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Literacy, Genocide and the Media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2015

Michael J. Christie
Michael J. Christie*
Affiliation:
Teacher-Linguist Yirrkala Community School, PO Box 896, Nhulunbuy, NT 0881.
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Extract

The structures of a traditional school curriculum, timetable, and teaching practices can, by their very nature, be destructive of Aboriginal identity and traditional Aboriginal education, even when, on the surface, the content of the school curriculum is Aboriginal. This article explores the idea that the processes of reading and writing and making books, movies and videos can also be very destructive of Aboriginal identity when these things are controlled by the imagination of white educators and media makers.

Type
Section Two
Information
The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , August 1994 , pp. 44 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press or the authors 1994

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References

1 By traditional Aboriginal education I mean the ongoing traditional processes whereby Aboriginal people have always learnt what it means to be Aboriginal. This traditional education has been at work for the past 30.000 years, and continues, all over Australia, in Aboriginal families and communities everywhere. Schooling may help or it may undermine this traditional Aboriginal education, especially in urban and rural areas where schools often do not acknowledge the strength and validity of contemporary Aboriginal cultures.

For discussion contrasting traditional Aboriginal Education with school curriculum practises, see “Aboriginalising Post Primary Curriculum”, The Aboriginal Child at School. Vol. 16 No. 5, October/November 1988. pp. 3-16.

2 A recent address by Stephen Harris "Alternative Literatures?" (Joint Australian Reading Association and Australian Association for the Teaching of English, National Conference, Darwin, (1989) looks at different cultural uses of literacy around the world, and introduces the possibilities of new varieties and functions of Aboriginal literacy.

Teacher-Linguist Yinkala Community School, PO Box 896, Nhulunbuy. NT 0881.