Whiteness and national identity: teacher discourses in Australian primary schools

The study examines how white teachers talked to children about national
identity and cultural diversity by drawing on qualitative research with eightto
12-year-old students and their teachers from four Australian primary
schools with different racial, ethnic and cultural demographics. Despite a
range of explicit and implicit approaches that fostered different levels of
critique among students, teachers often communicated Australian national
identity as commensurate to white racial and Anglo-Australian cultural
identity. We identified three main approaches teachers used to talk about
national identity and cultural diversity: cultural essentialism, race elision
and a quasi-critical approach. We conclude that the wider education system
needs to develop a more formal curriculum structure that guides teachers
in developing a better awareness of the power of white normativity, and to
critically and explicitly counter discourse and practice that centres whiteness
as foundational to dominant conceptualisations of national identity.