Lester-Irabinna Rigney
Biographic Data
| ID | 108715 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lester-Irabinna Rigney |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lester-Irabinna |
| FAMILY NAME | Rigney |
| SIGNATURE | RIGNEY L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of South Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4756-2399 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 304 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Co-constructed engagement with Australian Aboriginal families in early childhood education
Partnerships with Aboriginal families are significant to children's learning and development outcomes yet remain under-theorised. Complicating matters are enduring neo-colonising practices for engaging with families in early childhood settings. These taken-for-granted practices serve as a barrier to connecting with Australian Aboriginal families in meaningful ways. This article presents a decolonising analysis of preschool teachers' and leaders' …
Burgiyana and Waraldi: A radiocarbon chronology for a selection of coastal and island archaeological sites on Yorke Peninsula/Guuranda, South Australia
Global Perspectives and New Challenges in Culturally Responsive Pedagogies: Super-diversity and Teaching Practice
Reterritorialising pedagogies of listening: Bringing into dialogue culturally responsive pedagogies with Reggio Emilia principles
Cultural and linguistic diversity in educational settings is the new normal internationally. However, domestic research shows that Indigenous Australian students are still not benefiting from school. Despite global research on Culturally Responsive Pedagogies and Reggio Emilia being proven to work with minoritised groups in settler societies, little research exists in Australia. This paper addresses this noticeable gap in the literature, bringing…
The Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS): Why invest in a strategy that reduces attendance
In late 2013, under the leadership of Prime Minister Abbott, the Australian Government announced a new policy designed to increase attendance rates in remote community schools—the Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS). The model assumed that employing local people in the program, which was designed to support parents get their children to school, would yield significant improvements and consequently improve educational outcomes. After a slight…
Unsettling the reason of time: Indigenist epistemology and the child in the Australian curriculum
Colonial settler societies’ differing concepts and experiences of time entangle in enactments of curriculum knowledge and the governing of human subjects. This article examines how an Anglo-Eurocentric historical representation of time is used as a principle of reason to establish the conditions of epistemic progress through the curriculum and culturally accounts for human agency, a teleological understanding of human development, and representat…
Philosophy of education in a new key: Publicness, social justice, and education; a South-North conversation
Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in securing the common good. The common good is never what individuals or particular groups want or desire, bu…
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Mathematics Through Creative and Body-Based Learning: Urban Aboriginal Schooling
Global neoliberal imperatives that numerically measure student success through standardized testing undermine the educational outcomes of students, in particular Indigenous students, and construct a seemingly fixed reality that avoids State responsibility to address structural inequality in Australia. Achievement gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous school students in mathematics have become an urgent international problem. Although evidenc…
Scale, colonisation and adapting to climate change: Insights from the Arabana people, South Australia
The role of knowledge in assisting Indigenous people adapt to climate change has been gaining increasing attention and local studies provide rich insights into how and where knowledge is used. This paper reports on the results of a qualitative cross-cultural research collaboration about climate change adaptation for the Arabana, an Indigenous people from South Australia. We find that the Arabana people have a corpus of observed historical knowled…
The Sounds of Colonization: An Examination of Bells at Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission Station/Burgiyana, South Australia
Marine Transgression, Aboriginal Narratives and the Creation of Yorke Peninsula/Guuranda, South Australia
This paper provides new palaeogeographical reconstructions of the Spencer Gulf and Yorke Peninsula/Guuranda region of South Australia for the period ca. 20,000–6000 cal. BP. The rich complexity of traditional Aboriginal (Narungga) sea-level narratives is also explored. These narratives, which form a highly significant system of knowledge, are considered together by the Narungga and non-Narungga authors of the paper to generate a new dialogue abou…
Strengthening Australian Aboriginal Participation in University STEM Programs: A Northern Territory Perspective
The broad discipline of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) has become a global focus for education and employment. Currently, Indigenous students are less likely to engage in STEM programs and careers than in other disciplines such as education, health, social sciences and arts. In Australia, schools and tertiary institutions are investigating opportunities to increase Indigenous participation in STEM. In 2016, the XE Maths project…
Mapping Boarding School Opportunities for Aboriginal Students from the Central Land Council Region of Northern Territory
The 2014 Wilson review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory recommended boarding school models as the preferred secondary education option for very remote Aboriginal students. This study considers boarding uptake by Aboriginal students from the Central Land Council region of the Northern Territory. An examination of boarding programs available to Aboriginal students in this region found that scholarship access is largely determined b…
Educators’ understanding of young children’s typical and problematic sexual behaviour and their training in this area
