In addressing this question, I will briefly outline the existing types of language maintenance program models, and what schools can do about Aboriginal language maintenance in the Aboriginal community school context. I have suggested a number of guiding principles for Aboriginal schools which are not intended to be prescriptive, but rather to establish a basis for dialogue and discussion from which language maintenance programs could be developed.

My students live in three remote Aboriginal community. It is my job to teach them English and the other Primary school subjects. My aim is to produce bi-lingual and bi-cultural individuals. By giving them the ways and means to access white Australian society, they are more able to make an informed decision about the life-style they want and feel confident to interact with white Australia. Many students rarely do more than one or two years at the high school in Alice Springs so there primary education is very important. Students from remote communities rarely do well academically.

The idea of two-way education has great appeal because it holds out the promise that schools can achieve something that historically they have found extremely difficult; encompassing Aboriginal cultural maintenance while providing needed white knowledge. However, it will be argued here that while two-way theories are part of the current widely adopted rhetoric of educational change they are not practical curriculum alternatives for Aboriginalising Central Australian schools because they do not make sense in terms of real interaction between the cultures. For this reason, attractive as these two-way theories are, they are also hazardous. Their danger lies both in that they build up expectations for outcomes of Aboriginal schools and they associate these outcomes with Aboriginalisation, a process which will not be assisted by unworkable theories.

Much of the literature on Aboriginal education tends, and rightfully so, to emphasise the disadvantages Aboriginal children face when they enter into Western schooling. Cultural discontinuity theory proposes that cultural mismatch between the home and school cultures is an important factor in the alienation and school failure for minority (e.g. Aboriginal) children. Research certainly supports the view that Aboriginal students differ from their Western counterparts in terms of world view, learning styles and sociolinguistic etiquette. Current cultural ecology theory proposes that some minority group students (i.e. from ‘involuntary’ or ‘colonized’ minorities) rectify these differences in opposition and in resistance to the majority culture and thus play an active role in perpetuating school failure (Ogbu, 1987). In some urban schools, it appears that the inability of teachers to understand and cater for the cultural differences of their Aboriginal students is compounded by an active resistance to the school culture by those students. This paper investigates the teaching styles and practices of two teachers in urban schools who not only recognise and cater for the unique differences and abilities of their Aboriginal students but who have actively created learning environments in which student resistance is either directed towards group enhancing goats or rendered inappropriate. Pseudonyms are used throughout this paper.

As part of my work this year I was required to undertake an evaluation project. I decided to combine some of my concerns about the appropriateness for Aboriginal students of some of the ways in which state education curriculum priorities are implemented with one of my focus curriculum areas, namely Work Education.

In South Australia the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education Policy ( AEP ) is seen as the overarching Aboriginal Education Policy. However, most Aboriginal students in South Australia and all state schools are required to address mandatory curriculum are as set out in the “Educating for the 21st Century” (1990), the curriculum policy document.

This paper provides some early results on a project designed to improve Aboriginal children's performance in mathematics, starting from their earliest introduction to number work. It explores the use of an enriched mathematics environment that minimally conflicts with traditional Aboriginal learning styles. The study is concerned with evaluating the effectiveness of a program intervention in remote Aboriginal schools, based on the results of pre- and post-interviews given to children at eight different schools in Western Australia at the beginning and end of 1989 and 1990. Comparison data with those for children at other schools are provided in this paper. The data derive from interviews with young children, and provide evidence on their performance in several key areas of early mathematics. Schools were categorized into three groups: White middle class; town Aboriginal and working class; and remote Aboriginal. The White middle class schools had the highest performance, followed by the town Aboriginal and White working class schools and the remote Aboriginal schools. There was a rather consistent gain in mean scores for most schools of around four points over the course of the first year so that existing differences between schools at the beginning of the year were still evident at the end of the year. At this stage it is difficult to conclude whether the intervention program has improved mathematics achievement for this group of remote Aboriginal children. There is at least no evidence of ‘progressive retardation’, which describes the current situation where Aboriginal children fall farther behind as they progress through school.

Maningrida is one of the largest of the Aboriginal communities in the ‘Top End’ of the Northern Territory. It is located on the eastern bank of the Liverpool River and is home for some 1000 residents. Maningrida is identified on most maps but what is not so readily identified is the large number of smaller communities, located within a 100 kilometre radius of Maningrida and provided with services from there (see Map 1). These small communities (outstations or homeland centres) are found on the homelands of the families who live within them and the groups are usually quite small.

Aboriginal artists, authors and songwriters have expressed their thoughts and experiences about Aboriginal education through plays, poems, short stories, novels and songs. Their views cover a broad spectrum of educational issues that focus on educational experiences since contact, the teaching of traditional Aboriginal knowledge as part of the school curriculum, and other issues in both ways education.

