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The purpose of this paper is to reveal the success factors for retention of first year special entry Aboriginal students at an Australian metropolitan university. A retention model is proposed for minority students.

A grounded theory approach was taken to a longitudinal study of the first year experience of 12 indigenous tertiary students, the majority being second generation undergraduates. A qualitative methodology features in‐depth interviews conducted three times over one year to ascertain impacts of schooling, teaching and learning, life experience, career aspirations, relationships and racial identity on academic success.

Positive or negative prior life experience had little impact on first year academic performance. Indigenous students as an equity group were found to have similar learning and life issues to non‐indigenous students such as studying to improve job prospects and needing part‐time employment to survive. They did not see themselves as different, and had no close relationship to indigenous knowledge or culture. Yet factors influencing academic success were related to indigeneity. Such as close friendships and dependence on each other, mentoring care of staff, and rewards of giving back through mentoring local indigenous school students. Private schools provided a dominant pipeline to university. Participants had a very early career focus but little career support. Students adopted both indigenous and non‐indigenous world perspectives and displayed robust resilience in the face of challenging family and educational experiences. In‐depth interviews across the year well demonstrated student evolutions. Further longitudinal study of student progress will extend this first Australian study.

This is the first in‐depth analysis and benchmark model for development of success factors for retaining special entry indigenous Australian students in higher education. It provides a one‐year baseline for a unique longitudinal assessment of student success. The paper newly explores the role of career and indigeneity as well as life and academic support systems in student retention. Findings apply to minority retention programs.

Service marketers are increasingly aware of inequalities triggered by service systems and the need to prioritize practical strategies for reducing inequalities. A priority area for the Australian Government is reducing university education inequities for Indigenous Australians. This paper aims to examine how Indigenous Australian university students build and leverage their capabilities and strengths, harnessing service providers’ efforts towards enhancing participation (and completion) in university education – an essential transformative outcome for reducing inequalities.

A three-stage qualitative research process explored student retention/completion and capability building among a sample of Indigenous Australian university students, typically under-represented in the higher education sector.

Applying a manual thematic analysis, the findings reveal Indigenous students’ value co-creating capabilities (summarized in three dimensions) harness multi-actor processes extending beyond the service provider. Five dimensions summarize the service provider’s transformative service activities that strengthen capabilities for Indigenous Australian university students. Networks of place (a structured Indigenous Centre); processes (university systems); and people (social support), including peer-to-peer networks, are important service assemblages.

The authors present implications for supporting Indigenous students in persisting with and completing higher education. More broadly, the authors provide recommendations for service marketers to resolve barriers to service equality and enhance strengths-based approaches to value co-creation.

Underpinned by a strengths-based approach, the authors contribute towards an agenda of sustainable transformative services. Although considerable research reviews the experiences of Indigenous students, little research has taken a transformative service research perspective. Addressing this, the authors propose a conceptual framework linking consumers’ agentic capabilities with transformative service mediator practices.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the educational journey of indigenous Australians since the time of the 1788 invasion through into the modern Australian university. This exploration is intended to clarify the way in which education delivery in this country has been used to position the nation's “first peoples” within a context of centre/periphery thinking.

The paper established an overview of the educational service provision for indigenous Australians through a review of archival materials, historical texts and education reports. This information was then aligned with the data gathered through face‐to‐face interviews and focus group meetings conducted by the author in her own PhD research, to test the complementarity of the sources in terms of the indigenous experience.

The paper provides insights into the current positioning of indigenous Australians. The process of viewing the present against the backdrop of the past identified important historical landmarks that were then examined through the diversity of lens provided through interviews/meetings with contemporary students and staff to reveal the critical impact of centre/periphery thinking on indigenous education in this country.

This paper provides an historical overview of indigenous Australian education that, in clarifying some of the connections and ruptures between “centre and periphery”, provides valuable insights into the full diversity of the indigenous historical experience in Australian education.

This article considers the impact of competing knowledge structures in teaching Australian Indigenous history to undergraduate university students and the possibilities of collaborative teaching in this space.

The authors, one Aboriginal and one non-Aboriginal, draw on a history of collaborative teaching that stretches over more than a decade, bringing together conceptual reflective work and empirical data from a 5-year project working with Australian university students in an introductory-level Aboriginal history subject.

It argues that teaching this subject area in ways which are culturally safe for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff and students, and which resist knowledge structures associated with colonial ways of conveying history, is not only about content but also about building learning spaces that encourage students to decolonise their relationships with Australian history.

