Episode 3: Indigenous Knowledge in Learning and Leadership with Tracy Woodroffe

In this conversation, Ebe sits down with Dr Tracy Woodroffe, a Warumungu Luritja senior lecturer at Charles Darwin University, to talk about what it really means to embed Indigenous knowledge in Australian universities - and why our current approaches keep falling short.

Tracy shares her journey from childhood, to teacher, to academic, explaining why Indigenous perspectives can only be owned and delivered by Indigenous people, and what happens when non-Indigenous academics try to speak for communities they're not part of. They discuss the exhaustion of being tokenised as "the Indigenous expert", and the glass ceilings that persist even in supposedly progressive institutions.

The conversation also explores parallels between Indigenous and disability communities' experiences of tokenism, the difference between genuine partnership and performative allyship, and what it would look like if universities actually structured themselves to centre Indigenous knowledge rather than treating it as a weekly add-on.

Links mentioned:

• Tracy's publications and work in pedagogy, education, and leadership: https://researchers.cdu.edu.au/en/persons/tracy-ann-woodroffe
• Tracy's paper on work-like balance and managing identity: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-97-2823-7_6

Transcript

Welcome to Higher Hopes, the podcast raising the bar for Australian universities. My name is Ebe Ganon and I'm here to discuss what's possible when we centre different perspectives in conversations about higher education transformation and when we do things a little bit differently.

So today we're diving into something that I think is long overdue in Australian higher education: looking at moving beyond tokenistic gestures and towards genuine First Nations leadership and embedding knowledge systems that could really transform how our universities operate. We hear a lot about ‘decolonising the curriculum’ and cultural competency, but what does it really look like to build universities from the ground up using Indigenous approaches to knowledge, relationship building and leadership?

And why does our current approach of trying to squeeze Indigenous perspectives into colonial structures keep failing both our institutions and our communities?

My guest today is Dr Tracy Woodroffe, and we're going to unpack and explore these questions together. Dr Tracy Woodroffe is a senior lecturer and researcher in the Faculty of Arts and Society at Charles Darwin University. Dr Woodroffe is a Warumungu Luritja woman with extensive experience in early childhood, primary, secondary, and tertiary classrooms. She specialises in teacher education and the significance of culture and inclusive practice. Her interests are educational pedagogy, identity perspective, cultural responsiveness and equity.

Dr Woodroffe's work includes examining the Australian education system. She was the recipient of Vice Chancellor's Academic Awards for Research and Innovation, earning the First Nations Research and Innovation Award in 2023, and teaching excellence, earning the First Nations Teaching Excellence Award in 2022.

This conversation is for anyone who is tired of surface level initiatives and wants to understand what genuine structural change could look like for staff and students navigating institutions that weren't built for them or built by them.

Tracy, welcome to Higher Hopes.

Tracy: Ebe, thanks for having me.

Ebe: Before we dive into some of these big structural questions we want to talk about, I'd love for everyone to get to know you a little bit. Can you tell us about yourself, where you're from, what you're working on, and what's keeping you busy lately?

Tracy: Yeah, so I'm a Darwin girl. I was born in Darwin, grew up most of my life in Darwin. My father is Indigenous and my mother is non-Indigenous, so I've also spent some time with my non-Indigenous family down the East Coast when I was younger. I have been fortunate in that I feel like I understand the world from two different positions, so I don't lose my Indigeneity when I'm trying to understand it differently. But I can see how other people have treated me in my life. I can understand how they may have thought of something from a different position than myself. So growing up within those two different perspectives I think has helped me to engage with being Indigenous and to have more confidence in who I am. And I hope that that's kind of come across in my work.

I think it has to do with being an only child until the age of five as well, kind of surrounded by adult conversation. And I think you get treated a little bit differently. You have quicker language development. You are included in perhaps adult conversations. And then, you know, my brothers came along. I have two younger brothers, so I'm a big sister. And you know, growing up I was always looking after my brothers and then I was in school myself in year six, you know, something the teacher did really inspired me to be a teacher. And you know, some people will think she must have been a great teacher. She must have, you know? 

