Developing students’ cultural competence through embedded emergent learning

Universities are increasingly including Indigenous cultural competency as a graduate learning outcome for students. Undergraduate degrees incorporate specifically designed subjects to achieve these learning outcomes but their success has yet to be validated. This chapter describes the successful implementation of emergent learning in Indigenous culture through completion of assignments in non-Indigenous subjects. For an assessment item in their course, final year advertising students were briefed to develop a marketing communications strategy to encourage Indigenous student enrolments in Bachelor of Communication courses. Students were required to research attitudes of potential Indigenous students to develop their campaign recommendations. The impact their findings had on these students, through this embedded emergent learning experience, was significant. They were deeply moved by their learning about problems facing Indigenous students. A second cohort of marketing communications students was also briefed on an Indigenous project. This also required investigative research into Indigenous issues by the students, with similar emergent learning outcomes. Students made progress in their journey towards Indigenous Cultural Competence. This was achieved by embedding the learning into real life problems (in these cases, research for assessment tasks), by motivating students to carry out their own investigation to answer their own questions, through experiential situations and Emergent Learning. Educators could consider this model to achieve a shift of Indigenous cultural perspective, awareness and competence, by embedding Aboriginal education into non-Indigenous subjects.