This article considers collaborative approaches to knowledge transmission in the university history classroom as an act of decolonising knowledge spaces rather than as a model of reconciliation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how one tertiary enabling programme designed for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students uses a specifically designed pedagogy which goes beyond a focus on discrete academic skills to help students develop the resilience and knowledge about learning they need to be successful in tertiary learning contexts.

A narrative methodology is used to explore how graduates analysed and evaluated their experience of the course.

The stories show that for these students, resilience is a dynamic and multifaceted construct. Strength, confidence and resilience for these students come from seeing and valuing the strength and resilience that already exists in Indigenous people and Indigenous knowledge systems and using this as a basis for developing their own resilience.

This focus on resilience can provide a transformative experience for students who have largely been marginalised from the mainstream educational system, assisting them to build the crucial “cultural capital” required to be successful in their tertiary studies, while reinforcing the strength and knowledge they already bring with them. Through this process students are offered a way of navigating the higher education landscape on their own terms.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of how service learning pedagogy assists in student and organizational learning.

The authors use case study reflection and ethnography approaches.

The key to the success of the internship was time spent on relationship building between the parties, clear documentation of roles and responsibilities, the selection and matching process and open communication between all parties. Using Mezirow’s (1991) transformational learning approach, and Kolb’s (1984) learning framework, it demonstrates an example of perspective transformation where the “unfamiliar” helps participants to question the “familiar”; through embedding learning in relation to culture, values, ownership and identity. Service learning relies on collaborative pedagogy where reflection and relationships with community and educators provide a platform to test students’ values and moral reasoning and build community cultural understanding.

The paper includes a single case study and autoethnographic research methodology only.

Community-learning activities supplement the course content and embeds learning, broadening the students’ experiences, providing them with an understanding of context, and dealing with complexity to question their own cultural values. In practical terms it provides students with different career opportunities such as in the not-for-profit sector or in advocacy work. Service learning pedagogy enhances graduate capabilities, across many areas including problem solving, values development and community engagement and thinking of the other.

The paper reports on and analyses the learning of a service learning internship between a business school and an Indigenous organization. The paper uses a reflection methodology and is written by the University internship co-ordinator (teacher) and an international student intern, whilst drawing on reflections of the Indigenous leader of the not-for-profit organization.

This paper aims to analyze Northern Manitoba employers' indexes of employability skills that influence the UCN (University College of the North) students' employability in indigenous contexts.

This study constructs the employability skills into six indexes from employers' perspective: reading comprehension, numeracy, technology, soft skills, job searching skills and indigenous cultural awareness. Mixed methods have been applied to this research: survey data are used for empirical analysis of the six indexes of employability skills; secondary sources of similar studies together with functional theory in education as a framework is adopted to explore the breadth and depth of employability skills requested by employers; indexing analysis is adopted to validate the necessity of developing such skills in indigenous contexts in Northern Manitoba.

The correlation analyses and mean values show that employers in Northern Manitoba take the six indexes as influential factors of students' employability. As such, the study indicates that Northern Manitoba employers consider employability in indigenous contexts as a combination of basic skills, professional requirements, soft skills and cultural awareness. The employers' attested employability is in line with the concept of the technical-function theory, which requires education to meet the demand for updated job skills due to a technological change. Moreover, Northern Manitoba employers' emphasis on indigenous cultural awareness as employability skills rationalizes the necessity to integrate indigenous cultural contents into programs and curriculums in UCN and post-secondary institutes with similar attributes. It confirms that indigenous cultural awareness is required by employers in Northern Manitoba populated with indigenous communities. The research findings suggest that the functional theory of education might help UCN and similar institutions globally to offer programs that will reduce employment inequality.

This research is conducted among the employers in Northern Manitoba, and the indexes and their factors are designed to evaluate UCN students' employability in general.

The outcomes of this paper can be applied as a parameter for upgrading educational strategies to integrate essential and professional employability skills such as reading comprehension, numeracy, technology, soft skills and job searching skills with indigenous cultural components into UCN curriculums and programs. It can be applied to other post-secondary institutes with similar attributes to enhance their students' employability. Furthermore, the research findings can be used as a guideline for UCN to tailor their programs for the job market locally and as references for post-secondary institutions with similar student compositions globally.

