Race, Gender, and Sexualities in Australian Teacher Education: Reflections from the Intersections

This chapter offers an account of the impact of the increasing standardization of Australian teacher education programs upon the experiences of educators who exist at the intersections of Indigeneity (The term Indigeneity and Indigenous are spelled with a capital “I” to denote that these terms are referring specifically to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.), gender, class, and sexuality. As such we are a blackfella (The term blackfella is mostly used by Indigenous Australians and is a prominent marker of individuals who are speaking Aboriginal English. There are no rules preventing white people from using the term beyond the stigma around the use of Aboriginal English (which is considered by many to be bad English). If used in a derogatory manner, it would be highly inappropriate, but in a positive way, can be used to indicate good relationships and trust between white and Indigenous people.), a gay man and a lesbian who walked into an Australian school of teacher education to find that the possibilities for teaching with and for social justice through engaging students with issues of diversity, difference, and inclusion are being restricted. What is restricting the aforementioned possibilities are prescriptive teaching standards that seek to reduce teaching to a set of technocratic skills. We deploy a story as data approach in our writing here that draws upon autoethnography as a methodology that enables us to reflect upon our own embodied experiences as Other to the normative space of teacher education. We use our own stories as lenses through which to examine what it is like to work at and with the intersections of Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. For us, intersectionality is both an analytical tool and a framework for working within our day-to-day lives.