The (Im)Possibility of Dialogic Encounters at the Frontiers of Nation

This chapter provides an account, partly autobiographical, of my engagement as a white settler in the working for anti-racists or decolonial education. As such I discuss various dilemmas for whitefella educators who are committed to working in and on the contact zone in colonial Australia. I comment of my own unlearning of colonisation or at least to think past the ways that schooling [re]produces social stratifications of various kinds. Unlearning in my case demanded coming to terms to my own ignorance of the impact of settler colonial governing on the country. I grew up on, Ngarrindjeri country; working through the ways that I was implicated in the ways schooling produces social stratification; learning some theory of settler colonisation. Central to unlearning colonisation has been realising that colonisation is by nature, a monologue and hence a decolonial education must be experimenting with pedagogies as dialogic encounters. Decolonisation then is antithetical to claims of the what works paradigm that asserts more explicit instruction.