10 Oct 2022 World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education (WIPCE)
Image: Session from the World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education
The Hotline was recently a participant at this very special international conference which for 35 years has been bringing together Indigenous educators from around the globe. Held in Wollongong in 1993 and Melbourne in 2008, this was only the third time that it has been held in Australia.
WIPCE was an amazing opportunity to hear First Nations people speak strongly and clearly about things that work for their communities in education, at all levels. Culture, language and land was at the heart of the conference, and underpinned every presentation. We took part in fantastic sessions on community-driven pedagogy, community-controlled programs, on-country learning, and ways for non-indigenous educators to work alongside communities on “both ways learning”. These key messages certainly reinforce what we hear directly from Indigenous callers and communities on our phone lines, and we will be highlighting these themes and examples from WIPCE in our upcoming reports and submissions.
And as an added bonus, we were able to have a rare face-to-face meetup with our national Steering Committee member Robyn Ober, from Batchelor College in NT and Vicki Hartman from Tauondi Aboriginal College who hosted the event and had been an Australian Council for Adult Literacy representative for many years.