Globalisation and the Indigenous Community

There are many factors which can lead us to underestimate our Indigenous students and consequently fail to encourage them to think deeply about important global and social issues. This paper draws on the authors’ experiences of teaching in Indigenous communities in a bilingual mode. Using the multiliteracies framework (Kalantzis & Cope, 2000), the paper analyses these experiences and exemplifies gaps in the ways in which Western pedagogies include and appreciate the intercultural skills and knowledge of Indigenous students across different cultural and linguistic domains. This chapter explores the potential of the Global Connections initiative(Doherty, 2002), which harnesses communication technologies to enable Indigenous students to develop and communicate positive images of their cultures and their plural student identities. This strategy helps build a richer and more complex understanding of the experience of indigeneity within their own community and their place as valued members of the global community.