Aspirations for Meaningful Livelihoods: Challenges of Pathway Navigation

One of the primary goals of the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC‐REP) is to improve education and training pathways in remote areas so that people have better opportunities to participate in existing economies. In advancing this goal, the ‘Pathways to Employment’ project aims to understand the way that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in remote communities navigate their way into meaningful livelihoods, and what kinds of learning support these pathways. The paper highlights how mainstream ways of being, knowing and valuing make navigating such pathways inherently challenging. Aspirations for belonging to family, community and country which shape economic engagement can be overlooked by a system that values different goal orientations and privileges certain ways of getting there. The paper argues that building on local social and identity capital might be a key ingredient in supporting educational and economic advantage.