This chapter proposes ways of becoming more aligned with the aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and community members through pre-service and professional experiences. It also outlines a range of strategies and opportunities that seeks to make sense of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and education studies for participants in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs through corequisite, experiential learning opportunities in educational and community settings. The chapter also discusses some of the challenges and dilemmas that may be encountered in the process of developing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander professional experience frameworks within teacher education programs.

There are many reasons why we should study and teach about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. An underlying factor is that Australia is our home, and we should have a thorough knowledge of the country’s history. As Joe Sambono says in Chapter 9, ‘If you don’t know about us, how can you have a respectful conversation with us?’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is about educating all Australians in relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, histories, societies and cultures. That we are educating Australia in a climate of increasing racism is another important point.

Disability is an unspoken aspect that is overshadowed by larger issues in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education. Young Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people with a disability often fall through the cracks in the education system, with their disability not recognised or not supported. The presentation of their disability in the classroom is routinely mis-characterised as behavioural issues rather than a learning disability requiring specific support, an assumption that leads to excessively high rates of suspension and expulsion when disability is a factor in the education of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children and young people.

I have often been asked: How can mathematics be beautiful? This question is usually sparked by popular culture, such as the movie A Beautiful Mind or television shows that have popularised mathematics. For most of the inquirers, their experience with mathematics is so divorced from subjective statements such as ‘beautiful’ that they cannot fathom any connection between them. They have also been taught that mathematics is supposed to be objective – that is, transcending our own subjectivity (or bias) to find ‘the truth’. These are common perceptions of mathematics informed by our common experience with the teaching and learning of mathematics. This chapter explores such perceptions, questions notions such as objectivity and explores how these perceptions have positioned Indigenous people as mathematical learners. In essence, this chapter explores the connection between culture and mathematics – putting subjectivity back into mathematics and looking at how this can affect the teaching and learning of mathematics for Indigenous students. These new approaches also have implications for mathematics education in general, by allowing students to connect with mathematics through their own social and cultural backgrounds.

This chapter employs the timestamp of the World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference on Education (WIPCE), emphasising that elements of education relating to both First Nations communities and the teaching profession are central to transversing and bridging the two knowledge traditions of Indigenous and Western knowledges. Within this timestamp, we will look at the foundations we have created, the distance we have travelled and the new challenges we face for what remains as unfinished business.

This chapter explores how important it is for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in particular to have access to studying their own languages across all jurisdictions in Australian education. It also explores the increasing options available to teachers to provide these opportunities for students from Foundation to Year 12. The value is not limited to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students; all students in Australian schools can benefit from the deeper understanding of Indigenous peoples, cultures and histories that develops through the study of Indigenous languages. Language is the vehicle of cultural expression, and when a language is no longer spoken by its people all humanity is diminished by the loss of cultural transmission that occurs when a language ‘goes to sleep’. Teachers are very well positioned to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to help wake up the sleeping Australian languages and to maintain those that are still languages of everyday communication.

This chapter discusses the ways in which I implement Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing into my process as a First Nations performing arts practitioner, working to create resources for Australian schools to support all educators in approaching First Nations content in Indigenous ways. Examining the design of two projects as case studies, the Kings, Brothers and Heroes exploration (a verbatim performance ceremony intended as a resource for secondary school students and teachers) and the Totems program (an immersive creative arts program for students from Foundation to Year 6), I discuss the ways in which I related ways of Indigenous knowing, being and doing to the work. This includes connecting to First Nations oral traditions, creating a space of free creative expression, discussion and engagement for students around story, history and culture that maintains, supports and preserves community ownership while recognising the importance of the Outsider relationship into which practitioners enter when working with community.

This chapter explores a number of key principles and concepts dealt with in the Commonwealth government’s National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. The chapter’s central focus is the impact and continuing effects that past ‘assimilation’ policies have had on the contemporary circumstance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It also explores the Inquiry’s observations regarding the meaning and intent of genocide, the notion of self-determination and the vexed question of Aboriginal ‘identity’.

