Creating inter-cultural spaces for co-learning

Among the many inhibitors to social inclusion and mobility faced by Indigenous peoples in Australia, under-representation of Indigenous students in Higher Education has long featured as a concern for government and human rights advocates. This is due to the attendant lower social indicators than those of the wider Australian society which characterise Indigenous peoples’ life experience.UNESCO’s guidelines on inter-cultural education published in 2007 provide some principles for groundwork to develop classrooms which are inclusive but not assimilationist. Models of how this might be done in practice, however, are scarce. In this paper we consider a model for inter-cultural education which uses joint analysis and dialogue surrounding self-representation of Indigenous peoples by Indigenous and non-Indigenous peers to then co-create a new, inter-cultural representation. The ‘Daruganora’ program involves Indigenous students leading dialogue with non-Indigenous peers and teachers to jointly interpret a purpose-built Indigenous art exhibition. We explain in this paper how spaces created by this dialogue can allow open, honest and respectful interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people relating to Indigenous representations of identity. We argue that Daruganora provides a model for inter-cultural classrooms.