At an In-Service Course for Teachers of Aboriginal children held in Perth in February 1973, Mr. D. Ibbotson reported on the study being conducted by his College. In this study, teachers in the State were asked to provide information relating to their pupils, on

(a) general difficulties and problems of language, behaviour, attendance, organization, parental support (or lack of it).

(b) problems, interest and successful ways and means in curriculum areas of Spoken English, Written English, Mathematics.

Teachers were also asked to comment on curriculum areas of greatest and least success.

The following paper is based on experiences gained in schools in North East Arnhem Land. While it is likely that the situations as described are applicable to other areas, the authors do not claim that there will always be direct comparisons. Too often the wider Australian community regards Aboriginals as one people with one set of common needs whereas even limited experience soon reveals a great diversity amongst these people in terms of language, customs and environment and consequently a great diversity of needs and necessary solutions.

In schools throughout Australia the desirability of and need for community involvement become more apparent every day. To quote the Karmel report Schools in Australia,

“After almost one hundred years of public schooling a reappraisal of the relationship of the school to the wider society is taking place in Australia, as it is in most industrialized nations. The isolation of schools is being questioned as is also the idea that education should be confined to formal institutions and concentrated heavily upon those who have not yet entered employment.”

We have now reached the stage where the desirability of community involvement in education can be taken by most as a self evident truth and we can look”back in wonder at the times when such an idea was radical or not even considered.

In Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory the opportunities for involving the community in the school are probably greater than in the wider Australian society. For example, the families are easy to contact, they are generally open to suggestion and they do not have preconceived notions as to the “proper” way in which a school should be run. However, too often we have taken community involvement to mean the fund raising activities of Parents’ Committees and left the real problems of initiating genuine involvement well alone. (The activities of the School Council at Hermannsburg are a notable exception; there may be others).

The Maitland Area School on central Yorke Peninsula, about one hundred miles from Adelaide, caters for students aged from five to sixteen or seventeen years. Of the five hundred and seventy students who attend, approximately eighty are part-Aboriginal children from the Point Pearce community some twelve miles away. About half of these are secondary students.

Two years ago a secondary student from Point Pearce spent a year at a Maori college in New Zealand and then returned to Maitland to complete his fourth year P.E.B. Certificate. He is now undertaking his matriculation studies in Adelaide. Because of the obvious success of this project, the scheme is being continued this year. Although some very generous support has been given by various airline companies and other organizations, the Point Pearce Aboriginal community has a major responsibility in raising funds to cover the cost of the student’s board and other geheral living requirements.

Earlier this year, in April, as a result of an idea of one of the school staff members, it was decided to arrange a public fashion parade by the secondary Aboriginal girls as a fund-raising activity for the New Zealand project. The girls and their parents liked the idea and planning commenced.

Increasing attention has been given in recent years to the effects of various factors upon the academic achievement of ethnic minority group children. In those Australian states where there are schoolswith significantly large proportions of Aboriginal children, special programs have been devised and implemented.

The Department of Education in Queensland has been involved throughout the past decade in the development and refinement of both techniques and materials designed to foster the academic attainments of Aboriginal children. One program involved the employment of Aboriginal adults from a local community to work along side of teachers in and out of the classrooms as para-professional teachers’ assistants. This program is currently in the ninth month of a twelve month pilot study in the Cherbourg Community School.

The role of these assistants is regarded as being essentially mediatory. Primarily the objective has been to increase the degree of home/school and parent/teacher contact with a view to closing the knowledge and understanding gap existing between the school and the community generally. It is hoped to increase parental awareness and appreciation of the aims, ideals, and processes operating within the school environment. Conversely, it is hoped to acquaint the teachers with a more thoroughgoing understanding of the cultural, socio-economic, and familial backgrounds of the children they teach.

In implementing the project it has been considered that changes within the school itself can have only limited effect on the educational development of children, and that the ultimate success of any intervention program depends on the involvement of the children’s families.

The Carpentaria Kindergarten is the Community Preschool Centre at Normanton, in north-west Queensland. It was established in 1970 under the auspices of the Anglican Church with financial assistance from the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Canberra. Of the fifty children enrolled approximately 80% are of Aboriginal descent. All children in the town are encouraged to attend after their third birthday. The younger children attend three afternoons a week, while the older children attend five morning sessions a week. In most cases children have two years of preschool education before they enter the primary school.

The preschool is an instrument of integration in this community which has a 50% Aboriginal population. It is recognized that the principle of community integration is based on the movement of different types within a community together, with each group making a real contribution. Consequently the Aboriginal people must not disappear in a process of absorption, but move into the total community with a definite identity. The preschool plays a very real and definite support role in this process of integration in the following ways:

The following comments on the working out of the Bilingual Program were made by Manydjarri during discussion with the Headmaster. Questions were asked several times and in a variety of ways where necessary in order to elicit Manydjarri ‘s own feelings.

1. WORKING WITH EUROPEANS

“I have been very happy working with Michael Christie. I have been comfortable. He has given me a lot of help. We have been happy working together. The other Aboriginal teacher has been happy too. She wants some training though.”

2. THE CHILDREN

Interest level? “Very interested in learning in Gupapuygu but they are restless. But this is just their way of life”.

How fast are they progressing? “Children are learning faster in the second term than in the first term. They are progressing in all areas of their work.”

What about their English? “Not sure, ask Michael.”

I feel rather diffident in opening this topic as there are some of you who are far more experienced in this field than I am.

I think that, in talking about the Aboriginal people, some basic premises should be stated first. The Aboriginal people had a highly developed tribal system and a much higher ethical structure than the white man has. By contrast, an excellent study of Australian values is contained in a book by Ronald Conway, a Melbourne Psychologist, called The Great Australian Stupor. His equation of the Australian value system is as follows:

Material Wealth = Pleasure = Happiness= Reason for Living.

