Vocational Voices: Season 1, Episode 2
Cultural dimensions of Indigenous participation in education and training
Steve Davis (0:00)
Hello I'm Steve Davis. Welcome to this podcast for Australia's National Centre for Vocational Education Research.
It's widely accepted that Indigenous Australians experience poorer educational outcomes, employment and economic status than do non-Indigenous Australians. Efforts to redress this inequity must find ways to balance two seemingly contrasting objectives, preservation of indigenous culture on one hand, and closing the gap in the living standards of indigenous and non-Indigenous people on the other.
There have always been two main approaches to this challenge. Assimilation of indigenous people into mainstream society, or maintenance by indigenous people of a more traditional life, which has been characterised by cooperation and coexistence between members, with less emphasis on individual ownership and possessions.
Now while many would argue that education and training is vital for raising of living standards for all members of society, there is a prevalent view that for indigenous people, attachment to their culture acts as a barrier to economic success.
In this podcast, I interviewed Mike Dockery from Curtin Business School about the paper Cultural dimensions of Indigenous participation in education and training. In the paper, Mike explores whether attachment to traditional indigenous culture helps or hinders engagement with education and training, and attempts to measure its impact.
I began by asking Mike. What prompted this research in the first place?
Mike Dockery (01:32)
When you look back at this, culture's been central, it's often called the cultural wars, the debate about what we should do with indigenous affairs. And almost either camp, you know, the people who believe in self-determination, they say, well, sure, our culture might be a bit of a barrier, but that's for us to choose. We value it, so we want to keep it. And the other camp says, well, no, culture's a problem. We've got to get them out of their culture and get them on with achieving income and jobs and so on.
So both sides sort of have this assumption that culture is a barrier. But I've never seen any empirical evidence on this. So that's what brought me around, trying to actually measure it and model how it affects outcomes.
Steve Davis (02:09)
Now of course, this work is based in Australia, a very large piece of turf here on this planet. What role does this sheer distance, this tyranny of distance, if you like, have within this debate, I guess this is the divide between remote and non remote Australians.
Mike Dockery (02:26)
That's very, very difficult because of course a lot of indigenous culture or an important element of indigenous cultures attachment to their traditional lands, our homelands. And where of course, there isn't the same infrastructure and access to things like education and health and so on in those remote areas. Then in that sense, they do face a trade off. And if you just look at the straight relationships between what I've actually measured is indigenous attachment to indigenous culture. I don't really say what culture is, but I measure people's attachment to it, Indigenous peoples.
If you just look at the straight relationship, there's a negative relationship. Those with stronger attachment to their culture have lower educational outcomes, less participation in VET. But that's simply because the people in remote areas are the ones with the strongest attachment, and they have the lowest access.
So once you actually control and look separately at the metropolitan areas and the inner regional and outer regional areas, then you in fact find there's a positive relationship between culture and participation in education. And in fact, in all areas, even in remote and very remote areas, there's a positive relationship where people with a strong attachment of their culture were more likely to have completed high school. Although for further qualifications in remote areas the relationship is a bit weaker.
Steve Davis (03:42)
Alright we'll delve into that in just a moment. But I know you said you haven't really tried to define culture, but for the purpose of this paper, how did you work out what people were talking about in saying attachment to culture?
Mike Dockery (03:55)
This is a bit, I guess it's got to be considered a bit experimental, because there hasn't been a lot of measurement of culture in the literature that I could really follow, and certainly not of indigenous culture. But you look through the discussion of what culture is, and typically there's sort of two elements of it.
You say, well, if we're going to call a group of people of a culture, you've got to say, well, what is it about them that connects them? You know, are they from the same country? Do they speak the same language? What is it that connects them? So that's one dimension.
And then you say, well, what is it they do differently that distinguishes that culture? You know, do they have different worshiping practices or what is different about their culture from just mainstream culture if they're a minority?
So in my cases I was working with data from an indigenous survey, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey, sorry it's a bit of a mouthful, from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. All the people in the survey were indigenous. So my connectors were there, that's what connects the group there. They self-identify as indigenous.
The second part of the dimension is and of my definition that I'm using is culture is a difference in preferences and values and beliefs. And it's transmitted generationally, is the definition I use, so we're not talking about youth culture or pop culture. We're talking about something that's fairly long term and is defined by idiosyncratic sort of text or dance or languages. So there's symbols and things that define this group that make them different from the other.
So all the people are indigenous. And what I'm measuring is their attachment to that culture. So it's things like whether they speak a language, whether they identify with homelands and with clan and language groups, whether they participate in ceremonies and festivals and art. So it fits in nicely with the definition. And I've got all those questions in the NATSIS survey.
Steve Davis (05:43)
And so looking at this attachment to indigenous culture, how have we learned? How has it interacted with indigenous peoples accessing of or engagement with education and training?
Mike Dockery (05:56)
This is the main point. As I said, the assumption has always seemed to be that indigenous culture is a barrier. It's part of the problem. But when you actually look at this evidence and there isn't, as far as I know well, very little evidence other than this, it's in fact a positive effect.
So culture seems to improve educational outcomes. There's higher rates of participation in vocational education and training. People who participate in that training are more likely to use that training. So it actually seems completely the opposite to the assumption, culture seems to actually help people engage with education and training. And probably one of the very rare points of consensus in this whole debate is that education is good. Education and training should be part of the solution, an important part of the solution.
So my evidence is completely against this idea that the culture acts as a barrier, that there's something in indigenous culture that acts as a barrier to pursuing education and training.
