Enacting high expectations for all students in the classroom is a complex undertaking. Underlying, out-of-awareness assumptions may lead to actions, behaviours or pedagogic choices that do not support these high expectations beliefs and intentions. For Indigenous education, this is compounded by public and professional discourses around deficit positioning, and by historical conditioning, where many Indigenous students do not see achieving in school as part of their cultural identity. High expectations are usually considered as a performance agenda — in terms of effort, learning and achievement. In this paper, we introduce the concept of high-expectations relationships where viewing and enacting high expectations through a relational lens equips educators with strategies to support such performance outcomes. We describe this relational lens where fair, socially just relating establishes a relational space of trust, thus enabling both student motivation and the firm, critically reflective relating necessary for quality learning. Using the voices of educators, we describe how high-expectations relationships can promote collegiate staff environments, strong teacher–student relationships and trusting and supportive relationships with parents and carers. We show how these positive educational attributes of any school community, seeded through a focus on high-expectations relationships, work to support the performance outcomes of a high-expectations educational agenda.

The global standardization reform movement in education has seduced many Indigenous education policy makers in Australia, providing a powerful neoliberal discourse to further consolidate their focus on Indigenous educational deficit. A Share in the Future, the latest review of Indigenous education in the Northern Territory is an exemplar in this regard. This paper offers a brief exposition of this review, highlighting how an exclusive focus on comparative statistics and standardised testing of English literacy and numeracy works to maintain the coupling of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘deficit’, reifying colonial power relations and justifying technical and bureaucratic educational approaches, administered and monitored from afar. Such an approach is unable to adequately respond to the relational, cultural and linguistic complexities and nuances of local Indigenous education contexts. The educational assumptions and propositions of A Share in the Future will be juxtaposed with those of the Cross-Cultural Collaboration Project, undertaken in the Northern Territory in 2008, to consider alternative ways of successfully engaging these local educational complexities.

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The Country as Teacher research project was a formative exploration of how Indigenous pedagogies might be taken-up as part of mainstream schooling for all Australian students. This paper reports on the first phase where participant teachers were guided and supported, through professional learning, to initiate their own ‘relating with Country’ practice. A Country as teacher pedagogy is enacted through cultivating the practice of reciprocal ‘relating with Country’, resulting in gratitude and learning about, from and how to care for the places we live. Enacting Country as Teacher in school-based curriculum operates as a ‘critical pedagogy of place’, contesting Eurocentric epistemic power in Australian curriculum, to provide a balanced ‘both ways’ education for all. We argue that for teachers to be able to appropriately facilitate Country as teacher pedagogies with students, they must first cultivate their own practice of ‘relating with Country’. In this paper, we examine the stories of 26 teachers in Canberra public schools as they develop their practice of relating with Country. These stories highlight the process, and participant’s challenges and successes. This paper contributes to foundational knowledge and experience for the uptake of Country as teacher pedagogies in Australian schools. Our emerging findings suggest that the practice of ‘relating with Country’ is within the reach of all teachers.

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