Teaching Resistant Koori Students: Towards Non-Reproductive Education

Abstract

This thesis examines curriculum and classroom practices in an inner city primary school. It reveals how the curriculum is influenced by students' oppositional behaviour at a whole school and classroom level, and how teachers' responses to oppositional behaviour result in a curriculum which is implicated in the continuing educational disadvantage of a large group of the school's Koori (Aboriginal) students. The theoretical underpinnings of the thesis are drawn from resistance theory. However, the thesis offers a different perspective on previous research in this tradition by focussing on the perspectives of teachers and closely examining the nature of the school curriculum. Students' positions are explored through community and teacher interviews and through school and classroom observation. The data and the discussion focus on curriculum and classroom practices produced in the exchange between the school's Koori students and the teachers. Koori students are the largest ethnic group in the school. They generally provide most school and classroom opposition, and have the lowest academic standards. For these reasons these Koori students are the specific focus of the research. It is argued that this curriculum contributes to social reproduction by not eliminating the conditions of resistance contained within the school and its context. In this thesis it is theorised that conditions of resistance are brought about by an oppressed position in an unequal society and a consciousness of that position, by student rejection of inequality in the educational paradigm and by community support for that rejection.