exploring the power of relationality as a framework to re-shape non-Indigenous pre-service teachers’ conceptualisation of racial and place-based identity. By enabling non-Indigenous pre-service teachers to construct an authentic connection to Indigenous ways of thinking and being, relatedness pedagogy increased pre-service teacher willingness and confidence to infuse Indigenous perspectives into their future teaching.


Introduction
Globalisation and multiculturalism have created rapid upheaval in national identities, 1 politics, and education systems.Contemporary research highlights the key role of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs in preparing teachers to work with culturally diverse students and understand socio-political discourse (Clark & Andreasen, 2021;Moodie & Patrick, 2017).When teachers embrace the reality that all education is politically charged (Giroux, 2005), they can introduce their students to critical examination of the frameworks that guide political discourse -frameworks of national identity and historical legacy.
In Australia, education policy and institutions have been shaped by the legacy of Terra Nullius (land belonging to no one), a legal principle that deliberately and erroneously stripped Indigenous Australians of their land rights (Banner, 2005).The application of Terra Nullius supported British invaders to commit violence against Indigenous peoples (Banner, 2005;Jackson-Barrett & Lee-Hammond, 2019;Mabo v Queensland, 1992) and paved the way for the deliberate silencing of Indigenous knowledge in Australian schools for much of the last two centuries (Jackson-Barrett & Lee-Hammond, 2019).
Yet the truth is that the land mass presently known as Australia has the extraordinary status of having been born witness to the world's oldest continuous cultures.For some 60 000-70 000 years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (heretofore Indigenous) peoples have lived, danced, sung, traded, worked, and educated their young in this land.Over this ancient time frame, Indigenous peoples have developed a wealth of language, arts, and science that continues to be relevant to life in Australia today.
Contemporary scholarly writers espouse the idea that all Australians should learn Indigenous knowledge in school.These knowledge, with their rich cultural, historic, technological and environmental legacies, are relevant to diverse disciplines such as science, arts, and humanities (Cook et al., 2012;Macdonald, Gringart, Garvey, et al., 2022;Neale & National Museum of Australia, 2017;Poelina et al., 2020).More recent Indigenous experiences, such as the violent land dispossession of colonisation, forced removal of children, and fights for equal human rights, are also important aspects of the Australian curriculum.Such content allows all students insight to contemporary issues such as socioeconomic injustices and institutional racism, as well as the multi-dimensional nature of national identity and the associated politics of who belongs and who is othered.
Both our own work (Booth & Allen, 2017;Jackson-Barrett, 2021) and that of Moodie and Patrick (2017), has identified that Australian educators express resistance to infusing Indigenous Australian knowledge in their classroom curriculum.The reasons broadly fall into three categories; that Indigenous material is perceived peripheral in an already crowded curriculum, that educators believe non-Indigenous students to be resistant or disinterested in Indigenous material, or that non-Indigenous educators believe themselves unable to teach the material authentically and accurately (AITSL, 2022;Booth & Allen, 2017;Jackson-Barrett, 2021;Moodie & Patrick, 2017).Additionally, a result of Australia's education history is that the current teacher population are mostly ignorant of the Indigenous perspectives that they are now expected to deliver through curriculum.Thus, the cycle of Eurocentricity in curriculum (Jackson-Barrett & Lee-Hammond, 2019) ensures that most school students graduate with very limited, and usually deficit, understandings of Indigenous Australians.
Against this background, we present new analysis from two studies involving practising and pre-service teachers in the Wadjuk Nyungar language region of south-Western Australia.The first study, conducted in 2017, explored the attitudes of practising secondary educators to the teaching of Indigenous histories and cultures in schools which had little to no Indigenous students.The second study, conducted in 2020, applied a Design-Based Research [DBR] methodology to explore the effect of an Indigenous relationality framework as an instructional tool to improve the willingness and confidence of non-Indigenous pre-service (ITE) teachers to teach Indigenous knowledge in curriculum.
DBR is a methodology that recognises that education theory should be grounded in real practice and developed within authentic settings through a cyclic process of design, practice, analysis, and ongoing design (Design-Based Research Collective [DBRC], 2003).In this article we present a first iteration of this process.In the case of the research presented here, not only did the first study provide grounding for the design and implementation of the second study, but also, the data from practising teachers provided opportunity for us to apply an integrated research approach, and "follow the thread" of white teacher identities and understandings across to the second study with pre-service teachers (Moran-Ellis et al., 2006).