Steve Davis (06:54)
Have you been able to hypothesise about that positive relationship between attachment to culture and furthering an indigenous person's engagement with and continuing with educational pathways?
Mike Dockery (07:07)
Yeah, a little. When you think about the relationship, there's sort of two ways it could arise. One is that culture itself has an enabling effect that helps people achieve more education and participation in training and so on. The other is that they actually use the education and training system to engage their culture.
The causality runs the other way. People with high culture say, well, I want to do a course in music or arts and I will engage my culture and pursue my culture. Or both could be true. And I think the evidence is fairly clear that there's a bit of both.
Indigenous people are more likely to participate in those areas that you would expect related to their culture, like art, like education and society, those sort of fields of qualification.
They do seem to engage in training as part of pursuing and hopefully preserving their culture. But there's also evidence of this enabling effect, for example, as I said, more likely to complete high school. Clearly, you would think that that's an enabling positive effect. And they're also more likely people who have, undertaken vocational education training courses, people with stronger attachment to their culture and more likely to have undertaken numeracy and literacy courses, numeracy and English literacy.
So again, this is consistent with what we would see as an enabling effect that's going to improve outcomes. And when you actually look at, I have also looked at wider outcomes, socio economic outcomes, things like health, employment, even things like substance abuse and the probability of being imprisoned. And this applies to all those other areas. So I think it's something quite innate. It relates to an important thing, an important part of what improves people's life, basically. And I think it's to do with self-esteem and self-identity.
Those people with attachment to their culture have stronger self-esteem, stronger identity. And that's why there's this enabling effect in so many areas. But as you say, that's very much hypothesising.
Steve Davis (09:02)
The data that you've been looking at, of course, you're looking at socio economic outcomes, focusing more on the economic end. Is there some link between I guess we measure economic ends primarily in terms of money? Can you talk to that?
Mike Dockery (09:20)
I haven't actually looked at income. We all know in relative terms Indigenous Australians compared to non-Indigenous Australians, the gap is quite deplorable whether you look at income or employment or health, suicide, you pick your measure.
Employment, I do find a positive effect. And the education and training, the positive link would suggest that's going to improve employment and earnings outcomes down the track. But more in other areas, which what I was really trying to measure, was wellbeing, quality of life. And I didn't actually have that variable in the data, but it applies to things that we would relate to wellbeing, like for example, health.
Steve Davis (10:00)
So reflecting back on what you found, what does this suggest to government in setting policy? Is there anything it talks directly to government about?
Mike Dockery (10:10)
A couple of points on that. In a way, I think the findings are a bit of a tick for the delivery of education and training in Australia. There's still a lot to be done. And of course, there's an enormous gap between, for example, school retention rates for Indigenous Australians and so on. But when you think about it, if vocational education training was delivered in a way that was culturally insensitive, was inappropriate for culture, then you would expect a negative relationship between cultural attachment and participation. But I get the opposite.
The fact that I don't get a negative is, maybe it's too generous to call it a tick because we know there are so many problems for Indigenous Australians. But it's not a cross anyway. I was probably a bit surprised by that. That's not what I expected when I started doing the research.
But the other some other implications are clearly that, there is a trade off between culture, indigenous people staying attached to their culture and participation in education and training simply because of the remoteness. There's a big access issue that disadvantages people who have strong attachment to culture. But it's not because there's anything in the culture that goes against achievement in education. It's the remoteness.
And the other clear indication is that if we want to improve education and training and therefore employment income outcomes, then we should be drawing on culture. We should be using it as a way to improve outcomes for indigenous people, rather than seeing it as a problem. We've recently seen, for example, the Northern Territory say, well, you know, we've just got to stop teaching indigenous languages and culture. They've thrown that out of the Northern Territory schools. We're going to concentrate on English and numeracy.
My evidence and the other evidence I see says this is going to have exactly the opposite effect. It's going to make it harder for indigenous people to fit in and to achieve an education.
Steve Davis (12:03)
That's from a government point of view. Imagining you were running an institution within the VET sector itself. What would you be thinking about at the moment as far as your course material, your delivery? Those sorts of things?
Mike Dockery (12:19)
I think the important thing in delivering it, and this is probably more important at the younger ages, school and high school. It's important that each individual's identity is affirmed and respected for them to try and feel like they fit in. But there are different ways in how indigenous people, it's probably a bit out of my area of expertise, but believed to be different ways of how indigenous people, learn and participate. For example, that they tend not to be competitive, how we like to get, who's going to top the class this week and you're going to get a star. And that's great.
Indigenous people wouldn't really respond to that. They more prefer cooperative arrangements, where they work together and where there's a clear outcome, a clear goal. Whereas we sort of do things in a lot of abstract ways and models and things like that, particularly in my field of economics, of course. So there's different ways that things could be, I guess the course and the curriculum could be set so it recognises indigenous people and is sensitive to their identity and perhaps in the way they learn as well.
Steve Davis (13:29)
It could almost suggest that there's going to be some insights flowing back the other direction.
Mike Dockery (13:32)
Well, exactly. And certainly I think when you think about a lot of the problems we have in society today, for example, working ridiculous long hours pursuing consumerism, that doesn't really make us happy. Environmental challenges and so on. We really could have learned a lot from the indigenous people.
Steve Davis (13:51)
Thanks for listening to this podcast produced by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research. To download your copy of Cultural dimensions of Indigenous participation in education and training, go to www.ncver.edu.au.