For a while now I have been researching and writing about Australian Indigenous education issues. Like you all, I have seen much good work and learnt much from what is going on across the country and internationally to improve outcomes for Indigenous learners in formal education processes. And still we go on with the struggle and with the limitations that Western sciences and practices place on us in the process. This paper draws together theoretical propositions from the work we have been progressing for the higher education sector over the past decade and to point to some foundational principles that can help establish some early beginnings with Indigenous education as a discipline in the higher education sector.

Australia in Adelaide. He is the first Torres Strait Islander to receive a PhD from an Australian university and his current research work is in the curriculum development areas and online pedagogies with a particular focus on Indigenous learners. He has presented several plenary and keynote addresses at national as well as international conferences and published over forty articles on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and education in various academic journals and books in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Japan and the United States. He is the editor of the Kaurna Higher Education Journal and member of the editorial board of The Australian Educational Researcher. He convened the second national Indigenous Researchers' Forum in Adelaide in 2000 and was a leading member of the organising committee for a Conference of Indigenous peoples from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US on Indigenous Peoples and Racism in Sydney 2001. The UN High Commissioner designated this conference as a regional meeting for the United Nations World Conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. He twice represented the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on Indigenous issues in Australia, and later provided research and technical support to the Commission's delegation at the UN's World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa and the 2002 inaugural session of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York. He is currently working towards the incorporation of a national association of Indigenous researchers in Australia.

This article reflects on pathways for Indigenous education in the developing agenda of the Australian Curriculum, the cross-curriculum priorities, the general capability area of intercultural understanding, and the positioning of Indigenous learners within the diversity of learners with English as an additional language or dialect (EALD).

This paper is an early discussion of the ways we are approaching Indigenous Studies in Australian Universities. The focus is on how disciplinary and scholarly issues within Indigenous Studies can be interrogated and yet retain the necessary cohesion and solidarity so important to the Indigenous struggle. The paper contrasts Indigenous Studies pursued by Indigenous scholars to other disciplinary perspectives in the academy. Categories such as the Indigenous community and Indigenous knowledge are problematised, not to dissolve them, but to explore productive avenues. I identify one of the problems that Indigenous studies faces as resisting the tendency to perpetuate an enclave within the academy whose purpose is to reflect back an impoverished and codified representation of Indigenous culture to the communities that are its source. On the other hand, there is danger also in the necessary engagement with other disciplines on their own terms. My suggestion is that we see ourselves mapping our understanding of our particular Indigenous experiences upon a terrain intersected by the pathways, both of other Indigenous experiences, and of the non‐Indigenous academic disciplines. My intention is to stimulate some thought among Indigenous academics and scholars about the future possibilities of Australian Indigenous Studies as a field of endeavour.

The challenges of finding more productive ways of teaching and learning in Australian Indigenous Studies have been a key focal point for the Australian Indigenous Studies Learning and Teaching Network. This article contributes to this discussion by drawing attention to new possibilities for teaching and learning practices amid the priority being given to the more practice-oriented educational approaches for future professionals and the cultural competencies of all students and staff. We explore courses sequenced as Indigenous Studies Majors and discuss two different conceptualisations for framing teaching and learning in Indigenous Studies courses — decolonising theory and cultural interface theory — and the implications for some of the teaching and learning practices they facilitate, including the positioning of students and the development of dispositions for future professional practice. We suggest that those academic teams who structure course sequences in Indigenous Studies have a role to play in experimenting with shifts in teaching and learning frameworks and the design of course sequences to encourage approaches that are more focused on developing students’ breadth and depth of knowledge of the field, as well as their capacities for deeper engagements with Indigenous thought and the scholarly disciplines.