Game worlds are steeped in depictions of different characters, settings, events and, in many cases, different cultures and cultural knowledges. In some cases, these in-game cultural depictions have been created by outsiders of the culture and, even with good intentions, these creators may misrepresent the culture or represent the community in superficial ways. My game design approach attempts to respond to this issue faced by digital game designers and developers and provides an approach that encourages close collaboration with communities, cultural immersion by developers and greater forms of rigorous research in constructing game worlds. While the intent of my approach is to help designers create more meaningful and deeper cultural representations in digital games, the design process itself is an educative experience and there may be opportunities to capitalise on this digital and cultural design approach in learning contexts.

There are many facets to the historical context of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education in Australia, from the ways in which knowledge was transferred prior to invasion through to the deliberate withholding of information from all Australians. When we refer to Indigenous education in Australia, we must remember that this is both for and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This chapter therefore discusses the historical context of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education, beginning with how knowledge was transferred prior to invasion. Several ‘case studies’ – early evidence of First Nations children’s academic capabilities immediately following invasion – are cited in terms of the ‘grand experiment’, followed by reference to the inclusion/exclusion of Aboriginal children using the oft-quoted phrase ‘clean, clad and courteous’. The chapter then moves past the infamous exclusion of Aboriginal children to the formation of the National Aboriginal Education Committee, which so heavily influenced a change in the political landscape, to involvement in curriculum development, and discusses some of the strategies, plans and policies that have been put in place.

Paul Cullen became Ireland’s first cardinal in 1866, an appointment which formalised his long-standing influence in the Propaganda Fide, especially in the appointment of bishops in the English-speaking world. This chapter considers two such interventions, in Scotland and Australia, where Cullen sought to use his influence, unsucessfully in the former and successfully in the latter. The chapter then turns to the first Vatican Council, where Cullen was an important voice in support of papal infalibility, ultimately providing the compromise language that was accepted as Catholic doctrine.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Australia and New Zealand, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, we reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

We offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.

The research for this chapter was undertaken on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. As is customary in the country in which I live and work, or so-called ‘Australia’ (see Watego, 2021), I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of country, as well as elders past and present. I acknowledge that sovereignty over these lands was never ceded, and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain strong in their enduring connections to land, sky, water and culture.

The rise of the #MeToo movement has prompted a public reckoning with sexual consent, with public discourse now squarely focused on issues of sexual coercion and culpability. However, the principle of consent has a much longer history and wider significance beyond recent events. Bolstered by a social contract model that prioritises individual personhood and the protection of private property, consent has been central to the development of modern law and liberal societies (Munro, 2008). As feminist legal scholar Vanessa Munro argues, in Western legal settings, it ‘demarcate[s] the terrain between acceptable and unacceptable intrusions upon property / bodies’ (Munro, 2008, pp. 923–4) and accredits the liberal subject with its defining features of individuality, rationality and autonomy. In the specific context of sexual violence, consent is endowed with significant power (Hindes, 2022): it is used to arbitrate legal disputes over sexual assault and violence, and determine whether violation has occurred.

‘What is an e-cigarette?’ This ostensibly simple question is central to the classification and regulation of these popular and contested devices. From their first development, e-cigarettes, which deliver nicotine via vaporisation of a liquid solution, were marketed and presented as like conventional cigarettes in crucial ways. Not only were they called electronic cigarettes, that is, a type of cigarette, but early models were designed to look like conventional cigarettes, including a tip which lit up when inhaled (Ozga et al., 2022). Moreover, the clouds of vapour they produced resembled smoke. Public health and tobacco control organisations quickly identified e-cigarettes as a threat to individual and population health. They emphasised the devices’ capacity to produce nicotine addiction (just like cigarettes), to undermine the denormalisation of smoking and to enable tobacco industry expansion (Bell & Keane, 2012; Berridge et al., 2023). The rapid rise of e-cigarette use (or vaping as it is now known) among young people has solidified and intensified this emphasis on harm. In contrast, supporters of their harm reduction potential highlight the fundamental difference of e-cigarettes from cigarettes: there is no combustion of tobacco involved in their use.