As part of a wider study, this paper reports on Australian educators’ understanding of children’s typical and problematic sexual behaviour and their source of training in this area. A sample of 107 educators from government, independent and Catholic primary schools, preschools and care organisations across Australia answered an online questionnaire regarding their understanding of and experiences with children’s problematic sexual behaviours and …
The 'very stillness ofthings: Object biographies of sailcloth and fishing net from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission (Burgiyana) colonial archive, South Australia
This article details the discovery of early twentieth-century sailcloth and fishing-net samples pertaining to the lives of Aboriginal peoples on Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission (Burgiyana). Biographies for the samples are explored, from which it is argued that these objects may have many viewpoints assigned to them. The sailcloth and fishing-net samples allow the telling of complex stories from the past and present. These stories include the resi…
“They Planned Their Calendar… They Set Up Ready for What They Wanted to Feed the Tribe”: A First-Stage Analysis of Narungga Fish Traps on Yorke Peninsula, South Australia
This article outlines “first stage” research into Aboriginal fish traps located on Yorke Peninsula, South Australia. The project was undertaken by Flinders University researchers in collaboration with the Indigenous traditional owners of the region—the Narungga people. The research aimed to achieve a range of objectives including obtaining basic data as to the location and types of fish traps in the region as well as contextualizing these fish ca…
Indigenous at the Heart: Indigenous research in a climate change project
Indigenous involvement at all stages of research has been called for over several decades and is now an increasingly accepted requirement. This paper outlines the research approaches of the Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change: The Arabunna, South Australia project, which in the initial development phase identified a number of basic tenets. The intent is to outline these tenets, discuss the level of Indigenous involvement and activity wit…
Combining Indigenous and Maritime Archaeological Approaches: Experiences and Insights from the ‘(Re)locating Narrunga Project’, Yorke Peninsula, South Australia
Where salt and fresh waters meet: Reconciliation and change in education
Perth, WA
Internationalization of an Indigenous Anticolonial Cultural Critique of Research Methodologies: A Guide to Indigenist Research Methodology and Its Principles
Indigenous Australians, like First Nations Peoples around the globe, are arguably the most studied people of the world. The research enterprise as a vehicle for investigation has poked, prodded, measured, tested, and compared data toward understanding Indigenous cultures and human nature. Explorers, medical practitioners, intellectuals, travelers, and voyeurs who observed from a distance have all played a role in the scientific scrutiny of Indige…
Native title, the stolen generation and reconciliation: The struggles facing aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia
(1998). Native title, the stolen generation and reconciliation. Interventions: Vol. 1, Ideologies of the Postcolonial, pp. 125-130
Internationalization of an Indigenous Anticolonial Cultural Critique of Research Methodologies: A Guide to Indigenist Research Methodology and Its Principles
Indigenous Australians, like First Nations Peoples around the globe, are arguably the most studied people of the world. The research enterprise as a vehicle for investigation has poked, prodded, measured, tested, and compared data toward understanding Indigenous cultures and human nature. Explorers, medical practitioners, intellectuals, travelers, and voyeurs who observed from a distance have all played a role in the scientific scrutiny of Indige…
The 'very stillness ofthings: Object biographies of sailcloth and fishing net from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission (Burgiyana) colonial archive, South Australia
This article details the discovery of early twentieth-century sailcloth and fishing-net samples pertaining to the lives of Aboriginal peoples on Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission (Burgiyana). Biographies for the samples are explored, from which it is argued that these objects may have many viewpoints assigned to them. The sailcloth and fishing-net samples allow the telling of complex stories from the past and present. These stories include the resi…
Scale, colonisation and adapting to climate change: Insights from the Arabana people, South Australia
The role of knowledge in assisting Indigenous people adapt to climate change has been gaining increasing attention and local studies provide rich insights into how and where knowledge is used. This paper reports on the results of a qualitative cross-cultural research collaboration about climate change adaptation for the Arabana, an Indigenous people from South Australia. We find that the Arabana people have a corpus of observed historical knowled…
Philosophy of education in a new key: Publicness, social justice, and education; a South-North conversation
Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in securing the common good. The common good is never what individuals or particular groups want or desire, bu…
Unsettling the reason of time: Indigenist epistemology and the child in the Australian curriculum
Colonial settler societies’ differing concepts and experiences of time entangle in enactments of curriculum knowledge and the governing of human subjects. This article examines how an Anglo-Eurocentric historical representation of time is used as a principle of reason to establish the conditions of epistemic progress through the curriculum and culturally accounts for human agency, a teleological understanding of human development, and representat…
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Mathematics Through Creative and Body-Based Learning: Urban Aboriginal Schooling
Global neoliberal imperatives that numerically measure student success through standardized testing undermine the educational outcomes of students, in particular Indigenous students, and construct a seemingly fixed reality that avoids State responsibility to address structural inequality in Australia. Achievement gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous school students in mathematics have become an urgent international problem. Although evidenc…
