Failure to adequately address language differences between home and school is one of the many ways in which education systems frequently disadvantage Aboriginal students. Children from predominantly Aboriginal English-speaking homes face specific challenges, as the language differences between their home variety and the Standard Australian English (SAE) of the curriculum and classroom are often rendered ‘invisible’, with little explicit accommodation to the fact that such children are essentially immersed into the SAE classroom (e.g. Dixon, 2013; McIntosh, O'Hanlon, & Angelo, 2012; Sellwood & Angelo, 2013). One consequence of this invisibility is that it has been very hard to see during classroom time, where these language differences appear to affect children's engagement with the curriculum. In this paper, we present a micro-analysis of a year 2 maths lesson in a class of Aboriginal learners of SAE as an additional language/dialect, where children are being taught to use location words (e.g. under, above) as mathematical language. We have examined the precise ways in which the children's home variety and SAE were used in this lesson, and where differences between these two varieties appeared to impact their understanding of the concepts being taught. We differentiate between the kinds of classroom language that provide a challenge to learners of SAE and the kinds that do not.

Professor Watts’ (1980) review article of Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children was a welcome, optimistic view of the positive effect schools can have on pupils. It was particularly welcome for the optimistic view that teachers and schools can achieve something in the area of Aboriginal education. Watts reviewed this book against the background reality that many teachers of Aborigines

While accepting Watts’ view, I will argue that an overly optimistic view of the possibilities of schooling for Aboriginal children can be just as debilitating as the pessimistic view that broader structural inequalities such as poverty, poor housing, poor health have to be redressed before teachers and schools can achieve anything. To this extent it will be argued that teachers need to be positive about what they and schools can achieve. Teachers need to be aware of the specific ways in which schools can make a difference. 15,000 Hours… outlines some of these.

The Aboriginal learning system is not a functional learning system for everything that needs to be learned in school. Whether a formal or informal style fits the task best is dependent on the nature of what has to be learned, more than on the student’s cultural affiliations. Today Aboriginal children not only need to acquire age-old knowledge in traditional ways but they have to acquire new knowledge...and they need to develop new ways of learning.

The Queensland Department of Education has instigated, planned and supported, over a significant period of time, various programs to enable Aboriginal and Islander entrants to become trained and qualified teachers. Such programs have included for example:

The failure at school of Aboriginal students from traditional backgrounds has generally been ascribed to cultural differences. This study, however, investigated the relationship between Aboriginal children's learning and hearing loss. Aboriginal students with hearing loss were found to be different in that they used the highly verbal teacher-oriented behaviours, which were associated with school success, less than other students. There was evidence that some students with hearing loss used alternative peer-oriented learning strategies with some success. Also compensatory practises by teachers, including using Aboriginal teaching styles, appeared to assist some students with hearing loss.

The Indigenous Education and Training Alliance (IETA) is a staff college of Education Queensland. Its primary focus is to broker and deliver professional development to educators around the policies contained within Partners for Success: strategy for the continuous improvement of education and employment outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Education Queensland (Education Queensland, 2000b). This paper describes how IETA's work to support one of the policies, Literacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students, has been theorised and enacted. It also discusses the organisation's successes and challenges in the significant area of language and literacy pedagogy for Indigenous students.

This paper presents an analysis of the classroom discourse and strategies of Marcia, an early childhood teacher of a class with a high percentage of Indigenous Australian students. These students have been demonstrably successful on standardised literacy tests, which is not the case for Indigenous students in general in Australia (e.g., MCEETYA, 200). It will be suggested here that Marcia’s approach and relationships with the students, as constructed in her discourse, have been a large contributing factor in this success. Marcia’s discourse can be described as both inclusive and empowering and, as such, it will be proposed that awareness of her techniques may be of benefit to teachers who are working with groups whom education systems tend to marginalise and disempower. Marcia’s lessons were observed as part of the project, “Teaching Indigenous Students with Conductive Hearing Loss in Remote and Urban Schools of Western Australia”. This project was based in Kurongkurl Katitjin, School of Indigenous Studies, at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, and was funded by an Australian Research Council Strategic Partnerships with Industry [SPIRT] Grant and the industry partners: Department of Education of Western Australia, Catholic Education Commission of Western Australia and Aboriginal Independent Community Schools, Western Australia.

Aboriginal Education Workers (AEWs) are utilised by primary and secondary schools to improve components of success for Aboriginal students, liaise with their families and the Aboriginal community and contribute to developing and promoting an Aboriginal pedagogy. Despite the challenging role of decolonising the school environment, the important work undertaken by AEWs can be misunderstood and underappreciated by the Western school system. This paper aims to measure the influence of AEWs on Aboriginal culture within schools using quantitative data from Wave 7K Cohort of the Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children. Results show that there is a positive impact on Aboriginal culture within schools through having an AEW present all or some of the time. For Aboriginal children to grow up strong, employment of an AEW is important to decolonise the school environment and provide a holistic education.

