Churchill Fellowship Awarded for Truth-telling Education Project

Faculty of Education lecturers and Ngarrngga team members, Dr Jessica Gannaway and Justin Wilkey have been awarded a Churchill Fellowship for their research project, ‘To research truth-telling in classrooms and co-develop guiding principles for Australian teachers'.

Their project builds on the existing work they are leading at Ngarrngga, called the Truth-telling Pedagogies Lab, which aims to address historical wrongs and promote reparation and reconciliation in Australian classrooms.

The Churchill Fellowship will provide the opportunity for Dr Gannaway and Mr Wilkey to travel overseas for their research. They will connect with Indigenous educators, researchers and leaders in Turtle Island (Canada) and Aotearoa (New Zealand) to learn about successful initiatives for truth-telling practices in Indigenous-led education, and how their insights may be applied to an Australian education context.

“Receiving a Churchill Trust Fellowship will enable us to contribute to the groundswell of important work being done on truth-telling across teaching and learning environments in education. We see education as a transformative tool for collectively strengthening communities.”  Dr Gannaway and Mr Wilkey said.

Dr Gannaway and Mr Wilkey state that Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators need to work together to achieve truth-telling, seeing it as shared work. “Working together as both Indigenous and non-Indigenous educators, our collective research backgrounds focus on both Indigenous students’ experiences within schools, and the dispositions required of non-Indigenous educators to take up this work. We bring both of these lenses to the project’s focus on building strong collective truth-telling praxis.”

The project speaks to the University of Melbourne’s ambitions to promote truth-telling and further champion Indigenous Knowledges within education. It will also expand opportunities for future collaboration across international Indigenous programs. You can follow the progress of this project on the Ngarrngga socials or visit the Fellowship page: https://www.churchilltrust.com.au/project/to-research-truth-telling-in-classrooms-and-co-develop-guiding-principles-for-australian-teachers/.