“Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor” - Indigenous students’ academic buoyancy and the locale of the learner

Oct 15, 2026

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Exploring academic buoyancy as an educational psychology concept, the article analyzes how Indigenous secondary students in remote schooling overcome everyday challenges. Eleven Indigenous students share experiences of schooling and describe capabilities used to navigate classroom demands while maintaining cultural positions. The study reframes commonly cited barriers such as the “shame factor” as agentic responses that build strategies for fear of failure. Drawing on Nakata’s cultural interface theory and focusing on learner agency, it extends resilience research toward academically buoyant capacities.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages20

Reading Time50 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

The locale of the learner

Agency and Indigenous student success

Resilience, academic buoyancy and Indigenous students

“Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor”: Indigenous students’ academic buoyancy and the locale of the learner Tamara Sam and Ailie McDowall Indigenous Education and Research Centre, James Cook University, Room 15 Building 301, 1 James Cook Drive, Douglas, QLD 4811, [email: ailie. mcdowall@jcu.edu.au](email: ailie. mcdowall@jcu.edu.au) This article explores how academic buoyancy, a concept from the educational psychology literature, can be used to understand the experiences of Indigenous secondary students’ schooling. Academic buoyancy refers to students’ ability to overcome everyday challenges of schooling. In this project, 11 Indigenous secondary students in a remote school shared their experiences of school and how they developed a range of capabilities to overcome the everyday challenges. Factors often seen as cultural impediments for Indigenous students, such as the “shame factor”, can be viewed as agentic attempts by Indigenous students to develop new capacities, such as a strategy to deal with the fear of failure. It is through these attempts that students develop strategies to negotiate the classroom without giving up their own cultural positions. This article extends earlier research on resilience to focus on the development of academically buoyant capacities that allow students to better navigate the complexities at the locale of the remote Indigenous learner. Keywords: Indigenous students, cultural interface, academic buoyancy, locale of the learner, Indigenous education, remote schooling Introduction Indigenous students’ schooling is shaped by many layers of outside influence. From the decisions that policy-makers, regional offices, school leaders and teachers make; to families’ histories of and engagement in formal schooling; to changing curricula: these factors shape Indigenous students’experiences and how the students are represented by those around them, long before they step foot in the classroom. The field of Indigenous educational research has helped to show how these influences give shape to the locale of the Indigenous learner. The current research, reported here, shifts the focus from the outside to the students, exploring more closely how students develop the capabilities they need to successfully navigate their locale and to move through the everyday challenges of schooling. The locale of the learner draws on Nakata’s theory of the cultural interface, a guiding framework for this study. As Nakata (2007, p. 10) describes, Indigenous learners are “already variously constituted and positioned discursively to take up the knowledge which has inscribed their position”. Many Indigenous students are familiar with Indigenous practices and ways of thinking, talking, sharing language, and relating to others. They are also familiar with Western epistemologies, through everyday living and social and cultural practices. The tension of moving between the two—“a transforming process of endless instances of learning and forgetting, of melding and keeping separate, of discarding and taking up, of continuity and discontinuity”(Nakata, 2007, p. 10)—gives form to the locale in which learning takes place. By turning the focus to students’ agency, we can better see how Indigenous students navigating the school system are presented with unique challenges. Agency can be defined as an educational outcome that places autonomy, individual development, self-determination and self-direction central to learning (Crockett, 2023). It describes the ability of a learner to identify valued goals and desired outcomes and to proactively, purposefully and effectively pursue those goals and outcomes (Chuter, 2020) . For Indigenous students, learner agency becomes another strategy that they need to master to be able to push forward into uncharted waters. A focus on agency provides a way to think about students’ challenges that moves beyond a binary of taking a deficit-or strengths-based approach. Instead, challenges re

FAQs

What does academic buoyancy mean in this article?

Academic buoyancy refers to students’ ability to overcome everyday challenges of schooling through internal and adaptive capacities.

How does the article treat factors like the “shame factor”?

It views such factors as agentic attempts by Indigenous students to develop new capacities, including strategies for dealing with fear of failure.

Which framework explains the “locale of the learner”?

The article draws on Nakata’s theory of the cultural interface, describing learning as occurring within a tension-filled space between Indigenous and Western epistemologies.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by Kurz