Narrating our Learning Journey as a Community

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been telling stories for a very long time to collect and recall a large repository of knowledge around environmental and social management
These stories are designed to start at a young age to introduce the basic moral aspects, then expand as the listener grows to incorporate an understand of the wide system of interacting agents that make up our world
The world of education as developed in Australia now lacks any such narrative, and any understanding of purpose and reason that can be publicly analysed and developed to match the values of our people. Some people are creating new songlines around climate change and pandemics, around the issues we are tackling now and that we will need to teach our children to enable them to grow from our knowledge now
I am proposing we start to develop a community narrative amongst academics that provides the vehicle for such discussion, that includes our collective knowledge of the new domain and allows the introduction of more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander approaches to learning into our institutions.
We have been starting this at University of Technology in Sydney in the Faculty of Engineering and IT, and I am starting to develop this at Charles Darwin University but this needs to be a much broader discussion and more community engagement to move from these individual gut understandings into an objective understanding of the complexity of learning and how to introduce young people into this space.