Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education

The Australian education system works well for most students. However, equitable access to secondary education is problematic for First Nations people living in remote communities. There is a strong emphasis on Year 12 completion as an indicator of successful engagement in remote First Nations education. This has been partly driven by Australian Government ‘Closing the Gap’ targets. Yet for remote students Year 12 Certificate attainment is trending down, from 113 in 2013 down to 82 in 2022. Nationally, the target to achieve 96% Year 12 or equivalent is not on track for achievement. This article explores what students, school staff and community members say leads to disengagement and dropout. It is based on research conducted in Western Australia and the Northern Territory during 2023 by a team of researchers from Batchelor Institute, Curtin University and University of Notre Dame. The research focused on remote and very remote Independent and Catholic schools. It engaged 229 in surveys and 136 in yarns or interviews. Most of the respondents were First Nations people.

The articles in this issue can be viewed through the lens of theories of Recognition and Distributive Justice. These theories, when applied to rural education point to the marginalisation and devaluing of rural education, such that some kind remedy is required. The remedies for this are arguably the responsibility of systems that develop policies and provide funding for research and education. But we find that educators and researchers respond in their own way to the deficits and distributive injustices that are imposed on their roles in rural and remote communities. In the articles of this issue, we see researchers and practitioners investing their time, persisting and persevering despite apparent failure, engaging socially, and making space for the next generation of educators and researchers. The contexts in which these actions are taken vary, and so too do the expressions of these responses.

In 2023, researchers from the Batchelor Institute worked with staff, students and families from the Nawarddeken Academy in West Arnhem Land, which offers bicultural, community-driven education. Together, they engaged in a series of yarning circles as interviews with staff, students and families. The focus of the study was on retention, attendance and impacts from major events such as COVID-19. Nawarddeken Academy has a long history of fighting for educational rights for their children to learn on country, through an Aboriginal-led, controlled and managed model. This fight has spanned 20 years and today Bininj (Aboriginal) people are proud to provide education to their children on their land through Learning on Country programs that embed both-ways Bininj and Balanda (Aboriginal and non-Indigenous) knowledge/s into the school’s core curriculum. This article tells the story of Nawarddeken Academy and the case study research that was conducted with the school.

A groundswell to include Indigenous Knowledge in the school science curriculum has led to the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures (generally known as Indigenous perspectives) in the overall Australian Curriculum (AC) and the Australian Curriculum: Science (ACS). However, the experiences in other countries, their states and provinces are quite different and diverse, particularly when it comes to incorporating Indigenous Knowledge in resistant disciplines such as science. The AC and ACS are examined and compared with similar curriculum from elsewhere. The causes of resistance to the inclusion of Indigenous perspectives are identified, as well as other structural impediments. Strategies such as the Two-Ways or Two-Eyed Seeing approaches with epistemic insight are seen as a functional way of bridging Indigenous and Western cultures for policy makers, curriculum developers, educators and teachers, and ultimately students.

It's fair to say that the "laws of war" have existed since the dawn of time, since the existence of war itself. Even if in a rudimentary way, limits and rules used in conflicts were established among the most diverse civilizations and peoples (BOUVIER; LANGHOLTZ, 2020). Many scholars consider the First Geneva Convention (1864) to be the emergence of what we understand in modern times as International Humanitarian Law (IHL), but it is worth saying that many of the principles established there, such as respect for and protection of human life in the context of wars, were already supported in earlier times, often in the form of customary law (BOUVIER; LANGHOLTZ, 2020). However, it is possible to argue that in ancient times, the establishment of limits on the use of force in armed conflicts was motivated by economic reasons, which resulted in humanitarian benefits. Examples include restrictions on the use of poison in conquered areas, so that the territory could later be exploited by the victorious party (BOUVIER; LANGHOLTZ, 2020).

This article aims to map and analyze the configuration of international scientific production on environmental accounting, using the international databases ISI Web of Science (Wos) and Scopus. The methodology of bibliometric literature review was used and following the laws of Bradford, Lotka and Zipf the results that addressed the theme were analyzed. R and Excel software were used to treat the data. According to the results the authors who stand out most internationally are Matias Laine, Collin Dey and Tung Dao Nguyen and most of the authors who publish on the subject are from the United Kingdom and Italy with a total of 24 and 17 publications respectively. The publications on the subject have a significantly positive trend, but in some years observed there was a decrease in the number of publications.

In late 2013, under the leadership of Prime Minister Abbott, the Australian Government announced a new policy designed to increase attendance rates in remote community schools—the Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS). The model assumed that employing local people in the program, which was designed to support parents get their children to school, would yield significant improvements and consequently improve educational outcomes. After a slight initial increase in school attendance rates, RSAS schools have seen average attendance rates decline since 2016, which now stand more than eight percentage points lower than at commencement. This article analyses My School data for Very Remote Aboriginal schools, showing how the RSAS school attendance results compare with similar non-RSAS schools. We question why the Australian Government continues to invest in a program that is not meeting its objectives, asking, what went wrong?. We do this by critically analysing 36 policy-related documents, looking for ideological clues that show why the government continues to invest in the program and how it sees it as “successful”. We conclude by raising ethical and accountability concerns about the RSAS, which lacks evidence of attendance improvement, and which potentially causes harm to its objects: First Nations students.

Cardiac pacing is the only treatment available for patients with Symptomatic bradyarrhythmias in the absence of reversible causes. For about 50 Apical right ventricular pacing has been used for years.