Miss Ungunmerr has graciously consented to our publication of the following extracts from “Nature of Aboriginal Children”, the manuscript of which she is preparing for publication by the Northern Territory Education Department.

The following article discusses a program introduced at Millchester State School to allow children to borrow audio-visual equipment for home use. The principal, Mr. Jim Litzow, notes that,

No one has ever defined art in a way that has achieved universal acceptance, yet usually we operate as if this were not so.

Is hairdressing art? Is pottery art? Was Christo’s wrapping up of Little Bay art? Is architecture art? Is John Cage art? Is photography art? Is Andy Warhol’s “Flesh” art? Both “yes” and “no” have been answered to these questions.

From a child’s point of view, some of the main concepts of the language-experience approach to the teaching of reading are:

What I think about, I can talk about.

What I talk about can be expressed in other ways.

Anything I write can be read.

I can read what I write and what other people write.

What I say and write is as important to me as what other people have written for me to read.

This approach was adopted at Koonibba school at the beginning of last year in an endeavour to try to make reading more meaningful and interesting for the children. Excursions became a vital part of the language program. Each week the “classroom” was found somewhere within a hundred mile radius of the reserve. Places were visited along the coast as well as areas beyond the dingo-proof fence. Transport varied from trucks, land rovers, boats, canoes, buses, station wagons, on foot, utilities and a tugboat. The premises that reading should come from the child’s experiences and that all children want to read and write were adopted here. The child’s wish to communicate with others about the excursion was also capitalized upon.

Teenagers in the Western world are increasingly vocal in their demands for “relevance” in their school experience. Young Aboriginal men in their teens (although perhaps not fully conscious of what they are doing, or able to verbalize their feelings) are also “demanding” relevance in their school experience by several kinds of passive resistance. Two examples of this resistance are, that attendance at some Northern Territory schools is extremely low, and that young men trained in various trade courses are generally working in other trades. The educational system, of course, is not solely responsible for this situation, but we should respond to this new “post colonial” mood in Aboriginal communities. Examples of the “post colonial” era are: that Aboriginals know they are free to resist white pressures to work or attend school, or in fact to do anything “white”; that local Aboriginal councils are assuming much more responsibility for local management; that local Aboriginals cherish their new found power to say which white people can or cannot live in their community, and so on. Our prediction is that if schools don’t move with the times we will find that schools in Aboriginal communities will soon begin to appear to Aboriginals as the last “white strongholds” in these communities; that is “white” in terms of initiatives, in terms of ultimate authority, in terms of environmental setting, materials used, times at which things are done and content of what is taught.

For the white teacher to say, “But I’m open to Aboriginals taking more initiative”, is hardly practical because the Aboriginal teenager has not learned to be sufficiently aggressive or expressive to take initiatives in the face of the technologically dominant white teacher; therefore the first initiative-to-allow-initiative must be taken by the white teacher.

Yarrabah is an Aboriginal community of approximately 1200 people. The community, although close to Cairns, is isolated by a 3000 ft mountain range. The people identify more with the community than with individual tribes. A few crafts remain; Aboriginal languages are known but are not now spoken. So, in comparison with the communities further north, it is fairly westernized. The Grade 8 class is attached to the primary school. It is considered as a transition year from primary to secondary.

Before the first week of school was over it was evident there were vast differences in ability and attainment levels in the class of eleven boys and twenty-three girls. Through a variety of testing procedures, students’ performance levels in the basic skills of numeracy and literacy were tabulated to give a composite picture of the class.

Engaged as we are in the essential task of assisting Aboriginal children to decode and encode a language which presents many problems to them, it behoves us to strive for the one aspect that many teachers – particularly those new to the field of Aboriginal education, and those charged with the teaching of reading to our school beginners – appear to miss. The reference, of course, is to relevancy.

How many of us, in retrospect, have been guilty of peddling irrelevant or “foreign” reading materials during our careers? Are we still guilty? Do your children readily relate to the books you present for their use? If not, then the following thoughts and suggestions may have some value in your situation, be it one where a tribal language is still the main means of communication, one where a bi-lingual program is in force, or where English (or a non-standard form of it) is the main communication medium.

Something had to be done. The Gudschinsky approach, which we had been using for two years in our bilingual program, was working well with a group of children who happened to be both bright and making it to school five days a week. However, a large group had tried with the Gudschinsky method and, either because they were not yet ready for this approach to reading, or through irregular attendance, simply never got off the ground. The other children, in the middle, were off the ground but fluttering precariously.

The ‘never-off-the-ground’ group was given to me. It comprised over twenty children, about ten of whom would be at school on any one day. They were second and third year infants with whom I had an hour and a half every day in an open classroom. The children knew me well and I could speak to them in Gupapuyju (or in English to the one or two children from other settlements whose language was not Gupapuyju). Gupapuyju speaking children read in Gupapuyju, the others in English. Elements from the Ashton-Warner approach and the Language Experience approach were used.

The project I am about to describe was born out of a necessity to encourage children to realize that there are PEOPLE, PLACES and THINGS outside Camooweal. To most of us, this statement is obvious, but to some of the children of this insular community such an awareness appears to be neither important nor even necessary.

At the very outset let me assure you that this project was not our only method of teaching Social Studies, but rather an approach which we thought might stimulate the children of this area firstly to accept and then to enjoy learning about the ways of life of other people. Social Studies in a remote area can be uninspiring if initially the only method of gathering knowledge is through books and an occasional out-dated film. Since the children I teach respond to the visual approach, I decided to “paint-out” our Social Studies discussions. The place we chose for such an experiment was under the school where there were available large panels of wall space as well as several cement columns.

Rarely has an educational decade seen such dramatic reactions as in the proposal, acceptance and subsequent expansion of the involvement of aides in education. Many different terms are used – usually interchangeably – such as paraprofessionals, auxiliary staff, teacher assistants, etc.

The basic rationale was that the aide could free the teacher from the trivial, mundane administrative matters and thus release him for the more ‘professional’ areas of curriculum, programming and implementation. In many schools it is considered essential to distinguish between the professional and the non-professional; and this generally means between the instructional, and the non-instructional. Some leading educators are forcing a reappraisal of this thinking for they feel that the aide can provide significant assistance in the instructional field. And, as time progresses the extent of involvement in the instructional programme will probably increase.

Analysis of the argument for and against the employment of aides generally indicates that the employment is validated on educational grounds, whereas it is criticised on personal or administrative grounds. Whilst appreciating that education is concerned at present with the interaction of people with people, it is essential to establish the correct priorities: are teachers more important than the pupils they teach? Is the teacher who has an unfounded reservation because of possible side effects more important than the pupil who can learn more effectively because of the presence of an aide? Obviously the pupil is the prime consideration, because the task is the important thing! However most critics appear to show that the child is not the important factor.

In Vol. 4 No. 1, Ms Binnion discussed teacher-parent communication with particular reference to the Action Research Project into Secondary Education for Aborigines which was initiated in S.A. in 1972. During the course of the Action Research Project teachers in many other schools with Aboriginal secondary students were asked, via a questionnaire, for their opinions about a large number of factors relating to Aboriginal education. Consequently, this article reports the opinions of teachers in both the project schools and other schools with numbers of Aboriginal secondary students.

The following article is an extract from Mr. Lines’ dissertation for his Advanced Diploma Course at Torrens College of Advanced Education, Adelaide.