But really it was her discipline, and her control. So I don't know, maybe as a young Aboriginal girl, I felt like I had little control over my life perhaps, and I really wanted to do that thing that I saw that teacher do where she had the clear boundaries. She had control of what was happening with the students in the class, and it just seemed to me like “that's what I'm going to do”. So, don't know, maybe the young control freak in me decided I was going to be a teacher, you know, and take control of my life, perhaps. I don't know. But yeah, so I always had that focus from year six. I went home, I said to dad, "Look, dad, I'm going to be a teacher", you know, and he always said to me, "That's great, you do that."

And my parents are always wonderful, supportive people who, you know, always believed that I was going to be a teacher too, which helped I suppose. And by the time I finished compulsory schooling - so, year 12 - I still enjoyed school. I enjoyed being at school. It's not because I was ever told I was brilliant or I was going to be super fantastic at anything. I think I enjoyed the social side of school and I wasn't too bad at it. I think, I think a skill I had was being okay at lots of things, you know, I don't know whether that's actually a skill or not, but perhaps that's what helped me. You know, I felt like I could do things. It was all right.

And then I went and enrolled in university straight after school, and was lucky enough to get into the teaching course. And it's all history from there. But I have absolutely loved being a teacher. I love working with students. I love seeing the evidence of them learning something. You know, you have to have a passion, I think, in a profession that you choose and then you see where it leads you next because my passion for teaching and understanding the fairness for students within that education system, and seeing a lack of it, drove me to do something differently.

And so I moved sideways out of working with the Department of Education, you know, after 23 years or so of being a teacher, being a specialist teacher in behaviour management, you know, supervising other staff, being their senior to come to, helping to lead different things within schools, like accelerated literacy. I started to think that something wasn't right within the system and really, the focus that really sort of gave me a bit of a shove was when I was a specialist teacher for behaviour management.

So behaviour management came easily to me, and I think it was because I had the experience of being a relief teacher first, building up that quick rapport when you change, you know, from one class to the next as a relief teacher. And of course, students love to give the relief teacher a hard time. So you have to be able to quickly take a group of students, build the trust and respect with them, and to have that classroom management - behaviour management's part of that classroom management - but to be able to encourage and to help students along the way and to know that you are a confident operator as an educator.

And in my role as a specialist teacher in a middle school setting, it started to be obvious to me that teachers were not taking advantage of the gift that students were giving them. So students were giving them the gift of challenging behaviour so teachers could develop their practice and be better teachers because they knew how to work this behaviour management thing, you know, by caring for students, engaging students. But in my role as this behaviour management specialist, I was in charge of a hub of classrooms, which were the ‘engagement hub’.

At the time I really thought it was a pity, that teachers were missing out on this accountability of working on their own skills and strategies as a teacher, and that it was too easy for them to move the students out. And that, you know, the students must have a stigma too if they can't seem to fit within this expected mainstream classroom. And it's too easy for the teacher to get rid of them, to move them aside.

I started to think differently about my job and what I was doing. And when I moved into higher education it was into a lecturing role in units about Indigenous engagement into teacher education units. So it was something that was needed. And as soon as you get into the higher ed space, I had my master's already, but there was an expectation that I would quickly do my PhD. And because of my experiences as a teacher, as an educator, as someone who felt like there was an inequity in the education space, it was very easy for me to choose what to research.

So my PhD was around the importance of including Indigenous knowledge in pre-service teacher education. So how to better prepare teachers for working with Indigenous students in classrooms. That was the crux of it, and that's where I'm at today. So I started back in 2014 as a lecturer at CDU. Now I find myself as a senior lecturer and I'm working within the Faculty of Arts and Society. I lecture in humanities, not distinctly just teacher education, but humanities, which looks at more opportunity to challenge ideas about education and to delve deeper into cultural inclusion and inclusive practice.

Ebe: I am so glad that you started off with kind of your journey from school, because I think that those experiences when we are really small really shape our careers and our view of the world. And I love your framing of the gift of students giving teachers a challenge. I was certainly that challenging student, little young ADHD kid in the classroom with kind of poor impulse control and certainly presenting some of those challenges to teachers, particularly in the classroom sizes that we had in my primary school.

And I definitely think being okay at lots of things is a skillset. I think that's called being a generalist. And I think that's how a lot of us kind of end up in equity work, which is sort of what we call, I think, the space in which we both met. We originally met at the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success Symposium, I think last year. Time is passing weirdly. It might have been two years ago. But I was really compelled by, at the time when we met, your very clear vision and direct way of speaking and I think it shares a lot of characteristics with the way that I like to think about this work.

