Josie Arnold

Walking in both worlds: rethinking Indigenous knowledge in the academy

ABSTRACT Six generations ago, my Celtic forebears came to Australia as convicts and invaders displacing Indigenous peoples. As a scholar today, I am interested in how Indigenous knowledge remains a challenge in Australian Universities even in this postmodern and postcolonial moment. This paper recognises the need to extend discussion about how Indigenous people might be facilitated within the academy to bring their knowledge models into the university and its traditional dominant knowledge systems. This paper looks at Practice-Led Research (PLR) as a way of supporting the transition of Indigenous community scholars into university postgraduate courses. It explores how PLR may contribute to an appropriate entry point into postgraduate studies for some Indigenous practitioner-candidates who have significant life experiences and narratives and/or productions of artefacts that act to replace the breadth of undergraduate credentials. Indigenous people are facilitated in bringing their knowledge models into the university and the academy when we act upon being inclusive rather than exclusive regarding the explication and definition of knowledge within the academy. In accepting and acting upon the concept that traditional forms of knowledge are extended by non-traditional Indigenous forms of knowledge, we also enrich the scholarly conversation about how alternative forms of knowledge can add dynamism to the academy.

Methodologies and Theories within Academic Research

This paper enters into scholarly debate and discussion about data, methodologies and theories within academic research. It proposes that critical and cultural theories and methodologies are not some isolated intellectual game. It explores how they are that, but they also offer us ways in which we can identify those things that we most take for granted in our society. Once we have identified their existence, then we can begin to see how they are constructed. We question cultural metanarratives and confront normative but constrictive ways of knowing. In doing so, we identify those who benefits from these ‘givens’ and those who are locked out from the central aspects of culture through the unthinking application of such ‘givens’. Reading against the dominant cultural texts enables scholarly critiques of cultural metanarratives. It can be seen that such questioning is disruptive in the sense that it calls upon us to undertake scholarly research that takes knowledge forward. In doing so, we must clearly challenge that which we take for granted. For example, language embodies that shared cultural view in a flawed way. The flawed ways in which language establishes that shared cultural view is the best that we can do to share meaning. Language is a social ‘given’ or ‘norm’ that constructs the individual as well the culture. Meaning (fact) is never ‘fixed’ and stable: It is always in interpretation. Thinking thus acts to displace social reverence for ‘fact’ showing it to be a cultural invention necessary to the maintenance of social orderliness and order.

Research as Stories: A Subjective Academic Narrative

The subject of this paper addresses how the academic world depends upon peer reviews of scholarly narratives. The goals of this paper are to present a challenge to how such narratives are usually performed subject to a strict set of rules and regulations that have become formulaic since the Enlightenment processes of scientific methodology dominated the academy). Over the later part of the 20 th century and this early 21 st century, there has been much debate about the relationship of social science methodologies and those of the natural sciences. This debate reveals that the various natural sciences themselves have for mulated different methodologies and that the social sciences have moved from aping the natural science methodologies to an array of qualitative ones. At the same time, the refereed peer reviewed journals almost all ask for Enlightenment style articles to disperse social science knowledg e within a continuing paradigm that bows still to the Enlightenment values of Adam Smith and David Hume. The method of this paper is to practise and to survey the telling of a research story as a narrative that discusses documenting case studies through re cording and analysing interviews; the case study and/as narrativity and the methodologies emerging through ethnography and auto ethnography. The theoretical perspectives engaged with include postmodernist deconstruction and the rhizomatic text as well as n arrativity and the anecdotal within scholarship. Original Research Article

Walking the Walk of eTeaching and eLearning: Enhancing teaching and learning using the new technologies

Today, the overarching goal of all Universities is to develop excellence in flexible eLearning and eTeaching. Such excellence grows from and upon the rich offerings of traditional teaching and learning: it is not opposed to it. This paper investigates some of the opportunities offered by the multimedia experiences of cyberlearning and embeds those in traditional learning and teaching experiences. In doing so it utilises feminist postmodernist techniques, particularly that of telling the unfocussed story that is a descriptive narrative wandering across the text.

ELECTRONIC DELIVERY OF CURRICULUM: PREPRODUCTION OF CYBERSCRIPTS

New systems for delivering curriculum are creating new challenges for academics. The continuing development of new electronic concepts and approaches produce new literacies. These relate to new ways of `writing’ curriculum, new relationships between the learner and the teacher and new paradigms of discourse. This paper looks at how academics might go about transforming their print-based materials so as to explore the opportunities offered by the new writing technologies. It proposes that electronic textuality and discourse, like all writing, has a structure and form. Even the fluid and singular writing for the new multilayered virtual spaces provided by the emergent electronic culture needs concept planning and preproduction scripts. It argues that the fluidity provided by the new electronic textuality itself still needs to be approached through a process of planning, trying out, imagining, conceiving and communicating to oneself and to others. It investigates how this involves writing a multi-layered script and explores the possibilities offered by electronic texts such as: the provision of immediate information; an interplay of the seen, the heard and the read; the introduction of virtuality, interactivity, IMMediacy and self-authority. In doing so, it establishes a process which will enable academics to construct their curricula fully by exploiting the differences offered by new writing technologies