Both studies applied the interpretivist framework of symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969) to explore the way non-Indigenous (practising and pre-service) teachers' engagement with Indigenous curriculum was shaped by their understanding of place, racial identity, and by the role of education more broadly (O'Donoghue, 2007).Together these studies affirmed that practising teachers who express limited confidence and knowledge of Indigenous perspectives and appropriate pedagogies were likely to avoid the teaching of Indigenous curriculum content.However, pre-service teachers who were taught to deliver Indigenous curriculum through relatedness pedagogies that contextualised students' relationship to place and to Indigenous knowledge (Martin & Mirraboopa, 2003), felt confident and willing to infuse the knowledge of Australia's Indigenous histories, peoples and cultures into curriculum.

The relationality of relatedness
There is a growing number of Indigenous scholars (Graham, 2014;Mueller, 2017;Poelina et al., 2020;Riley & White, 2019) who write from a relational standpoint regarding Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, connecting education to the wider world in which we live.This standpoint recognises that relatedness (Martin & Mirraboopa, 2003) to place is embodied and grounded in a lived experience of place and infused within the concept of Country.By grounding relatedness to place, knowledge is defined by its context and relatedness to the learners' place and Country.A core aspect of relatedness is the concept of Connection to Country, as Country is a central tenet of Aboriginal identity.In Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures: Country is the term often used by Aboriginal peoples to describe the lands, waterways and seas to which they are connected.The term contains complex ideas about law, place, custom, language, spiritual belief, cultural practice, material sustenance, family and identity.(AIATSIS, n.d.) Country as teacher is a relational pedagogy within traditional and living Aboriginal education (Jackson-Barrett, 2021).By exploring the geographically situated nature of knowledge, we can open the door for non-Indigenous teachers to critically explore the political, historic, and cultural locations of their own knowledge base and worldview.Our relatedness approach to ITE engages pre-service teachers with considering their own connections to Country, and to Indigenous ontologies, through exploration of their lived experience of place.When pre-service teachers make this connection, they become able to deliver contextually relevant content.
In a study involving practising teachers at twelve Australian schools, Harrison and Greenfield (2011) found: There was considerable confusion across all schools involved over the use of Aboriginal perspectives and Aboriginal knowledge, with the two concepts being used interchangeably to refer to the syllabus content that is taught about Aboriginal people, including for example, Dreaming stories and the Stolen Generations.
Indigenous perspectives in curriculum can be defined broadly as both what is known by Indigenous peoples in a field of knowledge, but also the ontologies, epistemologies and pedagogies by which things are known and communicated within Indigenous cultures.Acton et al. (2017) describe the potential of Indigenous pedagogies to meaningfully infuse Indigenous knowledge in teaching.Such pedagogies are contextualised, locally situated, and grounded in community.They include storytelling, yarning circles, experiential and On Country learning, arts and media to model Indigenous ways of learning and being.Scarcella (2021), a teacher of secondary school English, discusses how personal story-sharing and place-based pedagogy help students comprehend Aboriginal ontologies.Having students hear the teacher tell personal stories of connection and disruption, then sharing their own, enables students to understand the Aboriginal perspectives in their texts.Similarly in our unit, having pre-service teachers explore their own connection to Country or place, enables them to more deeply appreciate the relatedness between all who live in that place (McKnight, 2016).

How Indigenous knowledge are [not] understood by policymakers
Although Aboriginal pedagogies and perspectives are not difficult to implement, what they do require is a change in discourse around the purpose and practice of education.Education policies in Australia tend to oscillate between presenting Indigenous knowledge as a tool to promote active citizenship and academic creativity for all students, or as purely a method to engage Indigenous students with schooling (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], 2019;Education Council, 2019).
The document which most clearly promotes the value of Indigenous knowledge in curriculum for all students is the Mparntwe (Alice Springs) Education Declaration (Education Council, 2019), signed by all government Education Ministers, which states: We recognise the more than 60,000 years of continual connection by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as a key part of the nation's history, present and future.Through education, we are committed to ensuring that all students learn about the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, and to seeing all young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples thrive in their education and all facets of life.(Education Council, 2019, p. 3) The Mparntwe Education Declaration (Education Council, 2019) is not a binding document for Australian schools, rather it provides guiding principles for education, particularly for the national Australian Curriculum (ACARA, n.d.).This formal, mandatory curriculum demonstrates far less emphasis on the relevance of Indigenous knowledge to all Australian students.In fact, placement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge is generally located in cross-curriculum priorities (CCPs) rather than in key content descriptors, leaving teachers to determine the content and priority of Indigenous knowledge that they deliver.
