Title of paper: / Inside the ‘contract zone’: white tourist teachers in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands
Abstract: / The term ‘tourist teaching’ is used to describe the dimensions through which white – or tourist – teachers in non-white settings are implicated in the preservation and reproduction of white race privileges, both material and discursive. This paper seeks to examine ‘tourist teaching’ in a remote[1] South Australian Indigenous school, via an autoethnographic exploration of my own experiences as a ‘two year tourist’ (Hickling-Hudson & Ahlquist, 2003, 2004). To capture ‘tourist teaching’, I interrogate notions of ‘the tourist’ and of the ‘contract’; that is, the identity of the white teacher, and the social, cultural, ideological and political terrain through which s/he operates. I posit that critical analysis of the “white tourist” against the socio-political ‘contract’ through which they operate, may reveal much about whiteness and white teachers; namely, how the white teacher is constructed to reproduce white race privilege, and more importantly, how the role of the white teacher may be harnessed as a site for resisting reproductions of whiteness. In this paper I use autoethnography to ‘return the gaze’ placing my Self and my structural and cultural context under scrutiny. I use critical whiteness theory to inform investigations, to shape the narrative process, and to illumine some of the problems of self-reflexivity on the part of the white subject. I argue that when exploring whiteness and white teachers in non-white settings, autoethnography combined with critical whiteness theory may be harnessed more vigorously as one of the many tools for negotiating critical pedagogy.
The South Australian Department of Children’s Services (DECS) and the Department of Education, Training and Employment (DETE), employ the terms “rural and remote” to describe those areas outside of Adelaide’s central business district and metropolitan regions; the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands are considered to be the state’s ‘most remote’ region (DECS, 2006). The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) refers to the APY Lands as ‘very remote’ (ABS, 2006). I use the term ‘remote’ in this paper; however, I do so problematically in recognition of the way that power operates unevenly in society. Uneven access to power is reproduced through discourses that, for example, unproblematically ‘locate’ certain peoples at a disadvantage owing to their geographic isolation from the mainstream. In this sense, hegemony is in operation through the allocation of categories such as ‘remote’, which are constructed against a hegemonic centre.
Presenter(full name): / Samantha Schulz
Institutional affiliation: / EHLT, School of Ed., FlindersUniversity
Contact: / Email address: /
Autobiographical Note: / Samantha is a first year PhD student in the School of Education at FlindersUniversity. Her research looks at education in SA’s far north west APY Lands. Her previous studies include an Honours degree in Education at Flinders Uni; a Masters Degree in Writing at Adelaide Uni; and a Bachelor of Arts at Flinders Uni. She has worked as a teacher in rural West Kenya and South Australia’s PitjantjatjaraLands.
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