Ei-iE

The World Indigenous Peoples’ Conference in Education (WIPCE) was held this year on the traditional lands of the Kaurna Nation, the original people of the Adelaide plains, at Tarndanya (place of the red kangaroo), Adelaide, Australia. WIPCE is the largest and most diverse Indigenous education forum in the world.

The EI delegation to the Conference consisted of over 70 education unionists, attending both in-person and online. More than 2,300 delegates from 17 countries attended the Conference this year. Education International and our affiliates thank the Kaurna people for welcoming us onto their traditional lands and pay respects to Elders past and present.

The WIPCE is a triennial event held in different places around the world. Since its establishment in 1987, participants are Indigenous leaders, teachers and academics, and their allies, who celebrate and share diverse cultures, traditions, knowledge, and strategies for Indigenous Peoples’ education. El and its member organisations have attended the conference since its first edition and use it as a space to liaise, engage, and strategise with members on EI’s future work fighting for the rights of Indigenous Peoples in and through education.

This year’s theme was Indigenous Education Sovereignty: Our Voices... Our Futures, with four subthemes of Sovereignty, Voice, Youth and Futures. These themes drove the main programmatic focus of topics discussed, with international perspectives presented. Language revival, research methodologies, and decolonisation were other prominent topics.