Doing and undoing reparative educational futures for First Nations teachers in Australia

This study explores the experiences of teachers and stakeholders involved with an Australian First Nations initial teacher education pathway with a long history of working to secure a reparative educational future. Using the lens of Decolonising Race Theory (DRT), we critically analyse interview data to identify ongoing tensions between DRT tenets of the logic of elimination and reparative activism and explain how these forces work to simultaneously create and undo reparative futures of education. Whilst not diminishing the gains that have been made through reparative activism over time, we argue that a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the ongoing interactions between settler-colonialism and reparative activism is required, with attention to the everyday, implicit, and explicit experiences of First Nations peoples to ensure much more than a restorative gloss to the future of Australian education.