Ashah Tanoa

32% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students leave within their first year at university. Of these students, 18.4% never return (DESE, 2021). The first year of university is a vulnerable time for all students, especially those from non-traditional backgrounds. Literature indicates that Indigenous students leave university because of financial commitments, familial pressure, career advancement, and notions of stability. However, there is limited data in Australia, and globally, around why Indigenous students leave within their first year. Likewise, past research tends to frame leaving university prematurely as an abject failure, whereas student narratives suggest that Indigenous people can achieve success independent of a university degree. I will present two studies on conceptualising and supporting Indigenous student success. First, I will describe an innovative undergraduate enabling unit that offers academic coaching to Indigenous students, where students value relational support and accountability. Secondly, I will present a research proposal on an appreciative inquiry study that will capture lived experiences of Indigenous students who left in their first year of university. This study will collect data through yarning with previously enrolled Indigenous students: those who left within their first year and those who continued studying. The study proposal will include an overview of the project undertaken by a Masters student and will reveal research purposes, Indigenous research methodology, literature review and data collection.

University Indigenous Education Units (IEU) support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students’ success, via providing academic, social, and cultural support and a sense of community on campus. As a result of the social distancing guidelines imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Australian universities have transitioned to online learning and campuses have closed. These rapid changes pose challenges for IEUs who have had to quickly innovate to ensure they can continue supporting their student cohorts. This paper provides a qualitative case study to describe how one IEU, located in Perth Western Australia, employed a ‘relationships-first’ strategy to maintain contact with and deliver support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. We outline the Centre’s activities during the transition to online support, including adaptation of the Transition Academic Pastoral and Support (TAPS) model, hosting weekly virtual ‘cup of tea’ sessions, and providing students with laptops to complete online learning– these moves are contextualised within a discussion of the Eurocentric foundations of Australian higher education, which has been exacerbated in recent years by neoliberalism and its Western capitalist bias. Against this backdrop, high-frequency contact provided students with an ongoing sense of a community of practice which is a necessary pre-cursor for their success.