In that it's not really rocket science if you listen to people and if you work on building relationships with people and understand where they're coming from and what they're bringing to their higher education journey. And I was listening to the recording from some of the sessions at the more recent ACSES symposium, and you were on a panel there and you were talking about in the context of transforming higher education, how the way that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities understand and value higher education as a pursuit and the way that that perspective is actually not in our messaging, in the way that we talk about higher education, the way we do, quote unquote, "equity work", which, you know, for those in an audio format, I'm using air quotes around all of that.

I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit more about, you know, what it would look like if we were talking to First Nations communities and understanding and working to embed their view on what the value of higher education is and what we'd actually need to change in the way we're having that conversation if we did.

Tracy: So I think what we would need to clearly consider is the scope that people are expected to work within in a higher ed space. So we have all of these, I dare say, pompous ideas about this higher education thing. And we hold it to such high regard, high standards. And all we do in framing it that way is we create an exclusive environment where only some people are privileged and other people are just on the fringes, you know, just on the edges. They might want to participate, but don't know how to. It just is framed as this really impossibly difficult space that some people just aren't entitled to be involved in.

And I think that's the wrong way for us to think about knowledge. And seriously, if we're about expanding knowledge in different fields, in different spaces, we need to be more open in accepting or understanding broader definitions of people's knowledge and of engagement with education. So, you know, we often have this - it's like westernised education systems are at this opposite end of a scale perhaps to an Indigenous knowledge system or a different knowledge system in the world. And it's like people set them up to be opposed to each other, whereas I would think that there are major overlaps in learning about each other and learning and understanding, you know, a broader scope or idea of knowledge and the world.

And I don't understand why in this distinguished institutional kind of space that we're involved in, why people would want such a limited view and such a limited scope and understanding of the world. You know, maybe back in the age of enlightenment and those times where we were trying to get away from the control of the church and the idea that the church's beliefs were a way of controlling people, right? So we were trying to move away from that into this more scientific way of thinking about the world.

I'm framing this in those kind of ways because I participated in a course about history, and I enrolled at Cambridge University. But it was like a continuing education unit, you know, something that goes for six months, whatever. And you get a certificate at the end - certificate in history - and I had to join at midnight or whatever to participate with the timeframe in England. But I loved it. So I was up, you know, and I'm into this thing, you know, because I love, as when I was younger, Indiana Jones and, you know, that kind of thing, these unique things within the world. It just really piqued my interest.

And this conversation for this unit of study I was doing, someone raised the idea of Christianity and creation stories and how the way they're framed within Christianity is this higher order way of thinking, more or less. They were trying to say it was exclusive in the way that people worshipped. And I then was in this argument with someone about, what about Indigenous peoples and their creation stories and their understanding of how the world is created and belief in spirits? How is that any different than, you know, the classic story of Jesus and Christianity? And for some reason the person wanted to insist that, you know, it was less civilised and not to be held in the same regard.

And I just, I was not backing down. You know, you really have to, I think, be strong in your beliefs and be able to frame what you're thinking in a certain way. I think you have to be confident in who you are and what you think. And like you said, sometimes that can come across as very direct, but I'm friendly at the same time. I'm smiling, I'm willing to listen to someone. I'm being polite and respectful. I just want the same level of respect back. Do you feel like that?

Ebe: Absolutely. I think, particularly as a younger person in higher education policy, and often when I get brought into a room, it's because I'm wearing my student hat. And people have a very narrow expectation of what they want to hear from a student voice when you bring us into the room. And I think we're starting to see a little bit of a shift there. But certainly in the majority of cases, they're really keen to hear about your experience in the classroom and your learning experience in that very narrow sense of who you are as a student. And then they're less interested in you looking at systems. They're less interested in you unpacking culture and they're less interested in your critical analysis.

And so when you start to bring those lenses, which traditionally it's those of us who are from communities and identity groups that have not been well represented in, you know, in the academy, when we bring that perspective in, people think, "Oh, that's a bit, that's a bit direct. It's a bit blunt. We're not ready to hear that and we certainly are not ready to hear it from a student."

And I think the relationships that I've built in the sector so far, the lasting ones are people who can see past the communication difference there or like see exactly what you've said, which is I'm here and I'm smiling and I want to engage with you and I want to talk about it. And we might not agree by the end of the conversation, but I want to have it regardless.

