Culturally Responsive Pedagogies in Youth Detention in Australia: Visibility, appearance and influence

This research paper focuses on an Australian Research Council Indigenous Discovery project (2017-2020) (IN150100045) which seeks to address an important problem related to Indigenous and low Socioeconomic status (SES) disadvantage in education and the increasing numbers of Indigenous and low SES young people involved in detention in the juvenile justice system. These groups have historically underachieved in mathematics. The project draws on two conceptual frameworks to advance knowledge about mathematics teaching using culturally responsive pedagogies and incarcerated and low SES young people’s learning. It is based on decolonising methodology in that it collaborates with Indigenous and low SES young people and teachers and focuses on improving learning outcomes (ensuring that the researched benefit). The researchers conducted a cohort study involving one hundred and twenty incarcerated young people and a mathematics teaching team of ten teachers. Students were administered mathematics diagnostic tasks before and at the completion of teaching cycles, participated in focus group interviews and completed an efficacy survey. Teachers participated in lesson modelling, semi-structured interviews, focus group interviews and were also administered an efficacy survey. Findings indicate that teachers struggle to draw on culturally responsive pedagogies in their teaching to ensure they met the educational needs of their students. Embedding Indigenous perspectives was found to be a challenge for teachers for a range of reasons including lack of knowledge and confidence to embed and pre-written workbooks for students not capturing Indigenous perspectives.