The following is an excerpt from the collection of critical essays from The Samuel Dewitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, and Justice

by Le’Passion Darby, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

February 9, 2020. After a fifteen-hour outbound flight from Chicago, I had finally landed in Sydney, Australia. My objective? To observe, photograph, and record material culture at Tranby National Indigenous Adult Education & Training. In my quest to study campus artifacts on six continents, I had arranged a three-day tour at Tranby after seeing it listed under “Australia” in “Students at the Margins and the Institutions that Serve Them: A Global Perspective” (Gasman & Castro Samayoa, 2015). Per Banning (2018), I would use my cellular phone to capture images of the art, architecture, and signs at Tranby, and later interpret those same images for the nonverbal messages they communicate to campus users. Quintessential to Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs), the built environment at Tranby made my task straightforward and engulfed me in an assemblage of opportunities to practice Banning’s (2018) methodology. This essay will explain that methodology and document Tranby’s history as an MSI. The bulk of this writing, however, will spotlight, pictorialize, and interpret the material culture at Tranby that I found most expressive. Of note, there were many photographs captured of Tranby that are referenced throughout the piece. All photographs corresponding with this piece can be found in this album.

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From the foreward by Belinda Russon
BA.LLB.LLM.SJD
CEO of Tranby National Indigenous Adult Education & Training, Sydney, Australia

Tranby values our connection to our ancestors who guide us as we shape and build a future for our students and their communities. As an Aboriginal woman, Aboriginal culture shapes how we see and understand the world. The Tranby campus and our campus artifacts are central to the notion that we teach through culture. The Aboriginal education pedagogy framework we have developed is supported by the Indigenous perspectives of knowledge and learning embedded in our educational programs and impactful community projects.

Read the full article here.