ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore how digitisation is affecting Indigenous peoples’ participation in debates around education in Australia. While there has been extensive research about the impacts of technology in Indigenous education, there has been little research examining the impacts of digital media on public debate about Indigenous education. Media and education are two fundamental democratic institutions. Education has long been a touchstone issue for thinking around First Nations participation in, and exclusion from, the political and public life of the nation. Likewise, it has been well established that dominant news media work with educational policy to exclude Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, their families, and communities from key education policy debates (Dodson 1994; Hogarth 2017; Waller and McCallum 2017). Our previous research has found that on issues such as bilingual education, policies that drastically impacted Aboriginal communities were implemented with little consultation or regard for the views of those directly affected (Simpson et al. 2009; Waller 2012). Mediated crises such as the 2013 “school attendance crisis” represent a self-referential conversation between mainstream media and policy elites. However, the shifting media landscape offers unprecedented opportunities to disrupt the exclusive dialogue between news media and politics that has for so long excluded Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from the national conversation. This chapter documents how First Nations communities in Australia are using their own media to challenge the mainstream media’s truancy discourse and develop deeper, broader, more positive conversations on school attendance.
