First published 27 September 2024
Dr Francis Bobongie-Harris has been awarded a $1,533,920 ARC Discovery Indigenous grant to lead the multi-centre project Community-led approaches to teaching Australian South Sea Islander history.
(Image, from left Dr Julie McLaughlin, Dr Bobongie-Harris)
Dr Bobongie-Harris, from the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education, said the project aimed to develop a new approach to teaching Australian South Sea Islander (ASSI) history in primary and secondary schools.
“This project aims to establish the foundation necessary for the community’s future success, in partnership with the Queensland United Australian South Sea Islander Councils (QUASSIC) and the Australian South Sea Islander Education & Research Institute (ASSIER),” Dr Bobongie-Harris said.
“It is urgently needed to create better opportunities and support systems to empower Australian South Sea Islander students to ensure they thrive and succeed in school.
“This includes developing ethical protocols, culturally appropriate frameworks, and tools that are created by the community, for the community."
Dr Bobongie-Harris highlighted the significance of this partnership: “By working closely with QUASSIC and ASSIER we can create culturally relevant tools and protocols to shape the future of education for Australian South Sea Islanders.”
Dr Bobongie-Harris said the project would use a tok stori methodological approach that draws on community knowledges.
“The project will work towards implementing the kind of meaningful progress that failed to follow formal recognition of Australian South Sea Islanders as a unique minority group in 1994.
“This collaborative approach ensures that the voices and lived experiences of ASSI communities are central to the project.
“By directly engaging with the community, we are committed to developing systems that reflect their values, needs, and aspirations.
“The ethical protocols and frameworks will guide future initiatives, ensuring that research and projects are conducted in ways that honour and respect ASSI culture and knowledge.”
Dr Bobongie-Harris said Australian South Sea Islanders are Australian-born descendants of people who were kidnapped or “blackbirded” from the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and New Caledonia to Queensland to work on sugar plantations between 1864 and 1904.
“South Sea Islander men, women and children were forced to work long hours of exhausting manual labour for little or no wages and lived in poor conditions which led to a death rate five times higher than that of the European population,” she said.
“Since 1994 little action has been taken to develop successive stages of Recognition which has become a “broken circuit” of representation without meaningful structural, cultural or social change.
“Consequently, Australian South Sea Islander history remains largely absent, creating the situation where students are uniquely disadvantaged at school and ‘racially stereotyped’ into less challenging courses, with lower retention rates than non-South Sea Islander students.
“This project’s aims include producing an education resource for schoolteachers to use when teaching Australian South Sea Islander history and developing pathways to build teaching, academic capacity and scholarship in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Australian South Sea Islander teaching and academic sector.
“We will use a combination of academic and non-traditional modes of dissemination, including publicly available ethical frameworks, podcasts, academic publications and books, and educational resources.”
The research team comprises chief investigators Dr Bobongie-Harris and Dr Julie McLaughlin from QUT, Associate Professor Michelle Redman-MacLaren from James Cook University, and partner investigator Associate Professor Kabini Sanga from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
QUT Media contact:
Niki Widdowson, 07 3138 2999 or n.widdowson@qut.edu.au.
After hours: 0407 585 901, media@qut.edu.au
