Reflective Teaching Practice in a Darug Classroom: How Teachers can Build Relationships With an Aboriginal Community Outside the School

Abstract

This project has been developed on Darug country, Sydney to examine how pre-service and beginning teachers can work with Aboriginal people in their local urban community. These teachers often want to know how to approach an Aboriginal ‘community’, how they can ask Aboriginal people for information in order to include it in their teaching, and how to adopt respectful ways of talking when they contact a community member. While these questions are commonly addressed in the Working with Community documents published by the various state Departments of Education, we found that the actual practice of working with a community is daunting for many. This article therefore attempts to document two examples of this practice, and in so doing it applies the protocols identified by Martin (2008) to the reflective work of both a pre-service teacher and a university educator. It also draws on the extensive literature of reflective practice developed for classrooms, and applies this to pedagogical practice outside schools.