Diversity and Cultural Pedagogical Games and Play: Through an Aboriginal Lens

Linda Payi Ford is a Rak Mak Mak Marranunggu, an Indigenous woman from Kurrindju, Top End of the Northern Territory, Australia. Ford applies her Mirrwana and Wurrkama Methodology to her Indigenous research practice and theory across multi-disciplinary fields including education, health, culture, and gender policy. As a qualified teacher, academician, and researcher, she draws from her professional experience spanning four decades. This chapter presents Ford’s lived experiences as she considers games and play through an Indigenous lens and to integrate the associated concepts across cultures. She has been able to do this form of practice from infancy and early childhood developmental milestones through adulthood, and she continues to apply these skills in the workforce and Indigenous community development. These forms of games and play have their own associated genres and practices that offer her challenges, but she considers them to be exciting and fun and describes them from her standpoint from both ways of cultural lens and femininity.