ABSTRACT

The Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) is a national, extra- curricular mentoring programme that is closing the educational gap for young Indigenous Australians. So what is AIME doing that is working so well? This article draws on a large-scale classroom ethnography to describe the pedagogies that facilitate the teacher–student relationships in this programme. We use Shawn Wilson’s theorisation of Indigenous ways of knowing in order to ‘unpack’ how these approaches succeeded in creating the egalitarian and trust-filled relationships reportedly experienced in the AIME programme.

Citation: McMahon, S., Harwood, V., Bodkin-Andrews, G., O’Shea, S., McKnight, A., Chandler, P. & Priestly, A. (2016): Lessons from the AIME approach to the teaching relationship: valuing biepistemic practice, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 25(1) pp. 43–58.