This paper provides empirical evidence from the employers' viewpoint to support the necessity of integrating essential and professional employability skills with indigenous cultural awareness into the curriculums and programs of UCN, a post-secondary institution in indigenous populated Northern Manitoba. Furthermore, it is also attested that employers consider indigenous cultural awareness as an influential factor of students' employability in indigenous contexts.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the indexes of employability assets that affect students' employability in Indigenous contexts.

The study restructures the indicators developed from the survey the authors did for the Vital Outcome Indicators for Community Engagement (VOICE) research project into six employability indexes. The six indexes are reading and comprehension, numeracy, technological mastery, contribution to organizational performance, job searching skills and cultural awareness. The study has applied mixed research method, which is the combination of survey and secondary data analyses.

All six indexes have impacts on students' employability in various degrees with a high level of internal consistency among the indicators. The regression analysis reveals that the technological mastery, reading and comprehension and numeracy indexes significantly influence students' contribution to the organizational performance. The results also show that cultural awareness has impacts on employability but students do not connect it to the required employability skills. Such disconnection of cultural awareness with employability skills justifies the necessity to integrate Indigenous cultural contents into programs and curriculums in today's post-secondary education, particularly in the University College of the North (UCN), improving students' cultural knowledge, which, in return, enhances their employability in Indigenous contexts. The result is also applicable globally to countries which have large populations of Indigenous people such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Colombia, Mexico and other regions where workplaces are set in Indigenous contexts.

The research survey was only conducted within students of UCN Thompson campus.

The results of this paper can be used as a guideline to adjust teaching/learning strategies with a focus on integrating Indigenous cultural components into UCN courses and programs, including other institutions with similar attributes to enhance Indigenous students' employability. UCN tri-council, faculty, community leaders, researchers, government and NGOs can also use the outcome of this paper to articulate polices that enhance students' employability. The outcome and strategic implication of the study can also be applicable to any institutions in a global Indigenous context.

The authors of the paper provide empirical evidence from the indexes of the employability assets including their indicators affecting students' employability. It is attested that cultural awareness index have impacts on students' employability in Indigenous context.

This literature systematically reviews articles published in “core” international journals on the topic of Indigenous education leadership over the period from 2000 to 2018 in four English-speaking countries, covering Canada, America, Australia and New Zealand, in which all of them have long colonial history and Indigenous population. These reviews provide insights into the nature of this emergent literature and generate many implications that required for further research in Indigenous education leadership.

In this study, a vote counting method was employed and a clearly delimited body of research on Indigenous education leadership was also identified. The vote counting method can enlarge the perspectives on the noticeable heterogeneity of Indigenous education leadership within the four English-speaking countries. This is the basic constitutive element for the development of a comparative literature in Indigenous education leadership. Moreover, this method can clearly calculate the annual number of articles about Indigenous education leadership, and the various methods used in the publications of Indigenous education leadership can be figured out as well, which helps to find out the different patterns of changes on Indigenous education leadership.

This study identifies the patterns of Indigenous educational leadership research across four English-speaking countries, which will contribute to the development of research in this regard.

This is one of the first studies about Indigenous educational leadership in the world. It will not only contribute to education practice but also leadership theory development.

The focus of this paper is to centre the lived experiences and perceptions of western education held by Aboriginal people who lived at Moola Bulla Native Cattle Station (Moola Bulla) in Western Australia, between 1910 and 1955. Of interest is an investigation into how government legislations and policies influenced these experiences and perceptions. The purpose of this paper is to promote the powerful narrative that simultaneously acknowledges injustice and honours Aboriginal agency.

The research from which this paper is drawn moves away from colonial, paternalistic and racist interpretations of history; it is designed to decolonise the narrative of Aboriginal education in remote Western Australia. The research uses the wide and deep angle lens of qualitative historical research, filtered by decolonising methodologies and standpoint theory. Simultaneously, the paper valorises the contributions Indigenous academics are making to the decolonisation of historical research.

Preliminary findings suggest the narrative told by the residents who were educated at Moola Bulla support a reframing of previous deficit misrepresentations of indigeneity into strength-based narratives. These narratives, or “counter stories”, articulate resistance to colonial master narratives.

This paper argues that listening to Aboriginal lived experiences and perceptions of western education from the past will better inform our engagement with the delivery of equitable educational opportunities for Aboriginal students in remote contexts in the future.

This paper will contribute to the wider academic community by addressing accountability in Aboriginal education. Most important to the study is the honouring of the participants and families of those who once lived on Moola Bulla, many who are speaking back through the telling of their story.