Not only is the limited inclusion of Indigenous knowledge within mandatory curriculum of concern, but also the rationale ascribed to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander CCP: ACARA acknowledge the gap in learning outcomes between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and their non-Indigenous peers.It recognises the need for the Australian Curriculum to provide every opportunity possible to "close the gap." (ACARA, n.d.) Maxwell et al. (2018) demonstrate that the wording in the above statement from ACARA is a continuation of deficit perspectives that problematise Indigenous students, rather than recognising Indigenous knowledge as valuable knowledge for all students.We argue that the infusion of Aboriginal perspectives is more about repairing the damaged relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and between peoples and Country.Yet, the Australian Curriculum still positions Aboriginal knowledge as external to the core knowledge needed by non-Indigenous peoples, at the same time as it positions Eurocentric knowledge as essential to the core education of Aboriginal students (Maxwell et al., 2018).
Amongst this policy landscape, it is no surprise that many teachers, practising and preservice, are ambivalent about the teaching of Indigenous content (Baynes, 2015;Booth & Allen, 2017;Clark & Andreasen, 2021;Moodie & Patrick, 2017).Clark and Andreasen (2021) identify that both pre-service and practising teachers' self-efficacy in culturally diverse classrooms is benefited by experiences that improve mastery of the skills required for such classrooms.This can occur through scaffolded identification of quality Indigenous resources, practice presenting Indigenous content knowledge, and designing lessons which infuse Aboriginal perspectives, pedagogies and content (Clark & Andreasen, 2021).Teachers who understand that Aboriginal knowledge enables all students to understand their own Country and community better, find it much easier to infuse Aboriginal perspectives authentically in curriculum (Jackson-Barrett, 2021).

Method
"Claiming success for an educational intervention is a tricky business" (Design-Based Research Collective [DBRC, 2003, p. 5).Education settings are not reproducible, because they reflect real people, political and social contexts.This naturalistic setting makes it impossible to demonstrate unequivocally the effect of an education approach, however, Design-Based Research is a methodology intended to provide a robust approach to creating reliable and generalisable research in education settings, grounded in practice and theory (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012;DBRC, 2003).
Although this pragmatic, grounded approach shares similarities with action research (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012), DBR requires that the researcher is trained in epistemological, ontological and methodological foundations to ensure robust, measurable findings.The distinction is small when the trained researcher is also the teacher-practitioner, as in our second study.Although validity of our findings may be more limited when we were both responsible for designing and implementing the intervention as well as evaluating the impact of that intervention, DBR is an iterative process (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012).The studies presented here are intended as first steps towards a pedagogical approach that can improve the confidence and willingness of non-Indigenous teachers to teach Indigenous perspectives in schools.
Each study relied on a combination of focus group and individual interviews, and correspondence based on open-ended interviews.Ethics permissions were obtained from Edith Cowan University, and in the study with practising teachers, ethics approval was additionally obtained from the school sector governing bodies.Informed, written consent was gained from all participants.
The first study's objective was to understand the extent of Aboriginal perspectives being taught, and the factors impacting teacher attitudes on its prioritisation and delivery, in Australian secondary schools with few Indigenous staff or students.The research began with the hypothesis that without internal connections to local Aboriginal community or strong pressure from school leaders and government policy, the teaching of Aboriginal perspectives would reflect the symbolic meaning which non-Indigenous practising teachers ascribed to Indigenous curriculum.
The first study collected data from practising English and Humanities teachers from three Western Australian secondary schools which had low (<3%) proportions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.The schools were contacted through purposive sampling and chosen as representatives of the three school sectors operating in Western Australia: Government, Independent, and Catholic.Thirteen practising teachers, including four Heads of Department, participated and engaged in individual interviews with one researcher.The research questions of relevance to the present article from the first study were: How do schools with predominantly non-Indigenous student populations teach Aboriginal histories and cultures?What factors influence the way Indigenous histories and cultures are taught in schools?
The data from these interviews was transcribed and analysed using NVIVO 10 with thematic coding.Two researchers were involved in coding using deductive and inductive methods.
