Robyn Heckenberg and Andrew Gunstone team taught a first-year subject in Indigenous Australian Studies at Monash University for eight years. The significant majority of students undertaking this subject are non-Indigenous students who are studying the subject as an elective rather than as part of an Indigenous Studies course. In this paper, we…

This article will discuss the ways in which community service learning programs in music can foster meaningful collaborations between universities and Indigenous communities. Drawing on recent pedagogical literature on service learning and insights from a four-year partnership between Australian Indigenous musicians at the Winanjjikari Music…

This paper examines how collaboration amongst university, indigenous community and private sector companies can promote Ainu participation in higher education, drawing on a case study of the Urespa Project in Sapporo University, Japan. In this project, the university offers scholarships to Ainu students, requiring them to take a special course in…

Peter J. Anderson and Bernadette Atkinson teach Indigenous and Traditionally Education in a Global World as a fourth year unit in the Faculty of Education at Monash University, Clayton. This paper is a self reflective piece of work where they discuss the use of graduate attributes relating to Indigenous Education, put forward by the Australian…

The Review of Australian Higher Education (Bradley Review, 2008) and the Review of Higher Education Access and Outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People (Behrendt Review, 2012) identified the need for tertiary institutions to incorporate Indigenous knowledges into curriculum to improve educational outcomes for Indigenous…

In the Australian higher education environment, often preoccupied with internationalisation of education and associated issues around intercultural competencies, there is an uncomfortable awareness of the commensurate lack of attention on 'Indigenisation of the curriculum" and the interconnected 'Indigenous cultural…

The paper reports on an initiative undertaken by a group of Pacific educators --"insiders" who have undertaken various activities and work of embedding Indigenous graduate attributes into teacher education courses, in leadership training of young and emerging young Pacific leaders and in communities, research that takes into account…

This paper analyses how high-stakes, standardised testing became the policy tool in the U.S. that it is today and discusses its role in advancing an ideology of meritocracy that fundamentally masks structural inequalities related to race and economic class. This paper first traces the early history of high-stakes testing within the U.S. context,…

This paper in commenting on the contributions to this special number demonstrates the necessity of historicizing and contextualizing the rise of test- and standards-based modes of accountability in contemporary education policy globally. Both are imperative for understanding specific national manifestations of what has become a globalized…

This paper explores Rizvi and Lingard's (2010) idea of the "local vernacular" of the global education policy trend of using high-stakes testing to increase accountability and transparency, and by extension quality, within schools and education systems in Australia. In the first part of the paper a brief context of the policy…

In the 1990s and 2000s, New Zealand governments monitored national educational performance broadly through cyclical "light-sampling" of primary school students, and the annual proportions of secondary school students who gained formal credentials. In 2008, a centre-right coalition government legislated for national standards of…

This paper describes how a locally developed school ranking system affected student enrolment patterns in British Columbia over time. In developing an annual school "report card" that was published in newspapers and online, the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute created a marketplace for school choice by devising an accountability scheme…

High stakes testing has been long established in the English school system. In this article, we seek to demonstrate how testing has become pivotal to securing the neo-liberal restructuring of schools, that commenced during the Thatcher era, and is reaching a critical point at the current time. Central to this project has been the need to assert…

The accountability paradigm for reforming public schools began in the U.S. as a state-based initiative grounded in establishing state standards for core content and developing high-stakes tests and schedules to hold schools, teachers, and students accountable (Hout and Elliott, 2011). This essay examines the test-based patterns of that paradigm…

In Australia, principles of inclusivity and access are explicit in education policies and are actively supported by government funding. In India, with a vast and diversely managed array of schools, limited resources and an absence of public funding, it cannot be assumed that official principles of access and equity apply. This small-scale study of…