Working at a cultural interface: co-creating Aboriginal health curriculum for health professions

Historical exclusion of Aboriginal people and Aboriginal epistemologies in Australian higher education, including health professions education, has produced generations of healthcare professionals who are ill-equipped and lack confidence to provide culturally safe care for Aboriginal communities. This article recounts efforts undertaken at a university in Melbourne to foreground Aboriginal ways of knowing and being through co-creating curriculum for undergraduate and postgraduate health professions programmes with Aboriginal expert partners. The intended learning outcome was to develop students' cultural capability for professional practice in occupational therapy, dietetics, or nursing. Herein, we present two co-created Aboriginal curriculum projects. The first describes two sequential, blended learning modules co-created and delivered in discipline-specific classes; the second is an interprofessional simulation involving students from multiple health professions. We use Nakata's cultural interface to reflect on the process of working together in this contested space as non-Aboriginal academics and expert Aboriginal partners and conclude by presenting considerations for navigating curriculum development at the intersection of two knowledge systems.