[EDLING:248] EducationGuardian.co.uk: Finding paths to indigenous classes

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Finding paths to indigenous classes
As Australian ministers look for ways to raise English skills among Aboriginal communities - and increase their access to jobs - Rob Burgess assesses how schools are helping bridge the learning gap
Friday June 22 2007
The Guardian


A child's first days at primary school usually involve some tears, but nothing a few kind words from the teacher can't remedy. Not so for many indigenous kids from Australia's more remote communities, who often arrive to find that the teacher speaks only a foreign language and expects them to speak it as well.

Acquisition of that language, English, remains a thorny problem for many remote indigenous communities in Australia and is often identified as contributing to a range of social ills - from low employment rates to constant friction with police and the courts, poor health, low life expectancy and even to communities failing to protect children from violence and sexual abuse.

Mal Brough, the federal minister for indigenous affairs, forced this issue into the open last month by announcing plans for a national policy to tackle truancy and improve English acquisition among remote indigenous children. Most controversially, he said he would consider withholding welfare payments from parents whose children skipped school.

"Many grandparents in remote communities have lamented to me the fact that their grandchildren don't have the language skills they themselves were provided with," Brough said. "The proposal relates to quarantining a portion of welfare payments to parents of children at risk to ensure the children are fed, housed, clothed and schooled. I'm urging states and territories to ensure indigenous children go to school. They pursue that responsibility for other children. Why should indigenous children be treated differently?"

Brough's plans met strong opposition from MPs and indigenous leaders. Why, asked the Aboriginal state MP Linda Burney, was the same government that removed funding for bilingual education programmes in the Northern Territory now concerned with getting students back into the classroom?

The Greens party leader, Bob Brown, accused the government of failing to value the languages that indigenous communities speak. "The neglect and even disdain for original Australian languages is chilling," he said.

Yet despite criticism of Brough's methods, the need to improve English in remote communities is widely supported. Vincent Forrester, a 55-year-old Aranda man based in Alice Spring, says English is an essential skill for the surprisingly numerous employment opportunities in remote areas, whether in mining, tourism or "traditional" work such as harvesting natural medicines from the bush. Forrester's career has encompassed indigenous curriculum development for schools and adult colleges, political activism, working as a specialist guide in the tourism industry and more recently working as an artist.

"My generation can read and write, but the younger ones cannot," he says. "The cost of living is exorbitant in the bush, so kids often turn up to school with no tucker in their bellies. Over 70% of these kids suffer from middle ear infections because of poor living conditions, so there are a lot of reasons they don't learn."

As a result, indigenous school-leavers miss out on jobs on their doorstep, says Forrester. "I talk to thousands of national and international visitors a year as a guide at the Alice Springs Desert Park and the response I get from them is, 'We want more access to Aboriginal people'. But if you look at the major tourist resorts, you won't see any indigenous people working there."

The campaign to get remote indigenous children back to school obscures the fact that several programmes have successfully done just that. One scheme enforces a "no school, no pool" policy that excludes truants from school swimming pools when they've skipped class. At the 1,500-strong Northern Territory community of Ngukurr, this policy saw attendance jump from 45% to 70% in 2005.

More subtle, though, is the move to make the educators and the materials covered in class less foreign to the students. Greg Dickson, a linguist who works in Ngukurr for the Katherine Regional Language Centre, is helping the local communities turn their oral culture into a range of learning materials, from story books to CD-roms.

These resources help students feel at home in the classroom, as do teachers who have learned a local language, if only the lingua franca of indigenous northern Australia - a heavily creolised English known as Kriol. Acquiring fluent Kriol is not easy, but even knowing the basics makes the classroom a less foreign environment, says Dickson.

Increasingly, indigenous teachers are becoming available to act as this bridge between cultures, although they face obstacles to a career in teaching that metropolitan graduates do not. "They can burn out pretty quickly, because non-local teachers rely so heavily on their local knowledge," says Dickson. "Also, all fully qualified teachers are supposed to be provided with accommodation, but there's not enough to go around. So if you're a local, you don't get an Education Department house - you keep living in your overcrowded house that just doesn't give you the space and time to be ready for work each day."

Training indigenous teachers often means starting with improving their English, says Tom Evison, deputy director of the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, which operates from six campuses across the Northern Territory. "Teacher registration in the Territory requires that Standard Australian English is the medium of instruction, so we have units of study to support all our students to make sure they have the level they need."

Some graduates will return to remote communities, says Evison, but many use their qualification to find work in cities. He hopes that some of them will later return to do language work, much of which is currently done by non-indigenous researchers.

Evison, like Dickson, says the bilingual skills of indigenous teachers are extremely important: "We accept that everyone needs to speak standard English, but we know that a facility for learning in the first language is a pathway into a second language. The two should be going hand in hand."

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