Decolonising practice in teacher education in Australia: Reflections of shared leadership

In national and state policy and curricula in Australia, Teacher Educators (TEs) are responsible to embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) courses. TEs in Australia are primarily non-Indigenous which raises important questions and challenges related to preparedness for meeting these requirements. The authors, a non-Indigenous TE and a Dja Dja Wurrung TE, use vignettes to articulate their experiences of working together developing decolonising practices with ITE students at an Australian university. This process has provided a working model that promotes co-construction of education contexts through shared labour and leadership of First Nations and non-Indigenous stakeholders by respectively indigenising and decolonising their practice for ITE classrooms. We argue shared labour and leadership is central to developing decolonising practices for education spaces, and that our model could support TEs in other ITE programs and universities to meet policy standards that have wide reaching benefit for all.