We engage teachers, leaders, Cultural Mentors and other interested Community members and stakeholders in a suite of strategies each year.
These strategies provide a framework to underpin whole-school change over a minimum of three years.
A whole-of-school approach
Overarching strategies
Building a deep understanding of the aspirations and histories of local communities and their desires for an appropriate education for their children.
This strategy underpins a long-term commitment to affecting change and a roadmap to affect new relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and communities and local schools.
We connect school leaders via a range of professional conversations and events focused on sharing leadership practice, collegial support and further developing capabilities to embed Culturally Nourishing Schooling in the long term.
The CNS project combines a range of elements that have the potential to impact the ways in which a school conceptualises and establishes its responses to the needs of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and their communities.
We aim to assist in bringing about this fundamental change.
Professional Learning Strategies
Culturally Nourishing Schooling is investigating the efficacy of five professional learning strategies that work together to support schools to build collaborative relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, learn about Country and local culture, and incorporate Indigenous knowledges, histories and languages into teaching and learning.Â
Cultural Mentors from the local Community are employed by each school to support relationship-building with the local Community and act as learning partners for teachers.
The Cultural Mentors work collaboratively with teachers on the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment that occurs in classrooms at the school and work with teachers during planning and reflective sessions outside of the classroom. They are engaged in each of the other four strategies.
Two to three days of learning led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander school staff, and Cultural Mentors, and local NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECG) members.
This learning centres Country and foregrounds the importance of understanding learning in a place. As knowledges are shared and exchanged during these days (and beyond), leaders and teachers are encouraged and supported to take up opportunities to engage with community and learn more about the strengths and lives of their students, their families and communities, and to think about Indigenous ways of knowing, doing and being.
A two-day collaborative workshop to engage teachers in thinking about curriculum frameworks to audit current planning practices and plans, and to inform their curriculum planning for future teaching cycles.
The focus is on centring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content and ways of thinking, being and doing in curriculum and pedagogical practices. Cultural Mentors are made available as facilitators and collaborators to provide expert advice.
During these conversations, held approximately six to eight times per year, teachers, leaders, researchers and Cultural Mentors read articles and research, discuss concepts related to pedagogy and curriculum choices for improving schooling for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, and connect this to their own local contexts, practices, and ways of working.
Held at least twice per year, teachers and Cultural Mentors work together to plan and structure learning to suit the specific circumstances of each local school context.
Cultural Mentors support teachers’ learning and are involved in developing, observing, delivering, and reflecting on teaching and learning practices with teachers and leaders in classrooms.