This first study provided a base for understanding the conceptualisations that affect non-Indigenous practising teachers' willingness and confidence to teach Indigenous curriculum.Using this data as a starting point, the authors developed instructional tools that promoted the Indigenous epistemology of relationality, to address these concerns within an ITE setting.Being situated "within the research problem" as teacher educators enabled us to apply a design-based research (DBR) methodology (Anderson & Shattuck, 2012;DBRC, 2003) to our second study.Through DBR, we were both able to educate preservice teachers in relationality as an authentic framework by which to engage with Indigenous perspectives, and, to assess the impact of relatedness pedagogy on preservice teachers' willingness and confidence in their role of teaching Indigenous knowledge as part of curriculum.
In applying DBR, we conjectured a pedagogical change that might address a known obstacle in our learning context of Aboriginal studies in Initial Teacher Education.Specifically, that non-Indigenous teachers frequently see Indigenous curriculum as the domain of Indigenous educators, and relevant only to Indigenous students.Yet, grounded in the Indigenous epistemology of relationality, we researcher-educators were aware that Indigenous perspectives are always contextual to place, and to relationships, and hold meaning for all people living on Indigenous Country.In applying the framework of relationality, we ran workshop activities that enabled pre-service teachers to explore the relevance of Indigenous knowledge to varied academic disciplines, and to examine relationality as a vehicle for holistic and interdisciplinary curriculum planning.We employed Indigenous relationality as a pedagogical tool to assist participants to decolonise the way that they see, connect to, and understand place.We spoke about places within our own city, centring the rich Aboriginal cultural and historical significance of each landmark.Many of these places held a deep sense of familiarity for those in our course, anchoring the connectedness of place for participants, which is the core of relatedness (see for example Tynan, 2021;Dudgeon & Bray, 2019).We also examined opportunities for non-Indigenous educators to teach Indigenous knowledge authentically by overtly prefacing the interaction of educator racial identities, curriculum choices, and systemic educational discrimination against Indigenous knowledge.By bringing into plain sight the typical objections teachers have to teaching Indigenous knowledge, and the solutions to these objections that arise from within Indigenous epistemologies, we aimed to construct a learning setting that enabled non-Indigenous pre-service teachers to become both willing, and confident, in their role as facilitators of Indigenous curriculum.
The second set of data presented here is from the qualitative component of a large mixed-methods study conducted three years after data collection for the first study.This data came from of a cohort of early childhood, primary, and secondary pre-service teachers undertaking the Aboriginal Contexts in Education unit described above.All participants were in the final year of a two-year Master of Teaching degree, or final two years of a four-year Bachelor of Education degree and had completed at least one practicum.The quantitative phase involved a pre-and post-survey, which explored the correlation between the pedagogies of this course and participants' levels of confidence to teach Indigenous knowledge and work professionally with Indigenous people (Macdonald, Gringart, Booth, et al., 2022).All participants from the final phase of quantitative data collection (N = 117) were invited to participate in one-hour focus group interviews.Twelve pre-service teachers consented to participate in these, spread across five focus groups.In this article we discuss interview participants' responses to the following research questions from the second study: The data for this second study was analysed in stages.Quantitative analysis identified that pre-service teachers felt they had engaged authentically with Indigenous perspectives and had formed valuable professional skills towards working with Indigenous curriculum (Macdonald, Gringart, Booth, et al., 2022).With this knowledge in hand, the qualitative analysis turned to exploring how the participants' understandings of Indigenous ontologies, in particular relatedness and Country, shaped their willingness and confidence to teach Indigenous knowledge in schools.
A decision was taken to integrate data from the two studies at the analysis stage in order to better understand the meanings which non-Indigenous pre-service and practising teachers made of their own positionality as teachers of Indigenous curriculum.Rather than being an ad-hoc approach to combining separate studies, Tonon (2019) explain research integration as: the combination of different individual elements that make up a coherent whole when they are brought together.(para. 19) In this sense, we applied a pragmatic and interpretivist approach to intentionally combining multiple data sources at the point of analysis and theorisation, in pursuit of a deeper understanding of a phenomenon (Moran-Ellis et al., 2006;Tonon, 2019).This approach has been coined "following a thread" (Moran-Ellis et al., 2006), and follows a robust inductive process to analyse separately generated datasets (Cronin et al., 2008).
Research methods also followed the Miles et al. (2014) framework for data analysis to support the reliability and validity of the study.All data were transcribed and analysed using NVIVO 12 with thematic coding.Both inductive and emergent processes were used.The first and second author each coded and re-coded during the process to identify consensus.All names provided are pseudonyms.

