A holistic approach to TPACK for Indigenous students in mathematics and science classrooms

The Australian Government has funded the Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF) project to increase preservice teachers' capacity to embed ICT in their teaching practice (Education Services Australia, 2011). The planning model promoted by the TTF project details three overlapping knowledge domains: technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge. The intersection of these domains is referred to as technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK). TPACK is promoted as a model for teachers to use when they plan mathematics and science curriculum for Indigenous students. This paper argues that when planning with the TPACK model the teacher also needs to explicitly acknowledge the attributes and resources of the Indigenous students. This feature of teaching design and \ud implementation needs to be further developed in pre-service education and teacher professional development. It is imperative for educators to acknowledge and value the attributes and cultural dimensions Indigenous students bring to the classroom: their lived languages, experiences and knowledge for the purpose of their learning. Here, the term 'culture' is used to refer to an individual's habit of mind; the development of a whole society; or the whole way of life of a group of people (Rojek, 2007). The paper positions Indigenous students as agentic in both negotiating their mathematical and scientific learning dispositions and using technological models and simulations. A key purpose of the paper is to highlight the socially negotiated and embedded nature of meaning-making, how one's culture influences how an individual or a group can make primary sense of their world and thus proposes a more holistic approach to TPACK for Indigenous students in mathematics and science classrooms