Saying NO to Niceness: Innovative, progressive and transformative inclusive education with Australian Aboriginal students

Abstract

This chapter contributes to the examination of inclusion and diversity in this Handbook by critiquing the enactment of niceness with Australian Aboriginal students. We draw upon Angelina Castagno who tells us that a nice person “is not someone who creates a lot of disturbance, conflict, controversy, or discomfort” (Castagno, 2014, p.17). We argue that left uncritiqued, enactments of niceness are always at risk of becoming enactments of racialisation, exclusion and assimilation. Acts of niceness, we argue, deflect our attention away from embedded racism borne out of two centuries of dispossessing colonisation in Australia. Our research reveals how niceness impacts the inclusion of Australian Aboriginal students at all levels of institutional education. We argue that we must find ways of revealing and ‘saying NO to Niceness’ within schools and beyond so as to contribute to improving educational success but not at the expense of a students’ Aboriginality. The chapter draws upon two Australian research projects that both documented acts of ‘niceness’ in Aboriginal education. Each revealed innovative strategies for saying NO to niceness in educational spaces, enabling a counterstory of success to emerge. The first is a critical school ethnography undertaken with teachers who are both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. The second is a study that used ‘strategic discourse production’ (Harwood & Murray, under review) to co-create Lead My Learning, an education promotion campaign that adapted social marketing techniques in partnership with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal parents who have experienced educational disadvantages. Finally, the chapter investigates the significance of culturally responsive caring relationships grounded in an Aboriginal ethic of care, as a tool for disrupting the dominant racialized discourse to be found within educational spaces.