Bringing Indigenous Sovereignties into university-community partnerships: Unpacking racialisation to re-engage Indigenous Australian students in education

… educators need to approach learning not merely as the acquisition of knowledge but as the production of cultural practices that offer students a sense of identity, place, and hope (Giroux 1992, 170).

In this chapter, and using the Inspire Mentor Program as a point of reflection, we begin by discussing an Indigenous community partnership with a university, established to provide non-Indigenous mentors with cultural education and to work with Indigenous senior school students to increase their retention rates. The goal of the Inspire Mentor Program is to increase retention rates in a low-socio economic area near Flinders University in South Australia. We then discuss the pedagogical approach that is applied to re-engage Indigenous students in education. We address how the pedagogical approach is implemented to program design and practices in addition to the cultural education training to non-Indigenous mentors in Inspire and we refer to the model that has been developed to reinforce Indigenous young people’s connection with their community and Elders as a crucial component of their participation in formal education.

This chapter is multi-voiced, hence in places the “we” speaks from an Indigenous standpoint and in others from a nominally white standpoint, but always in a relationship to Indigenous sovereignty. The first section addresses the protocol to locate us as both authors and as the people involved in developing and implementing the partnership.