Learning from the journeys: Quality in Indigenous teacher education in Australia

This paper presents the author’s doctoral research into quality in Indigenous teacher education in Australia, based on the learning journeys of three graduate teachers from Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education in the Northern Territory of Australia. Whilst the published literature often details the challenges and barriers, opportunities and intentions, the graduates speak of self-determination, learning and identity. Their stories provide the deeper story of Indigenous teacher education to which this research is responding—that there is a story of quality and success. We just need to be able to hear it. The findings of this research evidence the lived experience of graduate teachers learning in a both-ways program and generate some key determining factors of just what it is that constitutes quality in Indigenous teacher education in Australia today. In a time when the teacher education programs across the country are under intense scrutiny and regulation, this work proposes some fundamental aspects of quality necessary to ensure equitable experience and success.