Educators engaged in curriculum work: Encounters with relationally responsive curriculum practices

Abstract

Abstract The Culturally Nourishing Schooling (CNS) project is focused on whole‐of‐learning community efforts that aim to improve the educational experiences and achievements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learners. The project supports school‐based professional learning strategies, broad school or system‐level initiatives and deep engagement with local community, including students and their families. One of the professional learning strategies in the project is a 2‐day intensive curriculum‐focused workshop, which ran for the first time in 2021 within urban, regional, and remote school settings across New South Wales, Australia. The first day of the curriculum workshop introduces teachers and local Cultural Mentors to three analytic frameworks that they utilise to appraise curriculum resources available in the public domain. The curriculum resources appraised are all examples of curriculum designed to support educators with embedding an Indigenous knowledges focused National Cross‐Curriculum Priority into their curriculum. On the second day of the workshop, teachers are tasked with appraising and revising a curriculum unit of work that they or colleagues have planned for the upcoming teaching semester. The curriculum workshop culminates with the revised teaching and learning resources being presented to the full group of workshop participants, and subsequently each teacher is asked to write a reflection about the curriculum work that they have engaged in. For this paper, data analysis draws on ‘three sensibilities’ that invite enacting a form of onto‐epistemic heterogeneity. These sensibilities are multiplicity, horizontality and dialogicality. This analytic undertaking simultaneously explores the entanglements, and grapples with the possibilities, of re‐imagining curriculum and related pedagogical practices that seek to ‘delink from the colonial matrices of power’.