Many teachers involved in school education of Aboriginal children have, for a variety of complex reasons, found it difficult to design programs that begin with the things children know and move to those things that children have to learn. All too frequently school education offered to Aboriginal children has been conceived in Western terms and delivered in our language. Programs designed for children from mainstream Australia have simply been transposed with minimal adaptation into Aboriginal schools. In many curriculum areas the results have not been exciting. In the area of mathematics they have been dismal if not disastrous (see Williams, 1979). The introduction of bilingual education into many of the remote traditionally oriented communities of the Northern Territory has made it possible for educators to re-examine the assumptions on which many of our mathematics offerings have been based. This paper outlines some of the initiatives that have been taken in the Northern Territory to enable children to formally organise and classify local Aboriginal mathematical knowledge as well as begin to acquire some ideas related to the Western view of the world and so provide more meaningful introductory mathematics programs for Aboriginal children.

The Western Australian Maths Syllabus with Notes is the recommended Maths curriculum for all Northern Territory schools. However, for teachers in tribal Aboriginal communities it is obvious that the gulf between this syllabus and the education setting is enormous. It is therefore essential that teachers try to bridge this gulf. The answer does not lie in the syllabus itself, but in the insights a teacher has about the culture and systems of knowledge of his/her Aboriginal students. I would like to talk about these insights in the form of a letter to a first-year non-Aboriginal teacher in an Early Childhood class in an Aboriginal bilingual school in the Northern Territory. I hope it makes her/him a little more insightful, because it has made me so.

Dear H.……

By now you will have had time to look at the Western Australian Maths Syllabus with Notes which is the recommended Maths curriculum for N.T. schools. If you are like me, you will initially have been overwhelmed at the thought of having to interpret it for planning a Maths program in your Aboriginal classroom. But take heart, because I would like to try to help you think about how to do this, and I’ll refer you to support materials and readings that have some answers. Then, hopefully, you can feel confident about planning a Maths program to guide your students towards meaningful experiences.

I believe that, as teachers in Aboriginal schools, it is essential that we try to make education (and Maths in particular) meaningful for our students. Without meaning and purpose in education, we are perpetuating the unequal opportunity that has been offered to Aboriginal students in the past.

To traditional Aborigines their whole concept of life, whether it is physical or spiritual survival, is centred on their belief in the Dreamtime. The Dreamtime was the period of creation when the Aborigines’ life-style was planned and the Aborigines’ entire life centred on the need to live in the style prescribed by the mythical Dreamtime ancestors.

An understanding of the Dreamtime is essential to an understanding of traditional Aboriginal culture. Stanner (1979, 23–40) describes the Dreaming as pervading every aspect of life from social organization to food gathering. Not only is it the period of creation when the mythical ancestors roamed the earth, but it is also the life spirit which ties man, society and nature, both past and present, to the living now.

R.M. Berndt (1980) describes the dreaming thus:

The Dreaming therefore constituted a particular view of life, of the place of human beings within a preordained scheme or patterning symbolising a three-sided relationship between mythic beings, nature and people. Each was dependent on the others. People were part of nature, part of particular mythic beings, in social and personal terms.

(Berndt, 1980, 14–15)

Not only did traditional Aborigines believe in the Dreaming, they lived it. It is the Dreaming which provides the blueprint for life.

Central to the belief in the Dreaming is the belief in the mythical beings. These beings were part human and part animal. They roamed the earth in the Dreamtime using super-human powers to create all natural features.

A series of seven films has been produced for the National Aboriginal Employment Development Committee by Film Australia, the production division of the Australian Film Commission. The films are the outcome of eighteen months in the field by Producer Elisabeth Knight and Director K. Gow. They travelled thousands of kilometers with their film crew and visited twenty major locations spanning and circling the continent, from Nhulunbuy in the Northern Territory to Broome in Western Australia, to Port Lincoln in South Australia; from Mackay, Queensland to Brewarrina, New South Wales, to Melbourne.

The four We Did It films show Aboriginal people at work, talking about how they got their jobs, what they like about them and some tips for other job seekers. The four films show Aboriginal people from Victoria (12 minutes), South Australia (11 minutes) Western Australia(12 minutes) and Rockhampton and Mackay (11 minutes) in a range of jobs and apprenticeships – nursing, the Public Service, education, horticulture, library work, building and mechanical trades.

Women of Utopia (19 minutes) is a first-class introduction by a group of Aboriginal women of Utopia Station in the Northern Territory to the process by which they make their distinctively beautiful batik fabrics.

This Is Working (27 minutes) features four different projects being undertaken by Aboriginal people in New South Wales, thereby creating jobs for themselves and developing skills and expertise.

We recently received exchange material from The Saskatchewan Urban Native Teacher Education Program (SUNTEP) at Saskatoon, Canada. A brief description of the program might be of interest to those readers involved in adult and teacher education courses for Aboriginal students.

SUNTEP is a four-year off campus Teacher Education Program offered through the Gabriel Dumont Institute of Native Studies and Applied Research in co-operation with the Department of Education and the University of Saskatchewan and Regina. It is an enriched program leading to a B.Ed, degree, designed specifically for Metis and Non-Status Indian students who might not otherwise attend university. The program has a number of unique aspects including -