Connecting to Country in a Post-Colonial Biophilic World: Designing the Culturally Responsive School

The impact of nature on school inhabitants has been largely ignored in academic research until recently, as has the knowledge of indigenous Australians about the connections between culture, management, and the healing power of country. Furthermore, white colonial narratives silence indigenous stories, white temporal concepts do not align or resonate with indigenous approaches, and colonial-oriented pedagogies do not connect with indigenous ‘funds’ of knowledge. We argue that a culturally responsive pedagogy played out across the school ecosystem and tested through action research towards rethinking how school spaces and places are conceived, designed, constructed, and inhabited can achieve a culturally responsive school. This chapter has the following interlinked four main arguments: first, making a case for the context and briefly illustrating the emerging evidence base of nature’s impact on health and wellbeing through biophilic school design principles; second, outlining the possibilities for engaging with the indigenous call of connecting to Country through Country-centred design understood as a way into a relational ontology; third, revisiting some post-colonial possibilities and challenges of dialogic encounters between white settlers and indigenous custodians; and, finally, exploring some case studies including culturally responsive schooling and several others which offer some reflections on related projects. The next step in this provocation is to integrate biophilic school design through indigenous knowledge with a cultural pedagogy project on a school site to test this proposed framework. The next step in this theoretical concept is to integrate biophilic school design, indigenous knowledge and cultural pedagogy at a school site project to test the validity of the provocation.