The Australian Government has tried to include Indigenous education in schools; the current Australian Curriculum states that “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures are included in each learning area in ways that are consistent with its content and purpose. This also makes it possible to link content across learning areas, which can lead to integrated units of work”(ACARA, 2015). In 2016, 3,798,226 students were enrolled in schools across Australia. Within these schools 207,852 students registered/identified as Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders: this being 5.4% of the nations students (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016).

 

In 1994 in Australia when the ‘Salamanca Statement’ was implemented (UNESCO, 1994), education has changed in the direction of inclusion: it is now acknowledged that schools should support all children regardless of their differences. This in turn has helped address the imbalance within cultural, racial and ethnic educational ability levels in the community. Within the Australian community it has been found that an escalating issue is the representation of Indigenous groups. In the past, many have dropped out before the end of compulsory education. However, school retention rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander full-time students are continuing to rise with more students studying until Year 12. The school retention rate from Year 7/8 to Year 12 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students has raised from 36% in 2001 to 49% in 2011 compare to 81% Non-Indigenous students (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011). However, their academic results show that there is still disadvantage for Indigenous students within the Australian educational system. 
 

 

 

 

 

References:

 

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2017, February 2). Schools Australia. Retrieved April 2, 2017, from http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4221.0

 Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2011, Febuary 17 ). EDUCATION: SCHOOL RETENTION. Retrieved from http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/lookup/4704.0Chapter350Oct+2010

 

Australian Curriculum, Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority.. (2015). Australian and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures. Retrieved April 2, 2017, from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/crosscurriculumpriorities/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-histories-and-cultures/in-the-learning-areas

 

Forlin, C. (2006). Inclusive education in Australia ten years after Salamanca. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 21(3), 265-277.

 

McGuinne, J. S. (2012). Official Definitions of Indigeneity. Retrieved from https://johansandbergmcguinne.wordpress.com/about/

Merlan, F., de Costa, R., Greenhouse, C., Hale, C. R., Kymlicka, W., Ramos, A. R., ... & Merlan, F. (2009). Indigeneity: Global and local. Current Anthropology, 50(3), 303-333.

 UNESCO (1994). The Salamanca statement and framework for action on special needs education. Adopted by the world conference on special needs education: Access and equity. Paris: UNESCO.

 

The 8 pedagogies in the frame work are as followed:

 

·      Deconstruct, reconstruct 

·      Land Links 

·      Story telling

·      Learning Maps 

·      Community Links 

·      Symbols and Images

·      Non Verbal

·      Non Linear 

 

 

This Padlet will briefly outline 3 of the Following Pedagogies while exploring how these can be integrated.

 

The strong links between the Aboriginal community and the land is a well-known and well-documented concept. This pedagogy uses land links and placement to draw on history of ancestral living, and how they have developed over time from then to where we are now. Content is also drawn from the personal relationship with certain land marks/places that different Indigenous groups had with these particular places. For indigenous people, learning is about linking content to local land and place, which is highly contextualized (Marker, 2006).

 

In 2003, Dr. Wayne Atkinson of University of Melbourne, conducted a series of classes for University of Melbourne students in Yorta Yorta country. Yorta Yorta country has a rich history of 60,000 years with many significant landmarks including red gum forests and wetland system. Dr Atkinson took students up to a Lagoon to survey, where there are food utensils and scraps found. Dr. Atkinson goes on to explain that because of these findings, you can see that there’s been prior occupation of this land and there were people utilizing this water system. He goes onto discuss that the people living off this land were hunters and gathers due to the food remains that were left around the Lagoon. Dr. Aktinson then elaborates about their lifestyle saying that it took 3 to 4 hours a day to hunt for food, which is why much of the Indigenous population would rely on fish farming or the agriculture for their primary food supply (McKenzie, nd).

 

This is one of many links that can be made by land. Dr. Atkinson theory looks to build a storyline of events/ living from these landmarks, creating multi layers of indigenous evidence of prior population to current population. This is just one example of how land links can be applied within pedagogy. However it is evident that his can be transferable to the classroom and to western schooling too.

 

References:

 

Marker, M 2006, ‘After the Makah Whale Hunt: Indigenous Knowledge and

Limits to Multicultural Discourse’, Urban Education, vol. 41, no. 5, p. 482.

