Finding paths to indigenous classes (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Hi Greg, nice article!  How is it going? 
Phil Cash Cash
UofA
Quoting phil cash cash :

> 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
> Guardian Weekly
> http://education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/story/0,,2109049,00.html
>
> 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."


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ilat/attachments/20070625/706fb6ca/attachment.htm>