Batchelor College is a tertiary education institution servicing the needs of Aboriginal communities mainly in the Northern Territory and “top end” of Australia. Within the School of Education there is the Teacher Education programme which has been operating in various forms since 1976, and has successfully piloted and implemented a community based operation known as Remote Area Teacher Education (RATE) (see Kemmis 1988). The program at mid- year 1990 underwent re-accreditation, and in his paper Reconstituting the Curriculum Framework for the Batchelor College Teacher Education Program, Ian Stewart (Head of School) argued for the development of four integrated strands over four sequential stages (Stewart 1989). These strands are: Community Studies; Curriculum Studies; Language Studies; and Professional Studies.

The study sets out to find out urban Aboriginal children's views of schools and teachers, particularly the things they enjoy and find valuable in their schooling experience and their ideas on what changes they would like to see. Literature indicates that whilst, on the one hand, Aboriginal parents and communities increasingly “want to help my children do better at school” (de Lacy, 1985, p..282), on the other hand very few succeed, especially once they have entered high school. A study by Goodnow and Burns (1985) has shown that primary school children are very discriminating judges of what helps them learn. Thus finding out what Aboriginal children actually say about their school experience may help educators to interpret their behaviour in the school setting more accurately and consequently to communicate with them more effectively. In the fairly extensive literature on Aboriginal children's education a number of relevant themes recur. One is the importance of personal relationships in Aboriginal children's learning. Affiliation is the basis of traditional Aboriginal relationships with individuality of the person secondary to the close knit family group. This is expressed as concern with affectionate relations in Aboriginal children's interactions with teachers and peers. It relates to what Honeyman (1986) calls traditional Aboriginal society's “humane teaching”, where education was through guidance rather than direct instruction. Another theme is the unpredictability of educational outcomes for Aboriginal students, particularly the nature of the acquisition of English literacy. “It is the most puzzling yet most debilitating characteristic of Aboriginal education to be recognised in recent times.” (Willmot, 1989, p.10) There are contradictory findings on Aboriginal adolescents' attitudes to school. Jordan (1984) in her South Australian study found that Aboriginal students had a “positive view of schooling and school personnel” (p.289).

In the more remote and isolated communities, teachers require greater self sufficiency in their knowledge base about the many factors that impact on child learning. Sensory impairment is one such factor and it is essential that teachers be alert to the possibility of undetected impairment.

Factors influencing development of curicula for Aboriginal children must not overlook the importance of a strong verbal language component.

It is evident from research projects, and observation that persons of average or above average verbal abilities are found in most Upper Secondary Classes, Colleges and Universities. As a large proportion of graduates have proficient verbal abilities, this must be an area in our schools on which we must place importance. It is also a fact that just about any desirable avenue in life depends on some type of admission or selection procedure; whether it be tests written or telephone applications or interviews. The weighting of most selection criteria tends to give greater weight to verbal abilities than to any other personal individual characteristic.

I have a particular interest in the topic of hearing impairment within this human development unit of study and specifically I have a concern for the hearing loss of the Aboriginal child at school. The content of this assignment firstly will address the major characteristics associated with hearing impairment and then the condition specific to the Aboriginal community. The second part of this essay will explore the implications in relation to the child, the classroom, the teacher and the community setting.

The Philosophy for Children programme was developed during the 1970s and 1980s to address the low level of thinking skills exhibited by university and high school students in the United States. A programme of studies in philosophy for children from grade one upwards was based on eight novels with accompanying instructional manuals to assist the teacher in extracting the philosophical issues from the novels as children choose them. This programme is relevant and appropriate for use as part of the English curriculum in a remote Aboriginal school in Australia: whether the school has a bilingual or bicultural program in place or not, Philosophy for Children is fitting as it makes thinking skills explicit. Basing it on a concept of a community of inquiry is very supportive to people from a non-English speaking background. The programme of Philosophy for Children brings in subjects from all curriculum areas, thus encouraging the recently supported integrated approach, but is particularly useful for language learning and understanding.

Lack of a common means of verbal or written communication always creates problems of interpersonal communication and gives rise to misunderstandings and (possibly) prejudice against one or other party. On the surface, there would seem to be a good deal of merit in the suggestion that “if everyone spoke the same language, all these problems would disappear”. However, the matter is not as simple as it seems, for questions must be asked as to what language should be chosen, the dialect of it, and to what extent cultural factors, deeply related to the true understanding of how thought is expressed within a language, need to be addressed. In Australia, most reasonably well education Anglo-Celtic Australians asked these questions would immediately think of Standard Australian English (SAE), though working-class and indigenous Australians may consider it too “posh” and out of touch with their lifestyles. Few from the dominant group, however, would be even remotely aware of the degree to which cultural factors influence how thought is expressed in a language (as already mentioned), and how this influences the spoken language and, more particularly, the written language in a literate society.