Literacy Education and Indigenous Australians

This edited volume brings together diverse perspectives on Australian literacy education for Indigenous peoples, highlighting numerous educational approaches, ideologies and aspirations. The Australian Indigenous context presents unique challenges for educators working across the continent in settings ranging from urban to remote, and with various social and language groups. Accordingly, one of the book’s main goals is to foster dialogue between researchers and practitioners working in these contexts, and who have vastly different theoretical and ideological perspectives. It offers a valuable resource for academics and teachers of Indigenous students who are interested in literacy-focused research, and complements scholarship on literacy education in comparable Indigenous settings internationally.

Dr Jennifer Rennie is a Senior Lecturer in Literacy Education at the Faculty of Education, Monash University. Prior to working in higher education, she worked as a primary and high school teacher. Her chief research interests are Indigenous literacies, students who are marginalised from mainstream schooling, and reading pedagogies for disengaged adolescent readers. She has maintained a long-standing affiliation with the Australian Literacy Educators Association, and was the recipient of the ALEA medal for outstanding service to the association and the profession in 2015. She recently took office as Vice President of ALEA. In addition, she has been Managing Editor of the Australian Journal of Language and Literacy since 2009. Dr Helen Harper has worked as a researcher and lecturer in language and literacy education, as a linguist in remote Indigenous communities, and as a teacher of English as an Additional Language. Currently she is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education, University of New England (UNE), where she teaches English language and literacy education. Helen’s research interests include pedagogies for educationally marginalised students, pedagogies of literacy, and classroom interactions. Before taking up her post at the UNE in 2018, Helen spent more than two decades in the Northern Territory, where she worked as a researcher and educator.