Working at a cultural interface: co-creating Aboriginal health curriculum for health professions
Historical exclusion of Aboriginal people and Aboriginal epistemologies in Australian higher education, including health professions education, has produced generations of healthcare professionals who are ill-equipped and lack confidence to provide culturally safe care for Aboriginal communities. This article recounts efforts undertaken at a university in Melbourne to foreground Aboriginal ways of knowing and being through […]
Difficult Knowledge and Uncomfortable Pedagogies: student perceptions and experiences of teaching and learning in Critical Indigenous Australian Studies
This research presents a grounded interrogation of students’ perceptions and experiences of teaching and learning in two mandatory stand-alone Critical Indigenous Australian Studies subjects at an Australian university. The study proffers rare empirical insight into the student experience of teaching and learning about colonialism, racism, whiteness and privilege. It contributes to building a better understanding […]
Culturally responsive pedagogies of success: Improving educational outcomes for Australian Aboriginal students
The Role of Psychologists in a Changing Time
This is the third video in a three-part video series and collaboration between the Transforming Indigenous Mental Health and Wellbeing project and Pearson Australia. This dynamic three-part video series provides foundational learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural knowledges, and explores contemporary global issues, such as the Black Lives Matter movement. Together, the video […]
Kaartajin Ngundabut Indigenous Cultural Knowledge
This is the second video in a three-part video series and collaboration between the Transforming Indigenous Mental Health and Wellbeing project and Pearson Australia. This dynamic three-part video series provides foundational learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural knowledges, and explores contemporary global issues, such as the Black Lives Matter movement. Together, the video […]
Introduction to Indigenous Psychology
This is the first video in a three-part video series and collaboration between the Transforming Indigenous Mental Health and Wellbeing project and Pearson Australia. This dynamic three-part video series provides foundational learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural knowledges, and explores contemporary global issues, such as the Black Lives Matter movement. Together, the video […]
An introduction to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health cultural protocols and perspectives
This document provides a guide to appropriate and respectful behaviour with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It is intended to give RACGP members and staff background information and guidance on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives, along with an understanding of important protocols and other relevant cultural issues. It can be used to guide […]
The legacy of racism and Indigenous Australian identity within education
It may be argued that the emerging discourses focusing on the social, emotional, educational, and economic disadvantages identified for Australia’s First Peoples (when compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts) are becoming increasingly dissociated with an understanding of the interplay between historical and current trends in racism. Additionally, and if not somewhat related to this critique, it […]
Ausplat Conference: 17-19 September 2021
The following document provides links to access the Ausplat (Australian Psychology Learning and Teaching) conference presentations, held in September 2021. Several of these presentations related to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Knowledges and Psychology Education (see page 3).
Psychology Education and Work Readiness Integration: A Call for Research in Australia
Supporting students to develop transferable skills and gain employment is a vital function of Universities in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. A key area is work readiness, which has steadily grown in importance over the last 2 decades as tertiary institutions increasingly aim to produce graduates who perceive and are perceived as work […]
Cultural humility and decolonial practice: narratives of therapists’ lives
Objective: Cultural competence has been critiqued as a flawed principle, focussed on mastery of cultural knowledge rather than critical reflection on race and privilege. Cultural humility is proposed as an alternative, emphasising accountability over mastery, involving critical self-reflection of personal biases and culture. This study aims to explore the development of cultural humility in psychological […]
Decolonising clinical psychology: National and international perspectives
Background Throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries psychology has been used as a tool of colonisation. Critical theorists argue that in order to improve the wellbeing of those most affected by inequality, psychology programs need to be decolonised. In the Australian context, research has primarily focused on what decolonised curricula might look (e.g., Dudgeon 2017; […]
“Every client has a trauma history”: Teaching respectful relationships to marginalised youth. An evaluation of NAPCAN’s Respectful Relationships Program Northern Territory 2017-2018.
This report presents findings from a research evaluation of a one-year program run by NAPCAN in the Northern Territory which sought to develop a trauma-informed approach to Respectful Relationships Education (RRE). The program was undertaken under contract with Territory Families, and focused on providing training in traumainformed RRE to staff in the youth services sector […]
LIME Good Practice Case Studies: Volume Five 2019
Teaching Indigenous psychology: A conscientisation, de-colonisation, and psychological literacy approach to curriculum
For at least 20 years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, leaders, educators and mental health workers have been calling on governments, institutions, professional bodies, educators and practitioners to embrace culturally appropriate methodologies of practice in order to address the significant social and health disparities experienced by Indigenous peoples. Psychology as a discipline of knowledge […]
LIME Good Practice Case Studies Volume Four 2017
Measuring the ‘gift’: Epistemological and ontological differences between the academy and Indigenous Australia
This paper is drawn from our collective experience coordinating, and teaching in, a large common inter-professional unit on Indigenous cultures and health at an Australian university. Specifically, we use our lived experiences as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal academics working interculturally to inform a theoretical discussion about how universities conceptualise ‘quality’ in learning and teaching for Indigenous […]
The deconstruction exercise: an assessment tool for enhancing critical thinking in cultural safety education.
The ‘deconstruction exercise’ aims to give non-Indigenous health profession students the ability to recognise language that is imbued with power imbalance, so as to avoid the perpetuation of racialised ways of interacting with Indigenous peoples in the health system. Informed by Ngarrindjeri and Malak Malak perspectives, this is a measured anti–racism strategy, one able to […]
Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project Curriculum Framework
The objective of the AIPEP Curriculum Framework is to ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges are embedded within undergraduate and postgraduate level psychology education.
Unsettling Australian settler supremacy: combating resistance in university Aboriginal studies
Higher education courses designed to equip students to work effectively with Indigenous peoples by teaching about racism and inequality often encounter resistance to these concepts. In particular, students argue that individual and structural racisms, and their own white privilege, are ‘not their fault’. This article examines different forms of student resistance expressed within a number […]
Increasing cultural competence and Indigenous representation in psychology
Reflections on what has/has not worked for Psychology Educators. This document was developed for the Australian Indigenous Psychology Education Project (AIPEP) ‘How To’ forum held at the APS Golden Jubilee Conference, September 2015. It provides brief points on what has and has not worked for psychology educators involved in the project when attempting to implement […]
LIME Good Practice Case Studies Volume Three, 2015
Indigenising the Psychology Curriculum – Traps and Tips
An easy to read spreadsheet listing traps, tips, and resources for psychology educators in the process of Indigensing the psychology curriculum. This document is a work in progress, all feedback and suggestions are welcomed.
(De)Constructing paradigms: Creating a psychology curriculum for conscientisation education.
Critical psychology challenges the traditional assumptions of mainstream psychology by identifying the bases of power that maintain inequity and unjust social practices and working towards transformational change. Psychology has the capacity to be at the forefront of a social change agenda to remove the barriers that impede human functioning; the vanguard of such a social […]
Implementing an Intercultural Psychology Undergraduate Unit: Approach, Strategies, and Outcomes
The relative absence of Indigenous and multicultural perspectives in core undergraduate psychology curriculum is said to hamper the preparation of students for engaging with culturally diverse communities. An intercultural unit that includes perspectives on Australia’s history of race relations, Indigenous issues, and migration as the basis from which to research and practise intercultural psychology was […]