Aboriginal education policy
Aboriginal education policy has privileged an ennobled, radically different Aboriginal culture and self, and features many adaptations to curriculum, pedagogy, administrative routine, behavioural expectations and staffing to more effectively meet Aboriginal students’ needs. The approach is built on an Aboriginal culture imagined as a static isolable cultural bloc, and Aboriginal society as a highly integrated fabric of categoric kin relations, gender roles, marriage practices and social obligations. In this imagined Aboriginality, Aborigines belong to and are custodians of remote areas and exist in a finely balanced relationship with the land and in communal harmony. Individuals are unitarily Aboriginal and their cultural identity ‘thickly’ (Cornell and Hartmann, 1998: 73–7) determines their responses to the world.