Brotherhood and belonging: Creating pedagogic spaces for positive discourses of aboriginal youth

Representations of Aboriginal youth in Australia are typically characterised by deficit discourses often in relation to normative, Eurocentric educational criteria. They are described as maladapted learners, living in disengaged communities, without identifiable or recognisable literacy or numeracy practices. This chapter argues that through sport Aboriginal youth are demonstrating alternative ways of being and belonging, which avoid facile Western-traditional binary classifications, and that bringing this emerging discourse into the classroom context valorises Aboriginal voices. In a novel pilot study, the on-field language of young Aboriginal players of Australian rules football was recorded and transcribed. Language mapping of the transcripts showed that the students and their coaches developed a cohesive team identity through the consistent use of specific interpersonal tokens of solidarity and leadership. Positive discourse analysis offers a forward-looking, constructive theoretical framework through which the voices, practices and context of Aboriginal youth can be described and valorised, casting them as agents of social change. The chapter proposes an alternative pedagogy which gives students a way into previously inaccessible academic literacies and teaches them how to use those literacies to create counternarratives which inform a sense of belonging in traditional classroom contexts and beyond.