Focus of Book
This book was developed to provide authentic assessment for students learning First Nations knowledge and gaining cultural awareness around technology in Engineering and IT courses. To enable this we provide content and assessments that apply to many disciplines, extending into new ways of knowing, doing and being.
To provide authentic assessment of learning, we want students using their engineering skills to apply to new situations and demonstrate their cultural knowledge in action in their work. We want to emphasise that knowledge is from relationship with Country, not to be taken from Country, until an understanding of that local pattern is developed. Often the depth of this local knowledge is too much to transfer easily.
For instance, we can ask students to provide an oral narrative that ties their learning into a single story that they can develop over time or we can explain how they can reflect on their work by applying their engineering knowledge to and Indigenous community and consider the effect of this new context.
Example Questions
Questions may be:
- What workplace skills, knowledge and understanding are required by students? For instance how important do you think it is understanding Aboriginal links to Country in your professional work?
- How can we apply these elements to authentic, meaningful and engaging learning and assessment? For example how relevant do you think Aboriginal knowledge sharing methods is to your learning?
- What content needs adding to engage critical thinking and expose disciplinary assumptions and perspectives? Consider after running a simulation or role play asking what could you do better in this situation?
These approaches can help students expand their understanding at any level, but also they can help those not familiar with the technology to have an overview of their work, where they are heading. This can then help the technology make more sense. Similarly mathematical aspects can be estimated from this approach, to avoid getting lost in the detail, when this can be confusing.
Research
This eBook cannot cover everything that has happened and can happen in First Nations approaches to engineering. There are opportunities for lecturers to research local work that is already well advanced and applying some of these thought patterns discussed in these pages to a new domain.
Questions for Research
What happens when students who are used to a compartmentalised approach are given holistic problems?
How do they respond and what helps in the learning process? eg ask them why they asked any question they had.
Maybe it is not relevant to the problem but still helps in understanding the situation?
How do we learn about our cultural and physical environment?
