Beyond deficit discourse: reframing debate in Indigenous education

This chapter explores how digitisation is affecting Indigenous peoples’ participation in debates around education in Australia. It contributes to international scholarship on Indigenous use of digital media as tools of resilience, resistance, and education. Media and education are two fundamental democratic institutions. Education has long been a touchstone issue for thinking around First Nations participation in, and exclusion from, the political and public life of the nation. The Deficit Discourse in Indigenous Education project is exploring the pervasiveness of discourse that frames and represents Indigenous education in a narrative of negativity, deficiency, and disempowerment. The chapter examines how, or whether, Indigenous community voices made possible through the affordances of digital media can break the stranglehold on ways of seeing, and solutions steeped in deficit, in debates around Indigenous education. The challenge for government and other powerful forces is to fully engage with the media that are produced by First Nations themselves.