Roz Walker

Embedding Indigenous values and principles into decolonising ethical methodologies has often resulted in challenging much of the status quo occurring in research design. In part, this has been due to dominant forms of scholarship leading to Indigenous knowledges, ways of knowing, being, and doing being exploitatively taken from the communities who had shared this information.

Indigenous values and principles have required actions such as a strong time and relationship commitment and reciprocity building for stakeholder communities. This case describes a project that was designed with community benefit as its first priority. In order to include diverse community representation, the project was positioned within a number of Aboriginal community-controlled health services in Queensland (QLD), New South Wales (NSW), and Western Australia (WA). The services were chosen to include metropolitan, regional, and rural communities as well as diverse cultural communities. The codesign element required reciprocity and making meaning together via enacting ganma concepts of knowledge sharing. A crucial part of the codesign process were the focus groups held with stakeholders, including mothers, workers, and community-based service providers to discuss nutritional understandings for mums during pregnancy. Broadly speaking, reciprocity can take a number of different meanings. This may include actions such as sharing knowledges (including new knowledges identified by women as important to their well-being or their babies) , gifting or sharing tasks.

This project as described in this paper shows how partnering and enacting reciprocity has aided in the codesign of mobile health technology from content to image and functional engagement both for our community partners and for the full Chief Investigator (CI) and Associate Investigator team. By naming ideological questions, shaping and sharing the strategy journey and exploring our learning we present students with ways to consider codesign with Indigenous ways of knowing and doing as central to the research process.

An engaging guide for future best-practice, this book provides an illuminating account of how the innovative programs of education and research at one Centre for Aboriginal Studies made a demonstrably positive difference in the lives of Indigenous students.
Written by the experts involved, the book provides detailed descriptions of these ground-breaking education and research programs that saw an increase in the number of Indigenous graduates emerging from the Centre for Aboriginal Studies at Curtin University. Each chapter documents a different stage in the development and delivery of these programs and demonstrates how innovative and culturally appropriate principles of teaching, learning and organizational processes empowered participants to make a real difference in the lives of their families and communities. The book also addresses the challenges faced by such programs and the counterproductive pressures of market-based economic policies, highlighting the need to create an environment attuned to Aboriginal desires for social justice, self-management and self-determination.
As a celebration of genuine success in higher education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, and a guide on how to improve practice in the future, this book is an essential resource for all professionals and policy makers looking to make a real difference in the lives of Indigenous peoples.

This publication is a result of a two-day National Conference at the University of South Australia, 18-19 June 1998. This conference was sponsored by the Australian Federation of University Women and published in collaboration with Curtin Indigenous Research Centre, the School of Cultural Studies and Yunggorendi, First Nations Centre for Higher Education and Research at Flinders University, and the Aboriginal Research Unit at the University of South Australia. The conference was an opportunity for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to speak out about and build strategies to meet the unique needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the University sector and to facilitate a better understanding of Aboriginal perspectives in education.

Describes the implementation of the Aboriginal Curriculum Project at Curtin University's Centre for Aboriginal Studies; challenges and difficulties faced; argues that universities need to make a greater commitment to social justice and reconciliation by providing a more inclusive curriculum and presents the case for including Indigenous Studies as a distinct discipline.
Includes bibliographic references.

Paper based on a submission to the Review of Higher Education Financing and Policy: 'A Case for Indigenous Higher Education and Research' prepared in April 1997; discusses the implications of the fact that no recognition was given to the unique place of Indigenous Australians in the scope of the Review; strategies to maximise access and participation need to remain a priority in government financing and policy.