Perspectives of practising secondary teachers
The first study begun with a hypothesis that practising non-Indigenous secondary teachers who have few Indigenous students would provide a meaningful sample group for understanding the foundational understandings which non-Indigenous practising teachers had of Indigenous curriculum.Three key themes arose from the data.Firstly, these practising teachers valued Aboriginal curriculum content.Secondly, non-Indigenous teachers expressed concern that it would be inappropriate for them to teach Indigenous perspectives.Finally, non-Indigenous practising teachers believed that without clear curriculum guidance, they did not have the time or skillset to develop Indigenous programs of work which they viewed as an add-on in their already overcrowded curriculum.

Practising teachers' understandings of Indigenous curriculum
The first theme clearly arising from interviews with non-Indigenous practising teachers, was that these teachers recognised the power of Aboriginal content to challenge ignorance, racism, and uncritical thinking.
I think it's very important.Well, it's the history of Australia, it's a huge part of the history of Australia.And in terms of . . .ways of trying to help deal with the issue of how White Australians have interacted and dealt with Aboriginal Australians, having a better understanding of their culture is going to lead to better outcomes in the future.(Anne) So, I think it will always be part of our role to continue our awareness and education and making sure our students are properly informed.That they don't necessarily have to listen to what [others] say and necessarily . . .believe it.That we can give them accurate statistics and data, an awareness and a new knowledge of the reality of the Indigenous population.(Sarah) And I think there's more, we could do far more . . ., by actually trying to engage children by showing them this is what we do, this is what Aboriginal people do, there's not much really between us.(Therese) Such explorations are key to students' developing the skills needed in a globalised worldempathy, communication, teamwork, flexibility, and innovation.Yet within the comments above, it is apparent that educators perceived Indigenous curriculum as a matter of understanding Indigenous peoples as a historical artefact.They were not applying a critical lens to the different paradigms of thinking, social practices, and ways of relating that arise from diverse perspectives.Through exploring Indigenous lived experiences, students may begin to explore with a critical lens the interaction between racial power, political ideals, and social realities.

Fear and misconceptions create avoidance
None of the practising teachers interviewed identified as Indigenous; the majority identified with the White, or European heritage, population of Australia.As such, they had no cultural ties to Indigenous people and communities, either locally or nationally, and few had professional or personal connections with Indigenous peoples.With their own schooling having silenced Indigenous knowledge, the result was that many of the practising teachers interviewed were ignorant of Aboriginal curriculum content beyond historical and anthropological artefact, and of pedagogies that would enable them to authentically teach Aboriginal perspectives.
Who am I to go teaching kids about the (. ..)Aboriginal myths and legends when I'm not Aboriginal myself, and something is lost in the translation isn't it?When [an Elder] comes in and gives them a talk, which he has done in the past . . .There's a lot more that comes out of it when he does that rather than me who landed in 1998 and had little background, a lot is lost in translation.(Robert) I think people feel very insecure, I think again its resources, and resources are difficult to come by. . . .I feel sometimes that people perhaps are frightened, frightened of upsetting. . .and not quite sure of the boundaries of what they should and shouldn't be doing.It's very difficult because we're so limited in exposure to Aboriginal people in the school, that for me to go teaching. . .I think if there was more of that type of resources available for guest speakers to come in and do some of the Dreamtime stories with the students.(Sarah) "Fear of making mistakes" remains a primary driver of resistance amongst practising teachers to delivering Indigenous perspectives within schools (AITSL, 2022;Baynes, 2015;Booth & Allen, 2017).Although the teacher above recognised the value of first-person voice and primary source material, they were unaware of the already large burden that Indigenous community bear in relation to educating non-Indigenous Australians (Jackson et al., 2013).There are no other areas of curriculum where practising teachers can rely on their own ignorance as a reason for not engaging with source materials and developing student learning experiences.To do so in the Indigenous space reinforces curriculum silence due to the small number of Indigenous educators available in schools.Teachers who instead understand the principles of reciprocity, accountability, and respect are more likely to be able to create meaningful institutional engagement with Aboriginal communities as educators across a range of Aboriginal knowledge (Perry & Holt, 2018).
The above teacher's discomfort with not being a subject expert was repeated by other participants, particularly by educators who had Indigenous students within their classes.
