Community eLearning Modules
Although the original grant funding for these eLearnings was designed to assist social workers, the Community Modules invites all participants – across professions and backgrounds – to engage critically with the ongoing impacts of colonisation, and the strengths, governance systems, and knowledges that existed long before invasion and that continue in First Peoples Communities today. Co-designed with 91 First Peoples contributors from across Australia — including Yolŋu Elders and Community members from Yirrkala — these eLearnings will support anyone preparing to work with First Peoples and Communities.
MODULE 1
Precolonisation and Colonisation
This module invites participants to engage critically with the ongoing impacts of colonisation, and the strengths, governance systems, and knowledges that existed long before invasion. Rather than positioning First Peoples through deficit or trauma narratives alone, this learning foregrounds the complexity, diversity, resilience and continuity of First Peoples Communities, Cultures, and systems of care.
MODULE 2
Navigating Student Placement Reality
This module supports students to prepare for placement in First Peoples Communities through culturally responsive, relational, and reflective practice, and can be used by field practioners and/or students. Placement in First Peoples contexts is not simply about learning new skills. It involves listening deeply, building respectful relationships, understanding the ongoing impacts of colonisation, and recognising the strengths, knowledges, and sovereignty of First Peoples and Communities.
MODULE 3
Sovereign Practice
Sovereign practice is not simply about including First Peoples perspectives within existing systems. It asks practitioners to consider who holds authority, whose knowledge is privileged, who benefits from practice, who makes decisions, and how systems may continue colonial harms. This module encourages culturally responsive, reflective, and relational engagement grounded in self-determination, respect, humility, reciprocity, and collective responsibility.
MODULE 4
Bringing Country into Everyday Work
This learning invites participants to slow down, reflect and consider how Country shapes ways of living, working, relating, and caring for one another. This is not simply a module about including culture within existing systems. Instead, it asks practitioners to think critically about how workplaces, professions, and services have often been built through disconnection — from Country, Community, kinship, reciprocity, and relational accountability.
MODULE 5
Global Solidarity
Global solidarity is more than inclusion or awareness. It involves building reciprocal relationships grounded in accountability, humility, justice, and collective care. Throughout this module, participants will critically reflect on shared humanity and different global perspectives on social work, care, and wellbeing, and how practitioners work together across cultures and communities in respectful and ethical ways.