It can be especially challenging when you're looking at like big entrenched systems that have been operating like that for a long time and you're trying to get people to maybe see it from your perspective or think differently. And I think those different perspectives, they offer kind of fundamental questions about how we make decisions and whose voices get heard and what knowledge systems, for example, as you were talking about, which ones we choose to elevate and which ones we choose to see as niche or an add-on as opposed to foundational to the way that we're understanding something, as you were talking about, seeing the sort of empirical scientific tradition as default and then extra knowledge systems that we bolt on on the side.

I was thinking about a former university that I used to study at, we added in our First Nations graduate attribute, where in that very niche stream, graduates would come out understanding everything about, you know, First Nations culture and experience, but only in that very narrow stream. And I look at a lot of units that I've studied, that I look at, that I've learned about, that I've heard from other students. There's the one week where we look at, you know, Indigenous perspectives on whatever it happens to be.

I'm interested in your view on how you see embedding of First Nations knowledges in curricula at the moment, and whether or not you think it's consistent with where we should be going. Like, we're still doing this kind of segmentation, seeing these as two different dual opposing forces rather than embedding throughout our conversations. I'm interested in your reflections on where we are and where you think we could be in learning design there.

Tracy: Okay, so I'm going to start with identity, because the foundation to what we're going to talk about next is the fundamental understanding that an Indigenous person brings into the world with them - their own worldview and their own perspective. So as an Aboriginal person, my identity is made up of my cultural knowledge, my Indigeneity that I'm born with, the knowledge that I've learned from other Aboriginal people within my close family, so my grandmother, especially my dad, my cousins, my uncles and aunties, everyone else that I've been surrounded by from birth and have helped me to have this understanding of the world in a certain way.

But also it includes external influences. So, you know, people outside of my family, what they've said, what they've done as I've grown up, how I've been treated, the education system, how I've been treated by other people - all of those things that have helped me create my own self-identity as an Indigenous person help me to understand the world or to understand something from a certain perspective.

So unless you have those elements, you cannot have an Indigenous perspective. So Indigenous perspectives are owned only by Indigenous people. Okay, so I can explain something to you from my perspective. You can't have the same perspective as me, but you can try and empathise and understand how I might feel differently and why I might feel differently about something. And you can give space for that to be heard or seen within whatever activity we are doing. You can't talk as an Indigenous person. You can't say what my worldview might be. You're guessing unless you are me, you know how I think and feel and understand the world implicitly.

Okay. So for starters, it's not that Indigenous people expect non-Indigenous people to know Indigenous knowledge. We just expect other people to acknowledge that there is a different way of understanding the world, and if we give this Indigenous knowledge, our intrinsic Indigeneity to non-Indigenous people, they can't claim it, like we can't give it away because then there's no need for us. Okay? Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous perspectives have to be the property of Indigenous people. The ownership is there and it can't just be taken sideways by someone else, and that's what's wrong in the system.

Okay, so so many people think that they, if they're non-Indigenous, and it's a majority of people, 'cause you know, Indigenous people are a minority in the space. So the majority of people who think they're delivering Indigenous content as Indigenous knowledge, they're not, they're not delivering Indigenous knowledge. They might be delivering Indigenous content of something, some Indigenous content within their course. They may even be trying to deliver it in a way that best suits their Indigenous students. So they might be trying to deliver it in an Indigenous pedagogical approach, but they're not the owners of the knowledge. They're not delivering it in a way that an Indigenous person would with the same perspective and understanding and emphasis that an Indigenous person would place on it. That's the shame within what we do. Okay, because where are the Indigenous people in academia? Where are they?

They get burnt out. You get burnt out, you get unappreciated. You get treated as this token trotted out every time people want to do some kind of Welcome to Country. I would like everyone to understand the facts with Indigenous participation in higher ed. For example, if I'm not from that country, I can't deliver a Welcome to Country either, and anyone within the group can deliver the Acknowledgement. Asking me to deliver the Acknowledgement is offensive to me. You do it, you can do it. We're on the same level. If we are not the traditional owners from this place, none of us can say Welcome to Country, you know, but all of us can be in this reconciliation space where someone will take on the Acknowledgement responsibility, and it doesn't have to be the Indigenous person.

Reconciliation of Australia is not an Indigenous responsibility. Then there's some deep things that go into that. So if universities want to be authentic and ethical in their approach to what they do, they need to have Indigenous input into what they deliver. Okay? So some Indigenous person with the authority and the knowledge and the expertise has to be participating in providing advice and, you know, input into the content of how something happens, and also the way that that might be delivered.

There are just some things that need to be delivered by an Indigenous person. Okay? There's not enough of us to go around. So if a non-Indigenous person is delivering it, they need to be upfront at the beginning of the course, at the beginning of the unit and say, "I'm not an Indigenous person. The content within our course has been provided by this Indigenous person from this particular background. So this is the way that I'm justifying delivering the content to you because it has been endorsed and created by this particular Indigenous person or these particular Indigenous people."

And for example, if you have education courses, teachers have to abide by Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, right? Let's just go there. Okay. And some of those professional standards are about understanding Indigenous culture and being able to understand how Indigenous students will learn best. So a teacher has to, if they're not Indigenous, step out of their safe space, get advice and input and learning from an Indigenous person to be able to feel confident that they can then provide that learning to Indigenous students in Indigenous context and understand that they're being respectful. They know they're doing it in the right way.

So if universities have core units that are about teaching Indigenous learners, those units have to be informed by Indigenous people. Those units have to be created, developed from the way that an Indigenous person understands the world and would explain education and learning. And if best practice can happen, an Indigenous person should deliver those units. You know, so I'm just finishing marking. So we're in the marking phase at the moment, which will be, you know, the end of a course I've delivered called Challenging Educational Paradigms, and I love the fact that I can deliver that to my group of students in a way that will help them understand an Indigenous perspective, because they're hearing it from me. I'm providing that to them.

I also feel as an Indigenous person delivering Indigenous content, I'm authorised to do that. Okay? I know what I'm talking about. I am an Indigenous person, and this is the perspective that I'm conveying to you. It's almost as if I can't be wrong, because I know who I am. I know what I've done in my practice. I know about other Indigenous people, and I can explain that to you from my worldview. Do you think you could teach those units, Ebe?

Ebe: No, I don't think I could, and I don't think that I should. And if I was in a convening position, I think that not withstanding the frustrating things that have happened in universities recently around the way we structure employment and casualisation, and the challenges of bringing sessionals in to be able to co-deliver content, that co-delivery and the partnership piece is super important.

And I reflect on what you were talking about - Acknowledgements of Country as an example of that, right? Like real reconciliation and real partnership is non-Indigenous folk creating spaces for Indigenous people to bring valuable perspectives and their culture and their knowledge into those spaces. And I think for some people that probably pushes up against what they think allyship is in this space where in opposition to what you were just saying before, they think it is their job to have all of the answers and to know absolutely everything and to deliver it themselves. Because of this anxiety around, "Oh, I don't want to put cultural load on an Indigenous person, therefore I should just do it myself over here. And that's really good allyship to do that because if I don't do that, then these students are not going to get these perspectives”. 

And also an anxiety of not wanting to pass over the microphone as well. Like in a very competitive academic environment where you are creating a learning experience for your students that reflects on you, you're anxious about passing over the microphone and passing that space over to somebody else to come into your teaching space and to deliver to your students.

I think that's really interesting and I think that's probably a systems element of the way we've built higher education that is working against this imperative to retain knowledge sovereignty with Indigenous communities and be able to bring in, in partnership. And goodness me, I hope that, you know, Indigenous academics are already there, you know, in the institutions. And they should be. But I can certainly empathise, you know, from my perspective in the disability community about the importance and the value of that content being delivered from a position of lived experience and holding that knowledge and perspective yourself.

We get so much of that in disability studies and disability education where non-disabled people or non-disabled parents of disabled children come in and they speak for us. They say they've done their reading and they've done their, you know, consultation or their engagement and they sent one email to one advocate to just say, "Oh, can you just have a quick review of this lesson plan?" I've had that, I've had a few of those come to me. And they're either unpaid or the timeline is really unrealistic and I need to think about it, and I don't represent my whole community. I don't represent the whole disability community. I don't represent the whole queer community. I don't, I don't represent, I represent me. And my experience of life can inform some parts of those, you know, learning outcomes that you might want to be delivering to your students. But unfortunately, this can't just be a tick box, “one off, I'll just import that module from here to here and get someone to look over it and tick it off”. Like it has to be relational, ongoing work that we do over time.

Tracy: When you are mentioning that, I'm thinking of two different things. So first I'm thinking of the competition that you mentioned, and I think that it's really sad that there are so few Indigenous academics in higher ed for starters. But the sad thing also is that the few Indigenous academics who are held in high regard in positions like PVCs are given such a lot, like a huge task to try and overcome whatever challenges the university might be facing within that cultural space with so few Indigenous staff to be able to work with on that.

It's almost as if they're - I don't know how to explain it, but I would love to see lots of Indigenous people for their expertise employed in a range of highly regarded positions that don't have the tag 'Indigenous' on it. So someone's an expert in engineering, an expert in, you know, architecture, whatever, you know, and it's reached the point where we are so included and embedded in everything that there's no need to tag 'Indigenous' on what you do, because whether people think about it or not, there's still that stigma attached as if you're somehow less knowledgeable or less capable if you're, like, you know, surely you are the DEI pick. You know what I mean?

You know, how many staff actually work at your university, and what would they say about their experience of being a staff member there? Have they been encouraged and promoted? Is there a chance to be, you know, treated equally when you're going for a position that doesn't necessarily have 'Indigenous' in the title? You know, there's so much to still overcome.

And yes, I do feel token sometimes, especially when people approach me to be a PhD or a master's supervisor, because most of the time they come to me last. They've already got the rest of their panel sorted.

I'm the tack on associate, “that's the Indigenous expert”, because they picked an Indigenous topic that they're going to study. I hate that. I hate that with absolute passion because it's so offensive that they didn't pick me first to approach as an expert in that space. Don't you have a clue about how that might feel for me as an Indigenous person who is actually an expert in education and pedagogy and teacher education, minus the 'Indigenous' tag that people have decided to attach to me since I came to work in higher ed? You know, as a teacher in the education department, I was never an Indigenous teacher teaching just Indigenous classes of Indigenous people in Indigenous schools. I was in a school with all sorts of kids, expected to be an expert at that. You know, someone should stop and think about labels and how that then impacts on how people are treated within higher ed.

Ebe: I feel that so deeply in my own experience. I see it happening and you know, from a disability perspective, it has happened to me, you know, not to suggest that all of the experiences are the same, but I can empathise in that I'm often brought into rooms to be the disability perspective and to talk from my lived experience… But also like, I want to talk about the review of the TEQSA Act! I can talk about governance! I understand how policy works. And yeah, I'll often bring a disability lens to that because that's just who I am and that's my experience. And certainly my submission to the review of the TEQSA Act is very focused on that particular issue.

But, you know, I want to be able to contribute to all sorts of conversations in higher education, governance, and policy and pedagogy. Not just be the person who has to constantly be reminding people about, "Have you done your alternative formats? Have you considered Universal Design for Learning?" Because it's load, like it's representative load to constantly have to sideline your professional and research experience just so that you have the time and the space for someone to listen to you about those bare minimum things, right? And that takes up my space and my time and my energy in a similar way to how you were talking about with needing to respond to requests that are clearly token where you've been pulled out of a, you know, a university database as someone who can just like tick that little box over there. Like it's tiring.

And I think, you know, our systems unfortunately incentivise it and I'd love to be, you know, in a higher education system, hopefully not in a long time, hopefully soon, where we can be both. Because I don't know, I get the sense that you also don't want to leave those perspectives behind either, because it's valuable and important. And in addition to those, you want to be valued for the educational and the pedagogy experience and all of those other really, really valuable experiences that you have. At the same time, it doesn't always have to have the identity label attached to it.

Tracy: Yeah, absolutely. We're multifaceted. You know, we're not just one thing, we are many things. And quite often that gets lost in just one overarching label which is a pity and, and, you know, it goes into all aspects of your career really. And I know that you really wanted to talk about leadership and we've kind of touched on it a little bit, but the thing that really, that I want to talk about is the glass ceiling.

Ebe: Mm-hmm.

Tracy: So I mentioned that I worked for the department and in, in, you know, in schools and things in a mainstream kind of situation. I say mainstream because it just sounds so hierarchical, but within that space, even though I wasn't under any particular labels, I did feel that even though I was at this specialist role being paid on par, perhaps with some of the assistant principal levels, I was never given opportunities to do higher duties in that space. Even though I requested it, even though I was leading, even though I was supervising other teachers, even though I was in these fantastic roles, there was still this glass ceiling that was just sitting there.

