This ‘Guide to Good Practice’ (the Guide), is one of the major educational resources arising from a National Senior Teaching Fellowship awarded to Professor Dennis McDermott in 2014 by the (then) Australian Government Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT). The programme of work, Having the Hard Conversations: Strengthening pedagogical effectiveness by working with student and institutional resistance to Indigenous health curriculum, involved a team of national and international scholars in the field of Indigenous health and cultural safety education. Over a four-year period, they collaborated to develop, refine and disseminate a framework for conceiving of, and delivering, effective strategies to meet student and institutional resistance to the personal, professional, and political challenges encountered by many in curriculum material and teaching processes alike.

The Guide aims to be well-evidenced, accessible and practical in application. It is designed to be used in tandem with a suite of video resources that are directly applicable to a range of health professional educational settings (whether university courses or professional development workshops). In particular, six three-minute video resources, drawn from interviews with key national and international scholars in this field, aim to assist educators looking to keep students and practising health professionals engaged and successfully traversing a journey of change, despite any cognitive dissonance or emotional discomfort. Titles available include: Challenges; Cultural Safety; Power Imbalances; Self-Reflection; Listening; and Mechanisms of Change. A thirteen-minute video, suitable for use in organisational change contexts is also available, as are other downloadable video recordings of seminars, webinars and other presentations aimed at supporting educator comprehension and pedagogical success.