Learning from Country in the City

Welcome to Learning From Country in the City

Welcome to Learning From Country in the City

Vision

  • To centre Aboriginal voices, Country and accountability to Aboriginal families and communities as foundational learning for all students.
  • To prepare preservice teachers to develop Aboriginal-informed culturally responsive and safe practices for all students in all schools.
  • To transform higher education for professional degrees by exposing students to cultural immersion experiences led by local Aboriginal community educators.
  • To ensure another cohort of Australian students do not go through their education without knowing the true history of this nation.

The following book details the journey behind the research project: Thorpe, K., Burgess, C., Egan, S., & Harwood, V. (2025). Aboriginal Community-Based Educators teaching the teachers. Learning from Country in the City.Springer Nature.

The Project

Learning From Country in the City is a 5-year project where the research and teaching occurred together and so the teaching informed the research, and the research informed the teaching. The three phases of the research conducted from 2018 to 2022 included preservice teachers [N = 64], Aboriginal community-based educators [N = 10], and early career teachers [N = 13].

Aboriginal community-based educators shared stories of experiences of colonisation and strength-based responses to these. This approach destabilises teaching–learning dynamics by de-centring teachers as “experts and challenging stereotypes, cultural biases and deficit discourses.

In many ways, this project is a story about storying, an ontological journey of learning through being and doing. It foregrounds relational Country-centred learning on Gadigal land, invasion ground zero, known today as Sydney.

Impact

Preservice teacher

Learning from Country was more than an intensive subject. It was a reckoning. It was a wake up call. A reality slap that echoed well beyond the lecture halls and into my recesses of my consciousness, my understanding of the world, family, identity and education itself. It was a journey to the past, present and future

Community

It’s us owning our own narrative and our own space again in terms of how we engage with institutions like Sydney Uni, or the education departments or anything like that so once again it’s putting our community back into owning what they want to teach, where they want it, and how they want it to be taught. So, I know there’s a lot of conversations and we sort of push that as well, that we don’t want non-Indigenous teachers teaching our culture. We want them to open our classroom for our kids to bring that culture back in. So, this Learning From Country program or learning from Countries, it’s given us the way to give teachers that opportunity to bring that back in

Early Career Teacher

For Aboriginal people and, like as a non-Indigenous person, it’s very important for me to step outside of my conceptual understandings of land and Learning From Country was the first major time that I’ve had to do that and I sort of I saw it as an understanding of a universal Aboriginal appreciation of Country [and] relationship with Country you know universal to most Aboriginal people of the nation’s and that provided the foundational understanding of spirituality and connection to place.

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