2022 HEPPP Establishing a pathway from Secondary School VETDSS to a Bachelor of Education at CDU for First Nations students.

Approved funded research project under the HEPPP scheme. Indigenous engagement with Teacher Education is a continuing concern in the NT. Indigenous teachers constitute a small percentage of the total teaching workforce; a critical issue with the higher percentage of Indigenous people in the NT being approximately 30%. CDU has a significant role to play in increasing Indigenous teacher numbers in the NT.
Increasing culturally safe and accessible support for Indigenous candidates to enter HE pathways to education careers will help to ‘Indigenise’ Education qualifications at CDU. Creating uniquely qualified ‘Territory’s Own’ teachers that know the needs of Indigenous Students will support more Indigenous teachers in the NT.
This project will address the HEPPP issues of enrolment and completion, adding knowledge of pathways into Higher Education for Indigenous students. This will be achieved by investigating and mapping the specific pathway requirements for VETis students in Certificate III in Education Support through to successful enrolment in CDU HE Bachelor of Education studies. Consideration of culture for Indigenous engagement will be built into the project.
Using Indigenous pedagogical principles (Rainmaker 2021 Differentiated Pedagogies) with key stakeholders, we will negotiate a developmental evaluation framework for mapping supportive pathways. Targeted interaction with colleagues in the NT Department of Education and Senior Secondary schools will gather data on access to Tertiary education qualifications. Pedagogical experience will also be examined to acknowledge cultural backgrounds represented in the group. Additional interactions with CDU staff involved in pathways to BEd level qualifications will be conducted and contrasted with the experiences of Indigenous teaching staff.
The research outputs include public-facing, visual mapping of a VETis pathway into a teaching qualification at CDU, local and inter/national dissemination of the research, and Q1 publication.