Encountering the Ngarrngga education resources

Penny Harry & Robyn Barallon

Banksia by John Tann, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Australian teachers often express an uncomfortableness or low confidence, in developing lessons embedded with Indigenous knowledges. This may turn them towards an online ‘marketplace’ of resources to procure ready-made lessons. Think Teach Starter, Teachers Pay Teachers, Twinkl etc. But are these resources credible, are they appropriate, and how do we know?

The Ngarrngga (“Naan-gah”) Project aims to help to solve this dilemma. Guided by an Expert Advisory Panel comprising of 13 Indigenous Knowledge Experts, it is based at the University of Melbourne and supported by BHP. The project is led by Professor Melitta Hogarth, a Kamilaroi woman with over 20 years’ experience teaching in secondary classrooms.

Ngarrngga is a Taungurung word meaning “to know, to hear, to understand” (Ngarrngga Project, 2023). The project aims to provide Australian educators with quality teaching resources and professional development modules. Resources are piloted in classrooms and refined based on feedback, so teachers can be confident in their reliability and quality.

“Imagine an Australia where every school student learns about the knowledge systems, histories and cultures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and where every educator can feel confident in their ability to showcase Indigenous Knowledge in their teaching and learning”(Ngarrngga Project, 2023).

The resources, currently available for Years 3 -10, cover a wide range of curriculum areas. They include lessons with learning outcomes and required materials, assessment, hands-on activities, contextualised learning stimuli and place-based learning.

Having both attended an Australian Curriculum Studies Association (ACSA) webinar promoting this resource, we were eager to reflect on how our colleagues and pre-service teachers might benefit from engaging with this resource.

Engaging with the resource according to role

When you visit the Ngarrngga site, you are invited to indicate whether you are coming to the site as “an educator”, “an academic”, “a preservice teacher”, “an educational leader”, “a curious young person” or “a curious adult”.

We are both coming to the site as non-Indigenous educators.

As an experiment, we explored the resource to see how it might be helpful to three imagined educators: a pre-service teacher, an academic, and an educational leader.

• A pre-service teacher looking for teaching resources about English in Level 6

We imagined that this pre-service teacher was planning to incorporate Indigenous perspectives into an upcoming English lesson while on placement with year 6 students in a metropolitan public school in Naarm (Melbourne).

The search returns one resource: “Communicating traditional Indigenous Knowledge.” This took us to a page that outlines the resource aims and its alignment to the different curriculum frameworks.

The resource is framed around a case study of the Ngadju people’s relationship to fire and there are some associated learning activities that the pre-service can adopt, with links to external information sources such as the Ngadju Conservation website.

• Academic looking for guidance on teaching Indigenous content

We imagined this as a Humanities academic teaching into undergraduate and post-graduate courses at Deakin.

The search first presented the organising ideas that underpin the approach to engaging with Indigenous knowledges that Ngarrngga is espousing. The three organising ideas of ‘country/place’, ‘people’ and ‘culture’ are prominent on the page and scrolling down, we see the list of cross-curriculum priorities each of these ideas relate to. While these don’t directly apply to the teaching our academic has to do, they are curious to see what their students might be learning in school before starting a BArts.

As we click into Country/place, we find that it is organised around the three elements of fire, water and air and we are invited to explore the teaching resources that are related to each of these. In this list, our academic can find their way to the same resource that our pre-service teacher did but will perhaps draw on it to develop learning experiences for their adult learners, through the lens of the organising ideas and elements.

• Educational leader looking for professional development

Lastly, we imagined this person to hold a school leadership position with the responsibility of supporting and leading others in decolonising their curriculum and teaching practice.

We are immediately taken to a series of eight video resources in which the importance and rationale behind the Ngarrngga project is articulated by members of and contributors to the project. These resources are numerically sequenced and tie the project together to help viewers to better understand how the resources have been designed to be used.

Our school leader can refer their staff to the resource to start a conversation about how they might, as a team, draw on the organising ideas and make a start.

Questions raised

Our three imagined educators have presented us with some questions regarding the navigational features and function of the site:

• Will the pre-service teacher miss information on how to become more aware of their connection to Country and place by jumping directly to teaching resources?
• Will the academic looking for guidance on teaching Indigenous content turn away at the sight of the school-oriented teaching standards, thinking this isn’t relevant to me?
• Will the educational leader looking for professional development absolve themselves from any responsibility in leading this work by emailing the link to their colleagues before moving on to another priority?

At our Faculty Engaging with Indigenous Peoples and Knowledges Community of Practice meetings, we regularly discuss ways in which educators can improve their awareness of their positionality in relation to the knowledges they teach to build their capacity and confidence. This seems to be emphasised in the filter on the main banner of the Ngarrngga website as visitors are encouraged to declaring who they are so that the material will be filtered based on that input. Yet, it instead takes you to what you are seeking.

On the one hand, the resources available on the Ngarrngga site are valuable for supporting educators. On the other hand, the navigational structure of the site, especially the way it tailors information, may inadvertently lead educators to engage with the resources only at a surface level. We worry that educators may not recognise the importance of their positionality in relation to the Knowledges they are sharing with their students. Educators would therefore need to supplement this resource with others that assist them to critically reflect on their positionality.

The AIATS Guide to evaluating and selecting education resources  is one such resource. It aims to “assist educators to critically self-reflect on their positionality and support them to work from a foundation of integrity.”

In the words of the Indigenous Systems Knowledge Collective: “Well-meaning attitudes and good intentions are not as important as impact and unintended consequences.” As with all resources, we must evaluate their teaching and learning potential with care. We can determine if they are credible and appropriate if we approach them through the frame of our awareness of our positionality and the positionality of our students.

Penny Harry

Penny is a Lecturer in Education at the National Indigenous Knowledges Education Research Innovation (NIKERI) Institute and currently undertaking the Graduate Certificate in Higher Education Teaching and Learning (GCHELT).

Robyn Barallon

Robyn is a Learning Designer and supports staff in the A&E Faculty to develop engaging learning experiences for their students. She is currently completing a PhD in higher education looking at how curriculum is conceptualised in different academic disciplines and to what potential effects.