Background Discussion

It is an irrefutable fact that most Aboriginal children are under-achieving scholastically. It is also fairly obvious that a contributing factor in this under achievement is poor literacy skills which can hold children back in most areas of school performance.

Many different reading schemes and approaches have been tried, including Bridging and Headstart programs, which have met with very little success in the long term. As a result it is all too easy for educators to fall back on the deficiency model and blame the child and the home. This is neither profitable nor an adequate explanation for the under-achievement of Aboriginal students.

Aboriginal teacher education is a distinctive educational activity. How distinctive Aboriginal teacher education needs to be and the forms it might take are a matter for action research (McTaggart and Garbutcheon-Singh, 1986) by Aboriginal teachers, their communities, and teacher educators working in Aboriginal schools, and from teacher education instititions. But there is experience available from which it is reasonable to propose some general principles which should guide immediate efforts in Aboriginal teacher education.

The pedagogical principles outlined below come from an action research project in Aboriginal teacher education conducted in the Northern Territory over the last two years. The project is known as D-Bate, the Deakin-Batchelor Aboriginal Teacher Education Program, a joint project of Batchelor College in the Northern Territory and the School of Education of Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria.

Is there a teacher in Australia who hasn’t, at some time or other, had a class who were bored and uninterested? While the students might find the lessons tedious, it’s certainly no fun for the teacher to be confronted with students who are listless, restless and convinced that what you have to say isn’t worth listening to.

In the Admission Studies course for Aborigines, the students were required to learn about meeting procedures. Very few of the students had ever been to a formal meeting and it is probably fair to say that they regarded the subject as dull, pointless and irrelevant. Eric Hayward was the Aboriginal lecturer who was trying to teach this subject in a formal manner. He wasn’t succeeding - both he and the students were frustrated and little progress was being made. As a consequence the lecturer gave a great deal of thought about how the teaching of meeting procedure might be made more relevant to the students. He wanted to provide the difficult terminology with practical meaning and set the learning in a real world context. While these goals were quite clear, it took some time to decide on the teaching methodology which should be employed. A method was needed which would make the lessons more interesting and relevant to the students. The method adopted had to ensure the students learnt about meetings and how they are formally conducted.

Torres Strait Islanders are frequently characterised by other Australians as caught between two cultures. Evidence and speculation that the majority of Torres Strait Islanders have neither ‘made it’ in the white mainstream world nor live exactly and traditionally as their ancestors did, sometimes lead to the glib perceptions that Islander people are members of neither world and are caught somewhere between the two.

Implicit in this line of reasoning is the perception that the identity of Torres Strait Islanders in the contemporary world is an ‘either/or’ proposition - either Islanders must, in order to remain Islanders, remain totally traditional or they must, in order to survive at all, become totally assimilated into the dominant society. This erroneous and simplistic view of the choices open to Islander people ignores the value of the school in providing a cultural synthesis rather than a cultural replacement.