. . .when I teach Indigenous stuff and I've had Indigenous people in my class before and I always feel uncomfortable because I'm a White person talking about this stuff and a few of these guys might be looking at me thinking, "What do you know?" (Joe) But if I had a class of Indigenous students, I couldn't do that [Indigenous content] for all of them, could I? No. Would it be better to get a speaker in to deliver to a higher number of Indigenous students, rather than a White person tell them their history?I just think about it.(Ken) Such reflections indicate a lack of awareness that Indigenous students may well want to see themselves reflected in the curriculum and teaching materials chosen by their non-Indigenous teachers (Brown, 2019).In an earlier publication from the present study, Booth and Allen (2017) identified that practising teachers often cited low numbers of Indigenous students in their classes as a reason for not teaching Indigenous perspectives.Although this might at first seem at odds with the participant comment above, the consistent theme is that where teachers believe Indigenous knowledge is relevant only to Indigenous peoples, they may believe it should only be taught by Indigenous educators, and only to Indigenous students.
It is apparent that many of the practising teachers who participated in the first study were ignorant of the relatedness ontology that underpins Indigenous knowledge.Through relatedness, Indigenous pedagogies rely on knowledge being shared in ways that are holistic and contextual to the learner's situation (Martin & Mirraboopa, 2003).Through such pedagogies, Indigenous knowledge should always be taught with reference to the context of the educator and students (Harrison & Greenfield, 2011;McKnight, 2016).Thus, non-Indigenous teachers can authentically infuse Indigenous knowledge by positioning their own relationship to the learning (Scarcella, 2021).
Some practising teachers appeared aware that there may be an appropriate way to position themselves when teaching Indigenous content, and that learning these pedagogical approaches was necessary if non-Indigenous students were to experience a more inclusive curriculum.
I'm probably just not sure how to teach it in the full context.Yeah, I'd love that taboo to be gone and for us as a school to celebrate, for the kids who aren't Indigenous kids, to celebrate it more and get the whole "them" and "us" mindset out.(Anne) Despite this desire, the knowledge set of many of the practising teacher participants was not sufficient to enable them to confidently infuse Indigenous perspectives or content within their curriculum.

Practising teachers feel they are without curriculum guidance
The literature review highlighted the current limitations of the Australian Curriculum in relation to Indigenous knowledge.When it is considered that teachers already suffer a particular knowledge gap in this field, the perception that there was little curriculum guidance resulted in practising teachers avoiding delivering Indigenous content areas for which they felt unprepared.I'm not sure I'd be the first person to put my hand up to be honest . . . .certainly, if it was just, 'do you think we should do more about [Indigenous Curriculum], I'd probably say "yeah" and put my hand up and say yes, I think we should, but perhaps not such a proactive approach to it.(Ken) Although there has been an explosion in Indigenous curriculum resources in the last decade, this has not always been where secondary teachers need it -in their in-service training, textbooks and curriculum guidance.Other aspects of the humanities curriculum are highly prescribed, and as such, very well resourced, leading to one lead teacher emphasising the need for more explicit instructions to ensure teachers taught Indigenous curriculum: I think it has to be curriculum . . .I don't think there's another way around it.If you want it to be done, if you want specific concepts, content, skills, to be taught across lower schools, . . .It has to be put into the curriculum right there and then, and schools are told, "this is the curriculum."I don't think there's a way around that, I'll be honest.(Therese) If Aboriginal content were more clearly mandated in curriculum, it may be that a greater level of resourcing and support would also become available.Yet, it is Aboriginal perspectives, presented through both content and pedagogy, that have the greatest potential to open students to a more critical and empathic insight to cultural diversity (Jackson-Barrett, 2021).

Perspectives of pre-service teachers
In this next section, we discuss the potential of initial teacher education to provide preservice teachers with the skills and desire to confidently infuse Indigenous knowledge within their teaching.Two themes arose during analysis of data from the second study.Firstly, the ontology of relatedness provided pre-service teachers with a framework to understand Indigenous knowledge as holistic and universally relevant to all students.Secondly, this ontology provided pre-service teachers with the pedagogical confidence to infuse Indigenous perspectives in their teaching.

Indigenous knowledge are universally relevant
McKnight (2016) argues that Indigenous knowledges benefit non-Indigenous peoples directly when they allow people to live in ways that respect and care for Country, and when they provide opportunity for holistic critical thinking and reflection on cultural identities.The Initial Teacher Education unit Aboriginal Contexts in Education undertaken by participants in our second study required preservice teachers to reflect on how Indigenous perspectives can strengthen their own professional identity.As a result, participants demonstrated a strong belief in the universal relevance of Indigenous knowledge as part of core curriculum for all students.
