Local Knowledge and Wisdom in Higher Education

Bob Teasdale has taught at Flinders University, Adelaide, for the past thirty years. He is currently an associate professor in the School of Education and the director of the Flinders University Institute of International Education. He has worked extensively in indigenous Australian settings, and in the island nations of the South Pacific. For the past decade Bob has served as a consultant to UNESCO. He assisted the Education Division to develop its response to the UN World Decade for Cultural Development, and with his wife Jennie is currently coordinating the UNESCO Teacher Education for Peace Project in the Asia-Pacific region. Zane Ma Rhea is a lecturer and consultant in cultural diversity at the National Centre for Gender and Cultural Diversity, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. After an early career working with profoundly deaf people in Australia and the United Kingdom, she ran a vegetarian restaurant in Spain. Returning to Australia she completed a graduate diploma in Aboriginal education, an honours degree in sociology and a PhD at Flinders University, Adelaide. Her doctorate explored a cross-cultural understanding of wisdom through research about the higher education relationship between Australia and Thailand. She was awarded a Smuts Visiting Fellowship in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge, focusing her research on the exchange of academic ideas amongst Commonwealth nations. Zane has published a number of chapters and articles about how academic ideas are exchanged as gifts and commodities between cultures, the relationship between Buddhism, feminism and post-modern theory, and how university ideas are produced, reproduced, disseminated and legitimated in a globalised world.

• About the Authors. Preface: contextualising the dialogue (V.L. Masemann). A dialogue between the local and the global (Z. Ma Rhea, B. Teasdale). The indigenisation of trainee teachers in Papua New Guinea (M.A. Mel). Universities and curriculum localisation in Nusa Tenggara Timur, Indonesia (E. Kopong, B. Teasdale). Towards a new pedagogy: pacific cultures in higher education (K.H. Thaman). Aboriginal philosophy in Australian higher education: its own place in its own time (M. Slade, D. Morgan). New approaches to university research in indigenous settings: an example from Papua New Guinea (Yasuko Nagai). Indigenous rights and higher education in Australia: 'not just black and white' (P. Gale). Higher education as a collective resource for the Harakmbut of Amazonian Peru (S. Aikman). Local knowledges in Vietnamese higher education: a case study of two teacher education programs (G. Ovington). Transforming African universities using indigenous perspectives and local experience (B. Brock-Utne). Dominant and subjugated knowledges in Indian higher education: a preliminary analysis (P. Ninnes et al.). The Cuban University and educational outreach: Cuba's contribution to post-colonial development (A. Hickling Hudson). Contemporary knowledge production and reproduction in Thai universities: processes of adaptive balancing (Z. Ma Rhea). Bibliography. Index.