The poster was created by Matthew Humphries and is titled Road to Change.
Description of work: A First Australian family link hands as they step out on the road to change – proud of who they are, encouraged by what has already been achieved and united in their goal to be changemakers for a bright new future.
Want to celebrate for more than a week? Why not celebrate for a whole month!
Blak History Month is a grassroots movement that is celebrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture, people and communities for the whole month of July. You can order aBlak History Month poster created by Sam Cook from Kiss My Blak Arts from the online store, RedBubble, and you can download free resources from my Blak History Month for Teachers website.
Historically, many east-coast Australian communities have paid little attention to the cultural history of their places. Most communities proudly display plaques to their war dead, the young men and women from families that marched and died on battle grounds in Europe, the Pacific, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Occasionally there are plaques to explorer and settler families, but quite often these are held in the naming of places, streets, parks, mountains, and hills.
Generally there is little recognition of the people who walked and lived the land we now know of as Australia, since time immemorial.
Gathering and then curating this knowledge and information to suit classroom purposes is our modern day challenge. Quite often information is held within individual families, but mostly it's in the archives, in old newspapers, explorer/settler diaries and/or historical books that are out of print. Some of this information is on the web, but most is on shelves.
The community I live in, Everton Park in the north-west suburbs of Brisbane, is one such place. Over the past few years I have slowly cobbled together some information in my spare time.
My first effort at compiling information in a way that was presentable was using Google Maps. I was inspired by Stilgherrian's 50-50 project. Using a word list from Tom Petrie's Reminiscences of early Queensland, I used place markers to mark the Aboriginal names of places throughout Brisbane. My next effort was in creating a Picasa/Google album of Aboriginal Place Names. Unfortunately, life has got in the way of my extra-curricula activity and I've not progressed as far as I'd like - still so many places still to add.
This is one of the on-going barriers to the challenge of curating information for a specific purpose - time, energy and focus. The other key challenge comes in making sure that any texts (in the form of maps, albums, podcasts or books) is done in a way that is appropriate to the memory of Aboriginal peoples of the past as well as respectful of Peoples that live in communities today.
A recent query from a teacher at the local primary school has prompted me to compile what I have so far here in a a public Google document . I suspect that much of this information would work well and be useable in a blog format - perhaps I'll leave that one for an empty weekend.
What tools have you used to gather and present information about your community? What are some of the barriers or challenges you have faced?
Cheers, Leesa
Update - I'm not certain if the Map link is working. I'm going to try to embed the map below to see if this works.
Last week I ordered a poster created by Aboriginal artist Sam Cook from Redbubble.
Australian Blak History Month is a very grassroots celebration of history, people, events, stories from a Blak perspective. I have written about it elsewhere on this blog, and there is a link also to my Blak History Month website which has a range of free resources.
I highly recommend all schools purchase this poster. Not only does it look DEADLY, supports an Aboriginal artist, but it will resonate with your students and their families when they see it hanging in your school and classroom.
The poster I chose is print mounted on a matte board. I chose the white matte board. There are different options of purchasing with RedBubble including already framed prints.
For many people the 26th of January is a day of celebration, while for others, it is a day of sorrow or mourning. We have created a series of lessons designed to assist teachers to create activities that are inclusive and respects the beliefs of their students. The document is created as a Google Doc and is accessible via this link.
You will need this Google Presentation - Stimulus Texts for the 26th of January. I will be adding to this presentation over time.
Here is the first of the Deadly Ways presentations. It currently sits at 5 Deadly Ways to Explore Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives of democracy, politics and civics in your classroom, but will definitely grow in the coming months.
I did want to note that Annabel Crabb, political commentator and journalist, made an important point on the 1st day of the opening of the 43rd Parliament. On the Drum on the ABC, her and Chris Uhlman were discussing the recent changes to the opening procedures where from now on a Welcome to Country would happen and also changes to the Standing Orders which now instruct the speaker at the start of every sitting of Parliament an Acknowledgement of Traditional Owners must happen. Annabel Crabb while noting that this was a significant step forward, it was still a 'step' that was 'given' by the Parliament (and one that could be taken away).
Today's lecture I'm delivering at QUT for EDB007 pre-service teachers is about being able to identify the 'invisible frames' that we live within. Like my lecture for Indigenous Art Protocols & Practices, the lecture will explore what we know and how we know it.
I'm inspired by the recent election to focus this year's lecture on democracy and how teachers can incorporate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives into their studies of democracy, civics and society and politics and the political system.
As a result I've developed the first of my Deadly Ways presentations that I will present in the second half of the lecture. These are a bit of a rip-off of Tom Barrett's 'Interesting Ways' presentations that are a fantastic resource for teachers all over the world. Of course I'm using 'deadly' ways. I've been thinking about creating a series for a few months now so thanks for Jean Phillips (EDB007 Convenor) for giving me the opportunity (and deadline) to get it done).
You can get a copy of the lecture notes for today's session, as well as a copy of the first of our Deadly Ways presentations.
** Please note: I use Google Docs for my presentations. You should be able to access it without a Google Account. But I highly recommend a Google account (its free!) and Google Products (including Google Documents, Reader, Blogger, Picase and a whole suite of other products) for develop, collaborating and sharing.
I really want to explore this more. I know I do a bit of this now, but I know that there is so much more out there. I love the work of Gadj & Jodi from Sharing Culture Online.
In two of three of my 1213QCA Indigenous Art, Protocols and Practices lecture last week I showed this video, and I wanted to provide all the students with an opportunity to engage with this powerful and confronting (and very effective) work again.
Warning: Course Language
bell hooks in her essay Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance argues
The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of do-ing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture. Cultural taboos around sexuality and desire are transgressed and made explicit as the media bombards folks with a message of difference no longer based on the white suprema-cist assumption that "blondes have more fun." The "real fun" is to be had bybringing to the surface all those "nasty" unconscious fantasies and longings about contact with the Other embedded in the secret (not so secret) deep structure of white supremacy.
In the video, Yellow Rage seek to challenge stereotypes and assumptions of "Asian" and "Asian-ness". To interrogate mainstream positions and assumptions the artists explore:
mainstream assumptions (and entitlements) about language
appropriation of Asian imagery ("fake Asian tattoo)
assumptions about the cultural and sexual behaviour of Asian women
the power of the knower to know about the Other, including the impact of on-going colonisation by the West
the centring of the mainstream
Some questions for discussion:
What are the key themes the artists are exploring?
What do you think of the way that they express their point? Does "confronting" work? How does it make you feel?
Last week I explored the idea of research for students in 1213QCA Indigenous Art, Protocols and Practices at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. In the context of the student's work, I focused on the idea of research as not being about the stereotypical idea of research (thinking here - lab coats, clip boards, pen in pockets etc), but about how we, each of us, engaged in:
seeing
knowing
doing
Seeing: we explored how each of us "see" the world depending on our we see reality. The way we see reality is often programmed by our upbringing, and our culture. This video helps to illustrate this simple point:
Obviously "seeing" is much more complicated than in the video above, but it gives a bit of a starting point. In relation to looking at the visual arts, Vincent Lanier, an arts educator identified 9 filters through which we "see" art:
1) What other people say bout art and the particular work2) The setting of the art work
3) How we have learned to see
4) How muchw e know about the elements and principles of design
5) What we know about the particular symbols that are used
6) What the art work reminds us of
7) How much we know about the history of the work
8) How we judge the work
9) What relationship the work has to our life.
Knowing:When we explore the idea of knowing in relation to research, I asked the students to answer two questions:
1) What do you know about Aboriginal art? (just list them)
2) What are the sources of that knowledge (how do you know what you know, where did you get that information from).
Looking at knowledge and knowledge production, we identified that the majority of our knowledge about Aboriginal Art (for most of the students), was knowledge that was written down and passed on by non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people - teachers, curators, arts writers, art academics etc. This leads us to explore power - and the power of knowledge production.
Doing:
When we explore doing, we explore our role within the research process. I really love to think about critical theory as an approach to exploring this. I find it really empowering. What Critical theory does is:
Challenges accepted norms and truths
Challenges privilege and power
Is explicitly about liberation & democratisation
Acknowledges that there are no absolutes/truths
Has exploring seeing, knowing & doing helped to unpack the process of research? Can you think of additional filter's to the nine identified by Lanier?
