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Crafting safer spaces for teaching about race and intersectionality in Australian Indigenous Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2020

Leticia Anderson Open the ORCID record for Leticia Anderson [Opens in a new window]  and
Lynette Riley
Leticia Anderson*
Affiliation:
School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University, Lismore, New South Wales 2480, Australia
Lynette Riley
Affiliation:
School of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia
*
Author for correspondence: Leticia Anderson, E-mail: leticia.anderson@scu.edu.au
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Abstract

The shift to massified higher education has resulted in surges in the recruitment of staff and students from more diverse backgrounds, without ensuring the necessary concomitant changes in institutional and pedagogical cultures. Providing a genuinely inclusive and ‘safer’ higher education experience in this context requires a paradigm shift in our approaches to learning and teaching in higher education. Creating safer spaces in classrooms is a necessary building block in the transformation and decolonisation of higher education cultures and the development of cultural competency for all staff and graduates. This paper outlines an approach to crafting safer spaces within the classroom, focusing on a case study of strategies for teaching and learning about race, racism and intersectionality employed by the authors in an undergraduate Indigenous Studies unit at an urban Australian university.

Keywords

Australiahigher educationIndigenous Studiesintersectionalityracesafe spaces
Type
Research Article
Information
The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , December 2021 , pp. 229 - 236
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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