I think every Australian, no matter their ethnicity, must engage with their local Aboriginal cultures, in order to not only learn the truths about our horrific history post-colonisation but to also learn the sacred ways of our local Aboriginal cultures, to learn how to keep our land sustainable through methods which have been passed down through thousands of generations.Most of all, all Australians have a responsibility to put a stop to our society's insufferable ignorance regarding the negative systemic attitudes towards our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander citizens, and therefore we must treat the oldest surviving culture in the world with far greater respect.(Kevin) Through understanding Country as pedagogy, curriculum becomes a matter of understanding one's place in the world and reflecting on one's obligation to others and their environment (Moodie, 2019;Moodie & Patrick, 2017).Teachers who apply this approach can explore all manner of curriculum through the lens of sustainability and place-based learning.One pre-service teacher explained this understanding in this way: I think also focusing on an ecosystem of knowledge.I think [non-Indigenous people], we're very sequential -so instead, saying: well, you notice if that tap's leaking, we're going to run out of water.So, thinking of a more holistic approach to everything, not just sequential things.(Paula) This "ecosystem of knowledge" is not purely geographic or environmental, it is about relatedness thinking, the interdisciplinary and contextualised nature of knowledge.When educators teach with explicit contextualisation of the educator, the learners, the community, and Country where knowledge is being learned; where this contextualisation incorporates non-linear views of time, shaping student understandings of the complex interaction between the knowledge, people, and events of past, present and future (Whyte, 2021), then knowledge becomes holistic, rich, and interrelated.Knowledge itself becomes an ecosystem, connecting the participants with each other and their world.This is the very essence of relationality.
It is in this manner that subjects such as art and mathematics can equally provide opportunities to respond to Country and consider our connections to the world around us (Queensland Department of Education, 2016).Another preservice teacher understood this ecosystem of knowledge, or contextualised nature of Indigenous learning, in this way: It's applying some of these collaborative learning techniques and taking them outside the classroom, and [saying] "look at that tree" -let's write a poem about that tree -instead of sitting in here and looking out -and not even seeing -just drawing a tree on the wall.That's not inspiration."(Tina) Other students similarly expressed a belief that knowledge of place, from those who have lived here the longest, was essential to developing active citizenship amongst all Australian students."This knowledge . . .applies to us all.So that's how I want to embed the knowledge . . .It's not a separation: this is 'knowledge' and this is 'Aboriginal knowledge' -We just put it together because we live in this place, together, as a community."(Kristy) Adding depth to this understanding of citizenship, was the realisation for pre-service teachers that exposing both themselves and their students to diverse perspectives was essential for addressing contemporary injustices and racism.
'I just think they need to be enriched, you know, it's through ignorance, that you get prejudices and biases and can't bridge gaps while there are those prejudices and biases.(Sam) Importantly, pre-service teachers who engaged in critical reflection on their own understandings of Indigenous peoples expressed awareness of what non-Indigenous people could learn from Indigenous peoples' contributions to Australian society.
"You know, the amount of mental health campaigns that are being advertised because of this COVID thing.And it's just one little thing we're meant to be dealing with, and what [Indigenous people] had to deal with, and continue to deal with; they're probably looking at us and going: 'really, you can't cope with that?' [group laughter].Yeah.Pick yourself up.So I'm just really admiring their resilience, and also really thinking about all the scientific things we can learn from their cultures."(Tina)

Pre-service teachers feeling confident they can meaningfully teach Aboriginal perspectives
One of the most consistent stumbling blocks discussed earlier by practising teachers was their uncertainty regarding their capacity to teach Aboriginal perspectives.Pre-service teachers in this study acknowledged they entered their ITE unit with the same obstacles in their own thinking.As their understanding of the interaction between race relations, education policy, and the needs of students developed, pre-service teachers began to move beyond these fears.
"I guess it's made me a bit more aware of those unconscious biases.And yeah, I guess less hesitant because they did talk a bit about the main blocks that non-Aboriginal teachers have with teaching, like, Aboriginal topics and educating Aboriginal students."(Sam) Another pre-service teacher followed up by saying: I think that they've given us the knowledge of what we should be doing to include it, and it's just whether people actually take that on board sort of . . .but I would personally feel like, quite confident to teach.(Mandy) Importantly, this willingness and confidence extended to teaching Aboriginal perspectives to classes containing Aboriginal students, a marked change from the findings with practising teachers.