He writes –

Whereas the Aboriginal trod his enchanted earth for centuries on tip-toe, leaving the delicate balance of nature of a tired continent intact, the white settler preferred to greet the touchiness of Australian climate and soil with a murderous impatience.

When the white man came to this continent he took the best land for agricultural purposes. He broke up the tribal system so that the Aboriginal people were left leaderless and landless. Now we expect, in our schools and other aspects of our society, that the Aboriginal people will bridge the gap to a super-industrial civilization (with its questionable value system) in two or three generations.

The author of this article wishes to point out that his comments are taken from his own direct experiences involved in the Aboriginal situation in West Australian Schools. They are not necessarily, therefore, the views of the West Australian Education Department.

It appears that there are several groups when one talks about Aboriginal children in general in Australia. Any person who has any Aboriginal blood is termed an Aboriginal. These groups have different hereditary and environmental backgrounds and thus give differing responses to stimuli.

In Western Australia, Aboriginals are of either country or town origin. There are vast differences between a third generation town Aboriginal and one who has only just walked in from the desert. Again one must differentiate between town and mission Aboriginals and also between the full blood and the part Aboriginal. The situation is s vast that one can speak about Aboriginals and their education in Western Australian Schools, only in general terms.

School can have a tremendous influence on the Aboriginal child. It can be a sanctuary or a place which he tries to avoid. The task of the educator is to make school interesting, yet a useful means of conveyance into 1973. Personal experiences indicate that success lies in motivation – kindness and interest. There is a broad spectrum for Aboriginal children in academic and social achievement. Many are school leaders, have high reading ages and excel in dance, music, sport, art, crafts and written work. Under ideal situations it appears that many Aboriginal children have greater potential than some white children. There must then be other factors which cause Aboriginals to fail to make full use of their talents and abilities.

Do Aboriginal children feel competent and confident in the school setting? Where do these feelings, positive or negative, originate?

Do teachers believe these children are competent and worthy? Does it matter what the teachers think?

Does a child’s concept of himself influence his success in the school setting?

Can schools help Aboriginal children feel more positively about themselves?

The following research report is not directly addressed to all of the above questions, but is an interesting study which compares the self-concepts of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children.

Education outside the four walls of the classroom has long been an integral part of the program of social change at Yuendumu School.

In mid October, while 80 children from the middle part of the school went on a trip to Alice Springs, the Post Primary School undertook an educational experiment which lasted for three days. There were 35 young men, 20 young women, 4 Teaching Assistants and 5 teachers involved. We chose one of the most dilapidated empty houses in the village, and undertook to renovate it. It stood empty and bare in a line of houses. Not a window or door or chimney adorned any of the 6 houses in the line; the water tanks were broken, the gardens arid, and the walls and floor, both inside and outside, were covered with unsubtle graffiti and an occasional graphic display.

The school strongly feels that it must be a servant of the community. Its service must be conspicuous, and its actions undoubtedly speak more persuasively than words. So we undertook the venture in the belief that education will bring tangible results,

Our specific aims were two fold:

a. to repair the house, then give it to a young married man who applied for it and promised to look after it.

b. to show that anybody can repair a house, so long as he is prepared to work. In other words, we hoped that others would follow suit.

Since Amata Aboriginal school commenced late in 1968 we have followed a policy of respecting the wishes of the parents. One such wish was that their children learn to read and write their own language as well as learn to speak, read and write English: Hence, the policy regarding language teaching at Amata school stands: “to teach literacy in both languages.”

Basically, the means by which we attempt to meet the demands of this policy consist of beginning all instruction in and about Pitjantnatjara. Then, once a level of proficiency has been attained, (mainly a sound phonetical grasp of Pitjantjatjara) the particular child is moved to a class where instruction is almost entirely in and about English.

Thus, the infant grades’ language lessons are mainly Pitjantjatjara. We have been fortunate in the past to have a European teacher who could, before two years in the area, speak Pitjantjatjara fluently. She could, thereby, teach the infant children about Pitjantjatjara.

Now we have Aboriginal teacher aides who are doing the same job, with a European teacher as part of the teaching team.

Once a child is proficient in Pitjantjatjara the next move is into grade 3 where European teachers, with the assistance of an aide, take over the child’s instruction. In fact, by this stage, the child has attained a few phrases of English speech and can write some basic words.

Presently, the grade 3’s (for want of a better title) range in age from nine to sixteen years, and are divided into a class for boys and a separate class for girls, this being the expressed desire of the boys. It is mainly the grade 3 boys’ class which will be discussed here. However, most of what is mentioned is also applicable to the class of girls.

Several readers of the Journal have asked for reports on overseas projects which would be of interest in Australia. Mr. Amery agreed to provide such a report on the Bough Rock Demonstration School in Arizona. Rough Rock has been cited as one of the most dramatic attempts “to achieve community control in a school serving a disadvantaged, largely uneducated minority”.

An action-research program currently going on at the University of Queensland is seeking to help Aboriginal mothers extend their vital role as primary educators of their own children. A number of parent educators are working at home with the mothers on ways in which they can introduce their children to basic concepts they will need at school. Three of the parent educators, themselves Aboriginal mothers, talk here about what they think schools can do for their children.

In the first issue of The Aboriginal Child at School extracts from the Report were presented to show the rationale of the bilingual education program and the major recommended model, showing progression in the use in the school of both the Aboriginal and the English languages.

The extracts below show the Advisory Group’s conception of the teaching team, and of the separate but complementary roles of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal teaching members.