Supporting the learning of nomadic communities across transnational contexts: exploring parallels in the education of UK Roma Gypsies and Indigenous Australians

Deriving from the authors’ respective ethnographic fieldwork (around two decades in each context), this position paper considers experiences of education across two communities: Gypsy/Roma in the UK and Indigenous in Australia. The article brings together understandings across these traditionally nomadic communities, with no shared history or cultural connections other than nomadism, but with common experiences of exclusion, inequity, alienation and disrupted patterns of participation in formal education systems. Drawing on initiatives in recent years involving various Indigenous and nomadic groups, the authors suggest core notions that might underpin a culturally appropriate curriculum and pedagogy. They also propose amended conceptions of nomadism, allowing for recognition of challenges that persist even when nomadism is no longer integral to lifestyle. Rejecting policy positions that view inclusion as a solution, they outline the difficulties for youngsters, in each context, in seeking to inhabit two worlds with conflicting value-systems, and with contrasting beliefs about the ways in which children should be educated. The article identifies several cultural, socio-political and economic obstacles that are mirrored across each context, and argues for negotiated settlements between the state and such minority/marginal communities so as to enable an inclusive curriculum to be established that respects the cultures and aspirations of all communities