Marine Transgression, Aboriginal Narratives and the Creation of Yorke Peninsula/Guuranda, South Australia
This paper provides new palaeogeographical reconstructions of the Spencer Gulf and Yorke Peninsula/Guuranda region of South Australia for the period ca. 20,000–6000 cal. BP. The rich complexity of traditional Aboriginal (Narungga) sea-level narratives is also explored. These narratives, which form a highly significant system of knowledge, are considered together by the Narungga and non-Narungga authors of the paper to generate a new dialogue abou…
Strengthening Australian Aboriginal Participation in University STEM Programs: A Northern Territory Perspective
The broad discipline of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) has become a global focus for education and employment. Currently, Indigenous students are less likely to engage in STEM programs and careers than in other disciplines such as education, health, social sciences and arts. In Australia, schools and tertiary institutions are investigating opportunities to increase Indigenous participation in STEM. In 2016, the XE Maths project…
Reterritorialising pedagogies of listening: Bringing into dialogue culturally responsive pedagogies with Reggio Emilia principles
Cultural and linguistic diversity in educational settings is the new normal internationally. However, domestic research shows that Indigenous Australian students are still not benefiting from school. Despite global research on Culturally Responsive Pedagogies and Reggio Emilia being proven to work with minoritised groups in settler societies, little research exists in Australia. This paper addresses this noticeable gap in the literature, bringing…
Combining Indigenous and Maritime Archaeological Approaches: Experiences and Insights from the ‘(Re)locating Narrunga Project’, Yorke Peninsula, South Australia
Native title, the stolen generation and reconciliation: The struggles facing aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia
(1998). Native title, the stolen generation and reconciliation. Interventions: Vol. 1, Ideologies of the Postcolonial, pp. 125-130
Co-constructed engagement with Australian Aboriginal families in early childhood education
Partnerships with Aboriginal families are significant to children's learning and development outcomes yet remain under-theorised. Complicating matters are enduring neo-colonising practices for engaging with families in early childhood settings. These taken-for-granted practices serve as a barrier to connecting with Australian Aboriginal families in meaningful ways. This article presents a decolonising analysis of preschool teachers' and leaders' …
Mapping Boarding School Opportunities for Aboriginal Students from the Central Land Council Region of Northern Territory
The 2014 Wilson review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory recommended boarding school models as the preferred secondary education option for very remote Aboriginal students. This study considers boarding uptake by Aboriginal students from the Central Land Council region of the Northern Territory. An examination of boarding programs available to Aboriginal students in this region found that scholarship access is largely determined b…
Native title, the stolen generation and reconciliation: The struggles facing aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia
(1998). Native title, the stolen generation and reconciliation. Interventions: Vol. 1, Ideologies of the Postcolonial, pp. 125-130
Internationalization of an Indigenous Anticolonial Cultural Critique of Research Methodologies: A Guide to Indigenist Research Methodology and Its Principles
Indigenous Australians, like First Nations Peoples around the globe, are arguably the most studied people of the world. The research enterprise as a vehicle for investigation has poked, prodded, measured, tested, and compared data toward understanding Indigenous cultures and human nature. Explorers, medical practitioners, intellectuals, travelers, and voyeurs who observed from a distance have all played a role in the scientific scrutiny of Indige…
Where salt and fresh waters meet: Reconciliation and change in education
Perth, WA
Combining Indigenous and Maritime Archaeological Approaches: Experiences and Insights from the ‘(Re)locating Narrunga Project’, Yorke Peninsula, South Australia
Indigenous at the Heart: Indigenous research in a climate change project
Indigenous involvement at all stages of research has been called for over several decades and is now an increasingly accepted requirement. This paper outlines the research approaches of the Community Based Adaptation to Climate Change: The Arabunna, South Australia project, which in the initial development phase identified a number of basic tenets. The intent is to outline these tenets, discuss the level of Indigenous involvement and activity wit…
“They Planned Their Calendar… They Set Up Ready for What They Wanted to Feed the Tribe”: A First-Stage Analysis of Narungga Fish Traps on Yorke Peninsula, South Australia
This article outlines “first stage” research into Aboriginal fish traps located on Yorke Peninsula, South Australia. The project was undertaken by Flinders University researchers in collaboration with the Indigenous traditional owners of the region—the Narungga people. The research aimed to achieve a range of objectives including obtaining basic data as to the location and types of fish traps in the region as well as contextualizing these fish ca…
The 'very stillness ofthings: Object biographies of sailcloth and fishing net from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission (Burgiyana) colonial archive, South Australia
This article details the discovery of early twentieth-century sailcloth and fishing-net samples pertaining to the lives of Aboriginal peoples on Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission (Burgiyana). Biographies for the samples are explored, from which it is argued that these objects may have many viewpoints assigned to them. The sailcloth and fishing-net samples allow the telling of complex stories from the past and present. These stories include the resi…
Educators’ understanding of young children’s typical and problematic sexual behaviour and their training in this area
