Cosmopolitan theory and Aboriginal teachers’ professional identities

In this chapter we aim to examine how a cosmopolitan framework may reveal transformation of Indigenous knowledge and how this is related to the professional identities of Aboriginal teachers in Australia. Teacher education programs are drawn on to examine the ways in which Aboriginal teachers’ knowledge and identities are positioned. The authors come from very different parts of Australia; one from Sydney in the south of Australia and the other from Darwin in the north of Australia. One is Indigenous whose family are from the Aboriginal peoples of North West Arnhem land with rich historical links to early visitors in search of trepang (sea cucumber) and colonists to the Northern Territory seeking pastoral, forestry, and new natural resources; and the other is non-Indigenous with English immigrant parents who migrated to Australia in the postwar period as “10 pound poms” and whose own children have married into Japanese and Polish families. These common experiences of cultural transformation enable conversations about difference, power, and knowledge that emerge in the writing of this chapter.