A guided path to Indigenous curriculum
UNE has an innovative new AI tool to assist in the important work of integrating Indigenous perspectives into university curriculum.
Building Indigenous perspectives into curriculum is a specialist academic skill, and one many academics have had little structured support to develop. The work needs to be academically rigorous and grounded in a local context. A new AI assistant built by UNE's Oorala Aboriginal Centre offers a structured way in. It works as a reflective scaffold that guides educators through their own thinking, because the diversity of First Nations knowledge systems and the depth of understanding required for genuine integration mean a generic AI-generated answer would undermine the exercise of indigenising curriculum.
Reflection first, answers second
The Indigenous Voice Assistant (IVA) is a Madgwick-based tool that guides educators, question by question, through considering how Indigenous perspectives might fit within their discipline. It suggests relevant Indigenous scholars and contemporary published work, points to local community connections and prompts reflection on why a particular approach might or might not be appropriate.
"It's more about how you might start that process of self-education and how you might be able to put things into your units," says Kate Carter, Academic Programs Co-ordinator at Oorala, who developed IVA with Lecturer Dr Vanessa Sewell and former Academic Coordinator Guido Posthausen. "We've been approached by academics who bring their unit content to us seeking reassurance they are ‘doing it right’... What this tool does is direct them to relevant sources and helps them articulate what they want to do with their unit material."
What IVA will not do is provide a ready-made answer. The nature of the material - spanning many hundreds of distinct First Nations groups, knowledge systems and communities - means any generic or definitive response risks the kind of homogenisation and oversimplification that the tool is built to counter. If an educator asks it to simply "indigenise" their content, the assistant's response is direct: "Sorry, that's not my role."
Instead, it asks the educator to consider their discipline, identify where an Indigenous perspective might be relevant, and articulate why, directing them to contemporary published work that preferences Indigenous authors and to local community engagement.
A rights-based quality standard
IVA is built on a rights-based approach to education drawn from the research of Professor Peter Anderson, UNE's Pro Vice-Chancellor Indigenous, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That framework distinguishes between a student's right to education, their right in education - where their identity is treated as an asset - and their right through education, measured by outcomes defined by Indigenous excellence.
Framed this way, indigenising curriculum becomes a matter of institutional accountability and academic quality rather than individual goodwill. The standard applies across the university, and the capability to meet it has to be built, which is where IVA comes in.
Building professional agency
Professor Anderson's central argument is that IVA's value lies in what it develops in the educator.
"The Indigenous Voice Assistant is an engine for professional agency," he says. "It provides the architectural scaffold for educators to move from uncertainty to genuine expertise in curriculum design. By doing this work, we are ensuring that Indigenising the curriculum is no longer seen as a niche task, but as a core academic competency and a measure of institutional quality."
The design reflects that. IVA gives educators the means to take ownership of their own curriculum design, moving away from dependency and towards informed stewardship of the material they teach.
It also shifts a well-documented pattern in universities, where Indigenous academics are called on - formally and informally - to advise non-Indigenous colleagues on matters of culture and curriculum. That labour is often unrecognised and can detract from their own research and career development. A scaffold that builds capability in non-Indigenous educators changes where that work sits.
Dr Sewell notes the tool's flexibility within her own teaching. "Guido and I were getting it to help create lesson plans and it would leave slots of where we could include Indigenous perspectives," she says. She has also been using IVA within Oorala's teaching units to generate contemporary reading lists that preference Indigenous authors across different fields.
Fourteen months of testing
IVA's development began in April 2025 as part of a HEPPP (Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program) project focused on culturally responsive pedagogy for academics. The initial build was straightforward, but validation needed to be comprehensive.
The team spent over a year testing and refining the assistant against a wide range of inputs. Dr Sewell, a proud Worimi woman and recipient of Science and Technology Australia's Superstar of STEM recognition, was closely involved in the adversarial testing, systematically probing the assistant's boundaries to ensure it responded appropriately to any input.
"We tested it well from April last year until now," Dr Sewell says. "It's been a long process and I think we have a great tool now."
Indigenous academics across UNE also tested the tool, including Traci Travers, Indigenous Lecturer and Biripi woman with Kamilaroi and Anaiwan connections, and Professor Anderson. The team refined IVA's responses iteratively, stripping back resources that overwhelmed the reflective process and tightening its boundaries until it handled edge cases consistently.
The team also worked to prevent the kind of broad, homogenising responses that are a well-documented risk when AI engages with Indigenous content. IVA is connected to UNE's Acknowledgement of Country guidelines and consistently directs users to consider the specific Country they are on, and the local communities connected to it.
"We're talking about hundreds of different groups of people," Kate says. "No one thing can be broadly ascribed across the diverse populations of First Nations people."
What comes next
IVA has not yet been formally launched across UNE but is already in active use. The team is now working with LabNext70's Mitchell Smidt and Shannon Tyrrell on making IVA available through the Madgwick dashboard and exploring how its design principles could inform other curriculum tools.
When the team presented IVA at the STARS conference, interest from other universities was strong. "I think there's a lot of awareness out there and people are keen to get started," Kate says.