As part of a wider study, this paper reports on Australian educators’ understanding of children’s typical and problematic sexual behaviour and their source of training in this area. A sample of 107 educators from government, independent and Catholic primary schools, preschools and care organisations across Australia answered an online questionnaire regarding their understanding of and experiences with children’s problematic sexual behaviours and …
The Sounds of Colonization: An Examination of Bells at Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission Station/Burgiyana, South Australia
Marine Transgression, Aboriginal Narratives and the Creation of Yorke Peninsula/Guuranda, South Australia
This paper provides new palaeogeographical reconstructions of the Spencer Gulf and Yorke Peninsula/Guuranda region of South Australia for the period ca. 20,000–6000 cal. BP. The rich complexity of traditional Aboriginal (Narungga) sea-level narratives is also explored. These narratives, which form a highly significant system of knowledge, are considered together by the Narungga and non-Narungga authors of the paper to generate a new dialogue abou…
Strengthening Australian Aboriginal Participation in University STEM Programs: A Northern Territory Perspective
The broad discipline of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) has become a global focus for education and employment. Currently, Indigenous students are less likely to engage in STEM programs and careers than in other disciplines such as education, health, social sciences and arts. In Australia, schools and tertiary institutions are investigating opportunities to increase Indigenous participation in STEM. In 2016, the XE Maths project…
Mapping Boarding School Opportunities for Aboriginal Students from the Central Land Council Region of Northern Territory
The 2014 Wilson review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory recommended boarding school models as the preferred secondary education option for very remote Aboriginal students. This study considers boarding uptake by Aboriginal students from the Central Land Council region of the Northern Territory. An examination of boarding programs available to Aboriginal students in this region found that scholarship access is largely determined b…
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Mathematics Through Creative and Body-Based Learning: Urban Aboriginal Schooling
Global neoliberal imperatives that numerically measure student success through standardized testing undermine the educational outcomes of students, in particular Indigenous students, and construct a seemingly fixed reality that avoids State responsibility to address structural inequality in Australia. Achievement gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous school students in mathematics have become an urgent international problem. Although evidenc…
Scale, colonisation and adapting to climate change: Insights from the Arabana people, South Australia
The role of knowledge in assisting Indigenous people adapt to climate change has been gaining increasing attention and local studies provide rich insights into how and where knowledge is used. This paper reports on the results of a qualitative cross-cultural research collaboration about climate change adaptation for the Arabana, an Indigenous people from South Australia. We find that the Arabana people have a corpus of observed historical knowled…
Philosophy of education in a new key: Publicness, social justice, and education; a South-North conversation
Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in securing the common good. The common good is never what individuals or particular groups want or desire, bu…
The Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS): Why invest in a strategy that reduces attendance
In late 2013, under the leadership of Prime Minister Abbott, the Australian Government announced a new policy designed to increase attendance rates in remote community schools—the Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS). The model assumed that employing local people in the program, which was designed to support parents get their children to school, would yield significant improvements and consequently improve educational outcomes. After a slight…
Unsettling the reason of time: Indigenist epistemology and the child in the Australian curriculum
Colonial settler societies’ differing concepts and experiences of time entangle in enactments of curriculum knowledge and the governing of human subjects. This article examines how an Anglo-Eurocentric historical representation of time is used as a principle of reason to establish the conditions of epistemic progress through the curriculum and culturally accounts for human agency, a teleological understanding of human development, and representat…
Global Perspectives and New Challenges in Culturally Responsive Pedagogies: Super-diversity and Teaching Practice
Reterritorialising pedagogies of listening: Bringing into dialogue culturally responsive pedagogies with Reggio Emilia principles
Cultural and linguistic diversity in educational settings is the new normal internationally. However, domestic research shows that Indigenous Australian students are still not benefiting from school. Despite global research on Culturally Responsive Pedagogies and Reggio Emilia being proven to work with minoritised groups in settler societies, little research exists in Australia. This paper addresses this noticeable gap in the literature, bringing…
Burgiyana and Waraldi: A radiocarbon chronology for a selection of coastal and island archaeological sites on Yorke Peninsula/Guuranda, South Australia
Co-constructed engagement with Australian Aboriginal families in early childhood education
Partnerships with Aboriginal families are significant to children's learning and development outcomes yet remain under-theorised. Complicating matters are enduring neo-colonising practices for engaging with families in early childhood settings. These taken-for-granted practices serve as a barrier to connecting with Australian Aboriginal families in meaningful ways. This article presents a decolonising analysis of preschool teachers' and leaders' …
Sociology (12 works) · Archaeology (8 works) · Indigenous (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Indigenous and Place-Based Education (6 works) · Ecology (5 works) · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights (5 works) · Pedagogy (5 works)