And if anyone knows me, they know that I'm single-minded about something. I'm not going to wait around for someone else to give me an opportunity. I'm looking for opportunities. I'm going to go and find something, and I'm not just going to take no for an answer or be defined by someone else's ideas of who they think I am or what they think I can do. That was something else that really made me think I need to go and work somewhere else.

And I took leave without pay from the department while I found where I wanted to be instead. And, you know, the glass ceiling feeling doesn't really stop, but it's about being true to who you are, understanding what your role is and what your goals are.

Whatever I do has to be, like you said earlier, around that work life balance. So my work is about affording my life. Okay? It's not about spending, you know, all of my hours doing my work, because that's not what life's about. That's not what life is about at all. Work is about earning the money you need to pay for the lifestyle you want to have. So I always have that focus and if the work isn't good and the work doesn't fit, or it doesn't suit or it doesn't feel right, it needs to change.

Ebe: Tracy's written an awesome paper that I found really informative and helpful as I was starting to think about my PhD around what level of vigilance is required when we're looking at work life balance, especially when we're operating in spaces where identity is explicitly relevant. It's always implicitly relevant in every space, but explicitly when your work is connected to your lived experience. And I'll put a link to that in the show notes. 

But I think trying to bring this around to what I really want to create in this work, which is a sense of hope and solutions. I want to ask you, what work is happening and what progress is happening that's making you feel hopeful for our sector, that we are moving in the right direction. Something that's making you feel hopeful this week, this month, or right now.

Tracy: I think from everything that we've discussed today, the point to take away is that there's huge potential for improvement. There's so much for us to be able to think about and do better, and I think that is positive. I personally don't like someone to just lump me with a problem. I love it when people have, you know, ideas for a solution or something. How can we work in a way that's moving forward?

Ebe: Thank you so much, Tracy, for sharing your immense expertise and for being really open to talk about, you know, things that are a bit challenging and I like to, as you know, push up against some of the things that, you know, our fearless sector leaders sort of suggest are our priorities. I think this is a huge one and I think that more conversations where we can kind of step through what partnership looks like and empathise with each other's experiences. You know, like I'm never going to know what it's like to be an Indigenous person, but based on what I hear from people like you in the sector who've done amazing work speaking about your experiences and many others, I can think about how that relates to my own experiences and learn from that and continue to look for other ways to improve my knowledge and create space. And I think there's lots of opportunities to do that.

And as we finish off today, I want to challenge listeners to think about what in your systems that you own or that you have influence on gets in the way of doing quality collaboration, of centring Indigenous perspectives and Indigenous people in presenting those perspectives. Like what is it about changes to recent conditions around short term contracts in academia, for example, that makes that really hard to do? You know, it's great that we can reduce casualisation in our sector, but what it means is it's really difficult to do engagements across institutions where people can bring in the knowledge that they have when they might not have the opportunity to be employed in a permanent way.

For example, what is it in the way that we structure expectations around curriculum? If there's an expectation to have one Indigenous week or one First Nations unit in your curriculum, like what is that incentivising in not doing that all the time and when we just tokenise it into one period? Do you have any other questions you want to pose to people or reflections you'd like people to have or make?

Tracy: I would just like to say, you know, it's really important to probably just lift your head up for a second and have a look around. How many Indigenous people are actually at your institution? How many are in the lecturing or leadership roles that you see around you? How many students are there? Do you understand what an Indigenous perspective might be? Yeah. Where do you fit within this space? I think it's important for people to just take a second and think about that.

Ebe: In the show notes, you'll find links to Tracy's work, including to the paper that I mentioned. And if today's conversation sparks something for you, whether you're a First Nations person yourself and recognising your own experiences, or you're thinking about how to move beyond tokenism in your own work, I'd love to hear about it.

Real change happens when we stop tweaking around the edges and start imagining something genuinely different and centre different voices in our conversations.

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Until next time, keep dreaming bigger, keep building better, and stay hopeful.

The Higher Hopes Podcast is produced on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, as well as any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people listening today. Sovereignty was never ceded, and this acknowledgement extends to wherever you are listening from. I encourage you to learn about the traditional custodians of your own country. It's our job to support First Nations perspectives and knowledge in the higher education sector as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the original teachers, learners, and researchers on this land.