Vol.:(0123456789) The Australian Educational Researcher https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-019-00360-0 1 3 A courageous conversation with racism: revealing the racialised stories of Aboriginal defcit for pre‑service teachers Sheelagh Daniels‑Mayes 1 Received: 16 October 2018 / Accepted: 13 November 2019 © The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc. 2019 Abstract Teacher educators continue to debate the most efective strategies to assist teachers to become confdent educators of Aboriginal students, and Aboriginal content and perspectives. Recently, pre-service teachers have begun to be taught cultural respon- siveness with varying degrees of success. The paper is created from (1) data gath- ered from ethnographic research; (2) the existing literature; (3) my lived experience of being an Aboriginal teacher educator; and (4) my own experiences with racism and oppression. The therapy narrative technique of externalising conversations is used in this paper to facilitate a conversation with the identifed problem of racism. The resulting script is a dialogue between an Aboriginal teacher educator and the Master Storyteller Racism, with the ‘audience’ consisting of pre-service teachers. The paper seeks to bring together, in one location, a number of socio-cultural and socio-historical events and narratives regarding Aboriginal peoples and their cul- tures. It is argued that if the many guises of racism that continue to perpetuate a system that works towards under-educating Aboriginal students are not revealed and disrupted, then a counterstory of Aboriginal education success will remain silent. Keywords Aboriginal education · Counterstory telling · Critical race theory · Externalising conversations · Pre-service education * Sheelagh Daniels-Mayes sheelagh.daniels-mayes@sydney.edu.au http://sydney.edu.au/education_social_work/about/staf/profles/sheelagh.daniels-mayes.php 1 Sydney School of Education and Social Work, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney, Room 716 Address: A35 - Education Building, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia