As a prospective teacher who had lived in towns where white Australians, essentially teachers, were the minority groups, the reality of a posting to Aurukun was weighing on my mind. I began to wonder what school for Aboriginal Australians was like and what it should be like.

Aboriginal children attending school have special needs that should be recognised and catered for by the school system. This paper will deal with the practical aspects of Aboriginal education. In particular the focus will be on Aboriginal Primary education within Western Australia. The paper also limits itself by addressing issues related to more traditionally oriented Aboriginal groups living in remote communities. However, while the main emphasis is given to more traditionally oriented Aboriginal groups, many aspects can be usefully employed and extended to Aboriginal education in general. Therefore the aim of this paper is to give teachers and educators basic information about Aboriginal education so that they can develop appropriate education programs to meet the needs of the Aboriginal children within their schools.

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.

Katherine High School is the only school offering secondary education in the region and thus is catering to the educational demands of a culturally diverse community. In seeking to meet these requirements the school has endorsed the Participation and Equity Program (PEP) of the Federal Department of Education and one highly successful and continuingly popular experimental component of this program has been the TESL (Aboriginal) unit.

This unit represents the attempts of educators and community members to construct an educational environment in which the aspirations of the Aboriginal people can be ameliorated without compromising their Aboriginality.

Aboriginal people from various communities come into urban centres and take up permanent residence. They then enrol their school age children at urban schools, the same as other parents of different backgrounds.

This role is vital to the teacher aide because it helps him/ her to develop a good relationship with teacher, parent and child. This way parents can take an interest in their child’s education. Their attitude towards teachers would be much more pleasant and understanding. Parents would be aware of their responsibilities both in the school and at home. It would help the child to recognise his/her good and bad points, how to get on well with other children in the classroom and around the community, and last but importantly, to cope with society.

In this article we will consider one Aboriginal child’s literacy learning in her first year of formal schooling. The data were collected in 1985. Sharon was then a student in an Aboriginal Transition class in an urban school in the Northern Territory. The children in Sharon’s class consisted of Kriol, Warlpiri and Aboriginal English speakers. The program they were placed in was an English-only one. This report considers one case study and discusses Sharon’s learning in the classroom context (for a full report see Walton, 1986).

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.

In Semester 2, 1986, a group of 2nd year Aboriginal and Islander Diploma of Teaching (AITEP-ECE) students embarked on a research project, designed to be a learning experience, which could generate further understandings of concepts within Child Development, Child Learning and Sociology. The project focused on the child within the five to eight year age bracket.