I have more confidence of how to teach Aboriginal content and embed it throughout the curriculum after this unit, I hope any Aboriginal student that I teach will always feel respected, included and engaged within my classroom.(Kevin) Pre-service teachers do not yet have a solid grasp of the impact of time, resource and structural constraints on teaching, which cause teachers to narrow their focus to what they consider or are mandated to teach as core content.Yet, one of the most positive anecdotes provided in this study arose from the following participant, who outlined that it is not only their current knowledge, but their attitude to learning more, that had greatly grown.
I was looking forward to this unit and it did not disappoint.I have learnt so much, and it has ignited a calling to ensure I embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander skills, knowledge and understandings in an authentic [way] and specific to the children and local area I'm working in.I also have a thirst to find out more about my own local Aboriginal knowledge.(Rylee)

Conclusion
Preparing pre-service teachers to engage with culturally diverse contexts is integral to education in the 21 st Century (Clark & Andreasen, 2021).Successful teachers deliver holistic curriculum which engenders student capacity to critically reflect on the world in which they live (Giroux, 2005).Towards this end, the teaching of Indigenous knowledge, histories and ways of being enhances the curriculum by representing diverse worldviews and perspectives, essential to a well-rounded education for all students (Macdonald, Gringart, Garvey, et al., 2022).
The history of colonisation and ensuing curriculum silence around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge in Australian schools has resulted in the present generation of practising teachers being ill-prepared to infuse and deliver Aboriginal perspectives in their teaching (Booth & Allen, 2017).Despite a clear commentary from practising teachers that such knowledge would be a valuable addition to their repertoire, the present study corroborated other studies that have demonstrated that practising teachers feel generally unknowledgeable, afraid of inauthenticity and hesitant about the workload required to develop their knowledge, curriculum and resources (Baynes, 2015.Indigenous knowledge are by nature holistic and contextualised to the learner's society and environment (Martin & Mirraboopa, 2003;McKnight, 2016).Although other scholars have highlighted the difficulties which arise when a holistic system of knowledge is "forced" into a discretised curriculum (Lowe & Galstaun, 2020), there remains a path for pedagogies such as relationality to create the holistic narrative needed for educators to accurately convey Indigenous epistemologies.Hence, the teaching of Aboriginal knowledge cannot overcrowd curriculum, nor can it be irrelevant, or inappropriate, when presented through the lens of relatedness.We are all on the same Country, so shared history, shared ecosystems and shared future needs, make Indigenous perspectives relevant to all who share this place (Macdonald, Gringart, Garvey, et al., 2022).
Within the second study, developing pre-service teachers' understanding of Indigenous relationality and its effect on connectedness to place and Country triggered a transformative "shift" in perspective, empowering individuals to view the world, and hence their teaching, through an Indigenous lens.For those who embraced this shift, relationality emerged as an effective and impactful pedagogical approach, nurturing a greater sense of willingness and confidence in infusing Aboriginal perspectives into their teaching practices.
When pre-service teachers are provided the opportunity to explore Aboriginal worldviews, when they experience Initial Teacher Education, which models the infusion of Indigenous perspectives in classroom practice, their self-efficacy can grow.By ensuring that pre-service teachers know the steps by which to make connections and ground themselves in a respectful understanding of Indigenous ontologies, Australian students of the future may indeed benefit.

Notes
1. Note on Terminology: The phrase "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples" refers to over 200 separate Indigenous Australian nation groups, each with their own languages, lore, and cultural practices.The authors have chosen to interchangeably use the English-language terms "Indigenous," "Aboriginal" and "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander," when referring to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and knowledge, as a sign of respect for selfdetermination principles and also to acknowledge the international focus of the journal.
2. Nyungar Boodjar -Nyungar Country is located in the south-west corridor of Western Australia and extends from south of Geraldton along the coast to Cape Leeuwin, continuing south to Esperance and then in a line north-west to re-join the coast at Geraldton.An area of almost 3 000 000 hectares with 1600 kms of coastline and the home to 14 regional language groups.Wadjuk is one of these regions (Green, 1984, p. 1).
Having completed your unit on Aboriginal Contexts in Education, what understandings do you have of Aboriginal knowledge, and their place in Australian curriculum?How has this training developed your confidence and skills to be able to teach Aboriginal perspectives to all students?