Prestigious scholarship for Goodstart Early Childhood Teacher Catherine Jones

Catherine Jones, the educational leader and early childhood teacher from Goodstart Early Learning Kurri Kurri has been awarded the NSW 2025 Premier’s Teachers Mutual Bank Aboriginal Education Scholarship. to support teachers in furthering their understanding and knowledge of Aboriginal education.

Ms Jones applied for the scholarship to engage more deeply with V2.0 of the Early Years Learning Framework, and its emphasis on culturally responsive pedagogy and the creation of culturally safe places through intercultural pedagogies. 

With over 20-years of teaching and leadership experience within the Early Childhood sector, and as an academic in the School of Education at Macquarie University, she aims to enhance not only her own practice but also provide valuable insights for the broader early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector.

“I want to make it really clear, I’m an experienced teacher, and I can put my hand up and say I don’t really get this. And I’m hoping that perhaps this makes other people feel better and think ‘she didn’t know, and she tried to find out, and maybe it’s not so scary’,” Ms Jones candidly shared.

“For a long time, it’s been important that we embed Aboriginal perspectives into the curriculum, but V2.0 asked us to take that much further and to incorporate Aboriginal ways of knowing, being and doing. This is a huge area that educators need to understand to be able to implement the Early Years Learning Framework authentically. It’s from the vision, right through the document. It’s not just one part of it,” she continued.

“It’s our job, as non-indigenous people, to learn. We need to understand it and be able to implement it. It’s a whole different world view for me, coming from a Western perspective, to then be able to implement pedagogies that I haven’t been taught how to do. The framework talks a lot about place-based pedagogies. If I ask people what ‘place-based pedagogies’ are, a lot of people wouldn’t be able to answer that.”

Ms Jones will be focusing on engaging in a deep way with Aboriginal culture, exploring her own relationship with Country, and gaining more knowledge about creating culturally safe places.

“I will be spending a lot of time on and learning from Country,” she said. 

“Really trying to engage more with the Indigenous communities. Visiting schools and centres and gathering knowledge and resources to help rebalance the teaching that we’re doing.”

As well as focusing on her own community, Ms Jones will be going to several other sites across Australia and New Zealand and learning about what these critical place-based pedagogies look like in day-to-day practice.

This as ‘a chance of a lifetime’ is one which reflects her passion and commitment to making a meaningful impact in early childhood education. Of the seventeen teachers who received a scholarship, Ms Jones was one of only two from the Early Childhood sector. 

For others in the sector who are thinking about how to access or apply for opportunities such as these, her advice is “I don’t think it matters where you are in your learning journey. If you’ve got a passion and you’ve got a good idea to dive deeper, then I think you should go for it.” 

Information about the scholarship Ms Jones accessed is available here. This story was originally shared by Goodstart, and has been adapted to reshare here with permission. For the original please see here.