 

McKenzie, M (nd), Turning Bush into Classroom. Retrieved from : http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rnafternoons/yortayorta/7567716

 

Yunkaporta, T 2009, Draft Report for DET on Indigenous Research Project

NSW Region Schools, 2007-2009: Aboriginal Pedagogies at the Cultural

Interface. Viewed: <http://8ways.wikispaces.com/file/view/draft+report.doc>

 

Yunkaporta, T & Kirby, M 2011, ‘Yarning up Indigenous pedagogies: A

dialogue about eight Aboriginal ways of learning’, in R Bell, G Milgate & N

Purdie (eds.) Two Way Teaching and Learning: Toward culturally reflective

and relevant education, ACER Press, Camberwell Victoria.

 

The Little Red Yellow Black Book describes the experiences of Indigenous students as that they have to adapt in order to survive: regardless of the importance they place on learning through practical survival skills, the environment and spirituality, many Indigenous people express the thought that their children will have to complete a westernised kind of learning in order to succeed academically (AIATSIS, 2017).  A myriad of reliable sources support the claim that educational outcomes are consistently poorer for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students: included in this are census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, school attendance rates and results from the Nation Action Plan- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) (Guenther, Bat & Osborne, 2013). The negative impacts of this kind of exclusion throughout schooling can lead onto serious repercussions later on in life (Kerley, 2015). In fact, peer reviewed literature has found that the low self-esteem of Indigenous students within settings that they feel “othered” can lead to significant mental health consequences (Bodkin-Andrews, O’Rourke & Craven, 2010).

 

Although some progress is being made, this is slow and it has been found that secondary school dropout rates are still significantly higher for Indigenous students (Ma Rhea, 2010), this could then lead to lower employment rates in Indigenous adults too. The foundation for increasing Indigenous participation within schooling must begin with pupils’ feeling safe and supported at school (Rahman, 2012): at the most basic level, this can be achieved by educators making efforts to create a rapport with all member of the class. Indigenous pupils in remote areas are particularly at risk of poor academic outcomes, which is why efforts must be made in country areas, in particular, to incorporate Indigenous pedagogy in the classroom in a meaningful way. 

 

The language utilised within the classroom is pivotal to the success of inclusive practice: moving away from a deficit approach must occur for progress on the issue to ensue (Guenther, Bat & Osborne, 2013). Additionally, there are a myriad of different Indigenous dialects within Australia, as show in the diagram included. Although this does pose some potential issues, there are a plethora of resources available to include in lessons, such as the game and interactive map included within this source.

 

Although the Australian curriculum has made attempts to address Indigenous education, this has been found to often fall short in making substantial improvements in actuality (Nakata, 2011). Therefore, it is proposed that the 8 Aboriginal ways of learning be implemented as intervention strategies to address the lack of adequate inclusion of Indigenous Australian students.

References

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). (2017). The little red yellow black book. Retrieved from http://lryb.aiatsis.gov.au/

 

Bodkin-Andrews, G., O’Rourke, V., & Craven, R.G. (2010). The utility of general self-esteem and domain specific self-concepts: Their influence on Indigenous and non-Indigenous students’ educational outcomes. Australian Journal of Education (ACER Press), 54(3), 277-306.

 

Guenther, J., Bat, M., & Osborne, S. (2013). Red dirt thinking on educational disadvantage. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 42(2), 100-110.

 

Kerley, V. (2015). Thoughts on creating a culturally inclusive classroom: Indigenous literature and the Australian curriculum. Access, 29(3), 4-13.

 

Ma Rhea, Z. (2010). Partnership for improving outcomes in Indigenous education: Relationship or business? Journal of Education Policy, 27(1), 45-66.

 

Nakata, M. (2011).  Pathways for Indigenous education in the Australian curriculum framework. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 40 (1), 1-8.

 

Rahman, K. (2012). Addressing the foundations for improved Indigenous secondary student outcomes: A South Australian qualitative study. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, 39(1), 65-76.

The Little Red Black Yellow Book
http://lryb.aiatsis.gov.au/index.html
The little red yellow black book is both a physical book and website containing fundamental knowledge about Australian indigenous culture. The little red yellow black book is a go to guide especially for non indigenous Australians to begin to build their basic knowledge of indigenous cultures, their languages, identity and their history. A great place to start with knowledge necessary to meet the AITSL standards for graduate teachers.

