Strengthening pathways into higher education with remote Indigenous communities in Australia: Lessons from the whole of community engagement initiative

Community engagement is often cited as a critical component of working within indigenous communities in Australia and other countries. Ideally, this involves engaging in community-led and community-informed methods and place-based approaches that scope, identify, and respond to individual, family, group, and community needs and aspirations in a culturally responsive way. Such processes recalibrate power relationships and ensure indigenous leadership and self-determination is a central focus. This chapter reflects on key learnings from the implementation of the Whole of Community Engagement (WCE) initiative led through the Office of Pro Vice-Chancellor – Indigenous Leadership at Charles Darwin University. This initiative used a combination of collaborative research, participatory action research, and developmental evaluation approaches to “inspire six remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory to include higher education as a normal expectation and milestone along the life journey.” Current education scholarship is used, alongside key findings from the WCE initiative, to identify and discuss 11 strategies for success to promote pathways into higher education for remote indigenous students. While these strategies are contextually bound, and specifically relate to the six remote communities involved in WCE, we encourage their use as a framework to examine their applicability in other settings.