My early years as a teacher were concerned with children labelled as slow learners. In the light of what many of them have achieved over the years – ranging from skilled trades to self-employment – I sometimes wonder whether we limit our educational horizons on occasion to expectations based on faulty or imprecise data, or to a process of conditioning; what to expect in given localities or among certain groups of children.

Fortunately, my professional reading at that time led me to Kirk and Johnson: “Educating the Retarded Child”, and to their concept of “belongingness”. They argued that the teacher accepts the child as he is, with all his imperfections and educational blemishes, his deprivations, disadvantages and differences. It is all too easy for us to hang the child’s lack of motivation and interest on the peg of social, housing or health services deficiency, and to avoid the personal and professional involvement that is a prerequisite of the committed teacher.

Unfortunately, our educational practice is such that we continue to identify minority-group children on western-oriented tests of general ability. No allowance is made for the fact that the child is unfamiliar with the language of the test administrator or indeed, of the items of the test; and yet it is well known in psychological circles that test results are only valid if the children being tested are as familiar with the test items as was the group on whom the test was normed.

Western-style schooling for Aboriginal children in New South Wales began formally in 1940. Nineteen-forty was the year in which the New South Wales Department of Education abandoned its long-standing policy of exclusion relating to Aboriginal children. Prior to this, Aboriginal children were excluded from State schools on the complaint of a white parent. From 1940 on, it could be said that Aboriginal people had achieved the right to State schooling. This is, of course, a political statement as much as an educational one. I would argue that 1940, in fact, saw the beginning of modern Aboriginal politics.

Modern Aboriginal politics, as such, began in the early 1960s when Vincent Lingiari and the Gurindji people walked off Wave Hill; that was the beginning of the land rights movement. The 1940s and the 1950s, however, saw Aboriginal people struggle for the human right of education for their children.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, many Aboriginal people spent a great deal of time criticising the very education systems which they fought so hard to become part of. Yet Aboriginal people have voted for this form of education with their feet. In 1975, according to Commonwealth Government statistics, there were 223 Aboriginal people in tertiary institutions in Australia. In 1980, there were 881, that is a 295% increase. In 1970, however, there were only 20 Aboriginal people found to be in tertiary institutions in Australia and that, believe it or not, registers by 1980 as being a 4,310% increase. Unfortunately, this does not reflect an equivalent 4,310% improvement in outcomes of schooling; this extraordinary phenomenon associated with the tertiary education is very much an Aboriginal adventure.

In 1975 I was appointed to the infants section of a primary school in a Brisbane suburb with a population consisting mainly of:

A Bilingual Early Childhood Conference held in the Northern Territory at Batchelor Education Village in August 1980, provided the content and emphasis of this paper. In attendance at the conference were Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal members of teaching teams from bilingual schools of Central Australia and the Top End of the Northern Territory.

The conference aimed at providing an opportunity for dialogue to occur between team members, to assist them in further understanding the importance of two-way communication, and to raise their conscious level of thinking towards understanding the roles each should play within a bilingual classroom setting.

The team-teaching approach demands co-operation and a close working relationship between both team members. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal teachers plan together for each day of teaching and share class materials and ideas. Each teacher must be willing to be a leader at times and a follower at other times, and there must be constant discussion about the aims of their programs and their subsequent implementation. Groups of children normally rotate between the members of the team for different lessons, which are presented in the mother tongue language of the teacher in ‘face to face’ contact with the children.

As the classification implies, Special Aboriginal Schools necessitate special skills, methodology, philosophy, curricula and above all, special personnel. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons not all of the personnel who have trained for these positions take up appointments in these schools. Quite often it is the ordinary classroom teacher or principal who must review his or her own makeup, and adjust to the new set of circumstances and special needs which they face.

Personal adjustments to the new environment and the planning of educational goals and programs require time. No two situations are exactly alike and no single formula can guarantee success. It is up to the individual to search and to determine, largely through trial and error, a recipe for success.

The degree and meaning of success is inherent in the quality of goals set, rather than the quantity of output. If the incumbents in Special Aboriginal Schools expect high levels of success, they can achieve high levels of success. If they choose only to serve their time, success will not be an outcome. It is the expectations held by the school staff, not what is expected of the school staff, which will promote success and equal educational opportunity. Expectation levels are believed to be critical for both personal survival and educational development within the school.

The purpose of this paper is to help the practitioner in multilingual environments by making him or her aware of the need to establish a sound operational base from which to work before agonizing over the practicalities of the implementation stage. In essence, the paper seeks to show teachers that much of what is successful today in terms of school-based curriculum development is, in fact, grounded in theory: theory that is readily understood and useful to educators working in a variety of contexts.

Today, in the Torres Strait, the schooling process appears to be widening the educational gap between white Queenslanders and their Islander counterparts„* Teachers as curriculum developers, along with parliamentary heads and state education department dignitaries, must realize that problems of this kind can be grappled with initially only from within the geographical context. In other words, the problems of the oppressed must be solved by the oppressed who, first of all, need to understand their position and then transform it. But if problem transformation is going to take place from the inside, as has been suggested already, then it must include an examination of the role of the school for, according to Raskin.