From policy to practice in higher education: Cross-cutting issues in Indigenous pathways, transition and participation

An aim of this volume is to acknowledge the diverse approaches and strategies used to support and enhance pathways and transitions into higher education for Indigenous learners. Authors have approached this from various standpoints and so this book has a focus on social justice and equity issues in Australian and international contexts, and cross-cuts a range of disciplines including humanities, social sciences, education and public policy. Issues raised in this volume include transitions and pathways policy, theory and practice, but are very much grounded in the need for a transformative academy, one which truly engages with communities and has an intercultural foundation. Nakata (2002) views the academy as a ‘cultural interface’ where there is an ‘intersection of Western and Indigenous domains… the place where we live and learn, the place that conditions our lives, the place that shapes our futures and more to the point the place where we are active agents in our own lives – where we make our decisions – our lifeworld’. The ‘cultural interface’ has commonalities with the concepts of ‘both ways’ (Wunungmurra 1989; Marika et al. 1992; Ober and Bat 2007) and ‘interculturalism’ (Abdallah-Pretceille 2006; Coll 2004; Frawley and Fasoli 2012) as these are concerned with similar notions of space where systems, organisations, communities and people meet and interact, where there is balance, where knowledge is negotiated and where new knowledge is shared equally. This is the challenge for higher education: that within the cultural interface context, each university is a place for everyone.