Leading and Managing Indigenous Education in the Postcolonial World

This book brings together the academic fields of educational leadership, educational administration, strategic change management, and Indigenous education in order to provide a critical, multi-perspective, systems level analysis of the provision of education services to Indigenous people. It draws on a range of theorists across these fields internationally, mobilising social exchange and intelligent complex adaptive systems theories to address the key problematic of intergenerational, educational failure.

Ma Rhea establishes the basis for an Indigenous rights approach to the state provision of education to Indigenous peoples that includes recognition of their distinctive economic, linguistic and cultural rights within complex, globalized, postcolonial education systems. The book problematizes the central concept of a partnership between Indigenous people and non-Indigenous school leaders, staff and government policy makers, even as it holds this key concept at its centre. The infantilising of Indigenous communities and Indigenous people can take priority over the education of their children in the modern state; this book offers an argument for a profound rethinking of the leadership and management of Indigenous education.

Leading and Managing Indigenous Education in the Postcolonial World will be of value to researchers and postgraduate students focusing on Indigenous education, as well as teachers, education administrators and bureaucrats, sociologists of education, Indigenous education specialists, and those in international and comparative education.

Zane Ma Rhea is Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of Indigenous Education and Leadership in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia.