The Kinship On-Line Project and Aboriginal Community Engagement

This paper is an account of Aboriginal community engagement in relation to the design and development of a Project being undertaken through an Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) grant to develop Indigenous Online Cultural Teaching & Sharing (Kinship On-line Project), which is an on-line cultural education workshop based around Aboriginal Kinship systems used in Australia. The Project is built on an existing face-toface interactive presentation based on the theme of Australian Aboriginal Kinship systems developed by Lynette Riley. The on-line cultural education workshop is being designed as an experiential learning environment for two reasons. Firstly, there is a long denial of Aboriginal knowledges and their importance in contemporary Australia. Secondly, the experiential format is used in Aboriginal learning and is therefore an appropriate way of conveying these knowledge systems. The Project reflects where possible Aboriginal knowledge sharing processes, bringing this into mainstream teaching of humanities and social science related to subjects, such as sociology, law, education and social work. Aboriginal knowledge sharing has been adapted to this experiential learning environment via software design. The paper outlines the community engagement process for the Kinship On-line Project in the context of Indigenous methodological, epistemological and ethical considerations by juxtaposing Indigenous and western ways of teaching and research and exploring in greater detail the differences between them.