Aboriginal students enter schools and other educational institutions with a rich linguistic repertoire, including traditional languages, creoles (e.g., Kriol) and Aboriginal English. This dialect of English is the first language spoken by many Aboriginal people in Australia, although it should be noted that there are regional varieties of this. When communicating with others, Aboriginal people often move between their different languages and dialects by ‘Slipping and sliding’. This is a term coined during my PhD study to express how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academics and students engage, move and interact within a both-ways Indigenous Tertiary Educational Context by drawing on their full linguistic repertoire. In the current literature it is now most often called ‘Translanguaging’.

Slipping and sliding within Aboriginal and Torries Strait Islander inter-cultural environments is not new and certainly something individuals become adept in as part of their everyday lives, often triggered by the communication demands of diverse contextual situations. It is both ordinary, but also powerful - a simple, subtle and organic phenomenon. It is so ordinary that it may go unnoticed by Aboriginal people themselves and even by non-Aboriginal people.

Although there are cultural rules, processes and protocols that are instigated when Aboriginal people come together, their responses also can be innovative as they ‘slip and slide’ according to the cultural dynamics of interactions. In this way they can use their language to minimise obstacles, barriers and boundaries and instead engage in authentic, meaningful and genuine conversations.

In this presentation I explore the ordinariness and innovation of ‘slipping and sliding’ as Aboriginal students and educators embrace Indigenous ways of being, doing and knowing to make meaning, create new knowledge and establish conceptual understandings in teaching and learning spaces.