Throughout this exploration of the education of Aborigines the view is taken that school success means success in achieving the full range of goals envisaged in the establishment of schools and the determination of their programs:

The aim of bilingual education is to develop a person who can think, speak, read, write and act appropriately in the language and culture of both his home and the wider society. Therefore, although for sound educational reasons the first formal reading experiences of children in a bilingual program are provided in their mother-tongue and these activities are maintained and extended throughout the child’s school life, at an appropriate time a bridge to English literacy needs to be built. Once this is done the world of English literature should be explored as far as is possible for each individual child. Sarah Gudschinsky stresses the importance of the addition of English literacy skills for pre-literate groups within a wider society when she reminds us that

She has defined a literate person as one who

Teaching reading and writing to older Aboriginal children can be one of the most satisfying teaching tasks in the Northern Territory. Most of these students have a culturally different background from the teacher’s. Their perception of a topic therefore may be quite different from the teacher’s. A good teacher will value this difference and use it:

It is disturbing that some commentators on Aboriginal education in Australia draw the superficial conclusion that, “the school system has failed Aboriginal children very badly”.

There is abundant, undisputed evidence that Aborigines, as a group, consistently score much lower in English reading, writing and arithmetic tests than any other identifiable group in Australia. They leave school at an earlier age and at a lower achievement level than the national average.

As an educator it is not something that I am proud of – and I should say that most other educators would feel much the same way. It is the task of all of us who are involved in the education of Aborigines to do all in our power to rectify the situation. But it is too glib, too shallow by far, to heap all the blame for Aborigines’ low achievement on the schools, the school teacher or the school system.

Do those who make their sweeping condemnations suggest that all teachers, all schools, all the school systems across Australia – both government and non-government, have singly, and collectively failed the Aborigines? Is it claimed that in the 166 years since Governor Macquarie’s first school for Aborigines, successive generations of teachers have failed to ‘crack the code’, so to speak?

If so, isn’t this an incredible state of affairs? Can we really believe it to be true?

In an endeavour to provide a handy guide to available materials for secondary-aged students, a two-part review has been collated. It is anticipated that the following specific needs will be met.

The first problem that beginning teachers will face on ‘day one’ in the classroom is a communication barrier. Teachers fresh from universities and colleges of advanced education will find that the language they are using is too sophisticated for their students. Therefore they must be conscious of the need to simplify their own language while simultaneously improving the vocabulary of their students. The beginning teacher will also find that the majority of students use non-standard English. It should be noted, however, that the use of non-standard English is not a sign of backwardness. Peer pressure not to appear ‘flash’ is a strong factor in Aborigines maintaining their speech patterns.

Once the young teacher ‘gets his ear in’ he or she will find communication becomes easier. To speed this process I suggest that for the first few weeks the teacher spends a considerable amount of time listening to his or her students. Drama games such as ‘biographies’ and class debates on various topics are useful. It is also important that during this period the beginning teacher be honest and forthright about his or her own background. I found my Year 8 class extremely interested in my family and their background. A family photograph album is a good resource to stimulate class discussion. The students should be encouraged to bring in their family’s photographs. (Children from particularly impoverished backgrounds can be offered the use of a camera if they don’t have any family photographs.) These photographs can lead to the development of environmental readers for remedial readers.

Elliott is a small township in the Northern Territory situated on the Stuart Highway 260 kilometres north of Tennant Creek and 415 kilometres south of Katherine. It is on a flat tableland in a generally arid region. The town clusters around a police station, post office and store, clinic, school, supermarket, hotel, roadhouse and three petrol stations. The local church is the Australian Inland Mission.

About 50 non-Aboriginal people live in the town. Most of these are employed by government departments. While some Aboriginal families also live in Elliott, most of the Aboriginal population, which varies from 200–400 people, has settled in one of two villages to the north and south of town.

One hundred children attend the local school; more than 90% of these are of Aboriginal descent. Attendance figures for 1979–1980 indicate that mean attendance rates are 83% and 85% respectively; thus attendance at Elliott Primary School is uncharacteristically high when compared with the rest of the Northern Territory (Shimpo, 1978). Two Aboriginal teaching assistants and five non-Aboriginal staff teach combined classes from pre-school to year 7.

In this setting the Elliott Health Program developed out of the concerted and co-ordinated efforts of the school and local community health centre.

Like most teachers, I started my career using the old method of teaching spelling. Each week I would make up or find in a book a list of spelling words to be learnt by the class or group. Each day a different learning activity would be employed and on Friday the children would be tested. There are lots of difficulties with teaching by this method – so many, in fact, that like most teachers I gave it up after a while and for a long time didn’t really work on spelling at all. Probably the main problem was the wasted effort. Despite the teacher’s efforts selecting appropriate words for the class, it was usually uncomfortably clear that the words which each individual needed to learn to spell were seldom included at the right time. It seems that for every ten words a child had in his list, four of them he already knew, four he didn’t know and didn’t need to know, one he learnt and forgot during the weekend, and only one survived. This is a perfect example of something being almost impossible to teach when it is divorced from the meaningful situation.

So it became clear to me that, although it was important to teach spelling, the traditional formal methods seemed not to work very well. Another more serious problem that I noticed, especially with Aboriginal children, was their inability or unwillingness to make a reasonable attempt at spelling words they didn’t know. If they wanted to spell a word, most of them had efficient ways of finding it – looking at yesterday’s stories, asking friends or the teacher – but few of them would actually sit down and think about the problem themselves. It never seemed to occur to them that spelling could be worked out with a bit of thought; to them the answer was always out there somewhere and had to be located. Even traditional methods of teaching spelling do little to help children use their own imagination and thinking power in spelling because the words to be learnt are still provided fron an external source, the teacher.

What I was looking for was a method that

We would like to share with others our role as Aboriginal teacher aides at Healy State School, Mount Isa.

The administrative staff of the school has encouraged us to keep our roles and timetables very flexible. Our timetable changes as the needs of the Aboriginal children change within the school.

The Aboriginal population at school is 16%. Half of these children come under the heading of ‘assimilated Aboriginals’.

The suburb of Healy was built by the Mount Isa mining company for sale to mine employees. The Aboriginal children from these homes have equal housing and their parents have no trouble ‘fitting in’. They are accepted on their own worth along with children from first and second generation migrant families. These children could be called success stories but we see them as the result of equal opportunities.

Close to our school we have the ‘camping area’. These are the children we mainly work with in Reading and Maths. Within this area we have found two distinct groups. Families who say ‘I never had much schooling, so I always send the kids’, and families who see no benefit in schooling. From the first group children come on a regular basis and we are able to help individual members of the family to catch up and return to ordinary classroom activities, or keep them learning at a different level. The other group from this area do not see the benefits of school and have heavy social problems. Consequently we have a truancy problem with their children.