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2017). Professional knowledge. Retrieved from: http://www.aitsl.edu.au/australian-professional-standards-for-teachers/standards/list

 

Education, particularly in mathematics and science, has become an affront to, or simply not part of, Indigenous identity and Aboriginal students are not meant to succeed within it (Howard, 2008). However, if we are to create meaningful relationships between Aboriginal students and education we need to see education as a social construct or cultural expression identified in these two examples: Storytelling: The Cloud Model and Maths as a Storytelling.

 

Matthews (2015) advocates for the Cloud Model (see figure within Padlet), which is currently used to create new inclusive pedagogy for the learning and the teaching of mathematics that connects with Aboriginal students’ cultural background and knowledge they bring to classroom through story telling. Through a lesson, students move through the cycle and experience mathematics as a creative process, avoiding the unbalanced education experience of mathematics as solely and abstraction.

“Maths as a Storytelling” (Matthews et al, 2005) is a pedagogical approach that is based on the Cloud Model and focuses on the following:

 

1.     Pre-algebra and explicitly algebraic concepts with arithmetic, that is, avoiding the cognitive gap

2.     Using the notion of creativity to teach mathematics

3.     Through creativity allowing students to express themselves and value their current understandings and knowledge. 

 

Based on these 3 steps, students act out a simple mathematics story, for example, two groups of people walking together in a simple story of addition. An example of a student’s representation of an ‘addition story’ in Figure 7.3.

In this example, the student explained that his joining symbol was a vortex that sucks the two groups together and the cloud gently picked them up and placed them neatly together. The student therefore created a whole story that explained the meaning behind the symbols. 

 

‘Maths as Storytelling’ focuses on students experiencing the abstraction process by considering a story and allowing them to create the abstraction for that story. Matthews (2015) also describes stories about hunting Kangaroos, about gathering food and about rain drops falling from a cloud. A statement was made by an Aboriginal student who said: “we mixed our culture and maths together and it surprised me. I can now walk away with a different understanding of Math and my Aboriginal heritage.” (Morris & Matthews, 2011, p.32). 

 

 

Story Sharing: 

 

In his interview by Suzy Barry (School News, 2017), Will Lutwyche taught for 2 years in remote Tennant Creek, NT. He learned that in order to engage his students and make his lessons more inclusive, he had to bring local stories into the classroom

 

“In the end their stories really drove the history unit, along with the stories of community members. It was more relevant and integral to their lives, and their families and the town of Tennant Creek. They engaged well with it and started to reflect deeply and use critical thinking, which is not always easy to do without relevant content.” (School News, 2017, p.29).

 Those 2 examples illustrate the fact that some teaching strategies can make an inclusive classroom with Aboriginal students developing their self-efficacy and resilience based on traditional forms of their culture and history such as storytelling and story sharing.


References:

 

Howard, P. 1998. Contextualisation Issues Related to Aboriginal Children’s Mathematical Learning. Australian Association for Researchers in Education Conference- 98. Adelaide: Australian Association for Researchers in Education. Accessed 11 October 2017. https://www.aare.edu.au/data/publications/1998/how98283.pdf

 

Indigenous Australia. (2017). oral-traditions. Indigenousaustralia.info. Retrieved 12 October 2017, from http://www.indigenousaustralia.info/languages/oral-traditions.html

 

Matthew C. L. (2015) Maths as storytelling: Maths is beautiful. In Price, K. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education (2nd ed.). Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.

 

 

Matthews, C., L. Watego, T.J. Cooper and A.R. Baturo. 2005. ‘Does mathematics education in Australia devalue Indigenous culture? Indigenous perspectives and non-Indigenous reflections’. Proceedings of the 28^th Annual Conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia. Melbourne: MERGA

 

Morris, C. and C. Matthews. (2011). ‘Numeracy, mathematics and Indigenous learners: Not the same old thing’. In Indigenous Education: Pathways for success- conference proceedings ACER, pp. 29-33. Camberwell: ACER Press

 

School News. (2017). Teaching, learning and culture at Tennant Creek. School News, (5), 28-30. Retrieved from https://issuu.com/multimediaau/docs/snau05-term_3-2017

 

Indigenous Australia. (2017). oral-traditions. Indigenousaustralia.info. Retrieved 12 October 2017, from http://www.indigenousaustralia.info/languages/oral-traditions.html