Culturally safe health practitioners are essential for effective service provision to culturally diverse populations, including Indigenous Australians. Therefore, cultural safety education during training as a health care professional is an essential component in helping improve the health of Indigenous Australians. This study examined whether the implementation of an Indigenous cultural safety education workshop increased self-rated cultural safety knowledge and attitudes of allied health students. The study employed a quantitative before-and-after design using pre- and post-surveys to determine the level of attitudinal change in students who attended a day long workshop. The study sample consisted of 1st year (n = 347) and 4th year (n = 149) allied health students at a regional Australian university over the years 2007–2011. Whilst the results of this current study are varied in terms of achieving positive change across all of the taught items of knowledge and attitude, they provide some evidence around the value of this type of curriculum intervention in helping develop culturally safe practitioners. An important finding was around the student's becoming self-aware about their own values and cultural identity, combined with acknowledging the importance of this cultural identity to interactions with clients. This form of ‘cultural humility’ appears to be an important step to becoming a culturally safe practitioner. These types of interventions would be enhanced through embedding and scaffolding throughout the curricula.

There remains significant under representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australian higher education systems. A number of strategies have been implemented by governments and universities to best support Indigenous students within higher education that have produced varying levels of success in increasing participation, retention and completions. One key strategy is the inclusion of Aboriginal Education Units within universities. The current study aimed to examine students experience and engagement with a range of support services across university, in particular with an Aboriginal Education Unit. Utilising a mixed-method approach, data were collected from 103 students who identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander at The University of Adelaide. Overall, students were most satisfied with support provided by family (70%) and the Aboriginal Education Unit (61%), followed by support provided by university faculties (49%), and the wider university (43%). The main reasons students were accessing the Unit was for academic and tutoring purposes, also rating tutoring as the most beneficial service provided by the Unit. This study highlights the importance of examining and evaluating enablers such as support mechanisms from the student perspective and has demonstrated the significant role Aboriginal Education Units play in the student experience, laying a crucial foundation for targeted support initiatives.

This paper will discuss some personal philosophies and rationales in approaching and delivering Indigenous Australian studies – approaches that have been influenced and informed by experienced and knowledgeable educators both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. It doesn’t aim or pretend to be unique or innovative in its arguments or approach; instead, it is a reflection on the pathway taken by one Indigenous educator and the thinking behind this – at least at this point in time. As such, it adopts a philosophy that “it’s important to know where we’ve come from in order to make sense of where we are and where we might be heading”. It is hoped that through this reflection and by offering an example of how art (as performance/role-play) has been used in one of my teaching sessions that I might make more sense of my personal practice and contribute in some small way to the important and ongoing debates surrounding teaching Indigenous Australian studies.

There are at least three competing interpretations of Aboriginal classroom behaviour in tradition-oriented communities. These interpretations and the theories they support may well be familiar to experienced teachers. However, the aim here is not to expound theory but to draw out implications for classroom practice.

The first interpretation is that much of the behaviour of Aboriginal children in the classroom is explicable in terms of cultural deficits relative to the demands of school. It is a time-worn but by no means old-fashioned notion that tradition-oriented socialisation renders Aboriginal children ill-fitted to school. Certainly, Aboriginal students are often characterised as passive and given to non-participation, punctuated occasionally by one word responses at best.

My own research into classroom interaction between teachers and Aboriginal students confirms that there is little verbal interaction between them relative to that in white classrooms (Folds, 1984a). However, the ethnocentric assumptions of deficit theory that school is a given and that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children learn in exactly the same way are ill-founded and have alienated Aborigines from school rather than improved educational outcomes.

Many teachers see classroom behaviour in terms of differences rather than deficits. In particular, relative lack of verbal interaction is viewed as a cultural phenomenon modelled on Aboriginal learning style where the student makes little personal input. The Aboriginal teaching and learning style has been thoroughly documented elsewhere (Harris, 1980).

The word culture is defined by Singer, 1988: 6) as:

It is obvious from this definition that each one of us belongs to one culture or another, each culture encapsulating a totality of a way of living, expectation and behaviour that is specifically unique to that group. Culture is constituted in our daily lives, in our negotiations and adjustments to experience day-to-day existence.

(This is the first of two articles, based on a paper delivered at the 1982 conference of the Applied Linguistic Association of Australia, entitled: “Language maintenance among Torres Strait Islanders living on the Australian mainland.” It deals with the language backgrounds of most Torres Strait Islander children attending mainstream Queensland schools. The second part, which will appear in the next issue, discusses some of the language difficulties experienced in the classroom by many of these children).

Throughout 1974 and 1975 I worked among Aboriginal people in Rural Town, S.W. Queensland. With one exception, all Aboriginal people in this country town have attained at least a primary education. Further, almost 30 per cent of men and women in the 16–30 age group have attended some secondary school; although only two completed grade 10 in 1974, a further three attended tenth arade in 1975.

These figures reflect the pattern of Queensland Aboriginal education as presented in Roper (1970:55). On the basis of these trends it should be possible to hypothesize that younger Aboriginals are attaining higher educational standards than their parents. But the figures lie – simply because more children are staying at school for longer periods this does not mean that they either learn more at school or are experiencing more satisfaction in the school situation.

Obviously the proportion of individuals who attend at least some secondary school is increasing; Aboriginal parents generally support the principle that education is essential if the child is to acquire reasonable employment. Such schemes as the Aboriginal Secondary Grant Scheme are recognised by the Aboriginal community as worthwhile endeavours, not only because they enable parents to support their children for longer periods at school, but because they make the whole educational issue topical. Discussions about the grant lead to discussions about children’s problems at school. Ambitions for “good jobs” are intrinsically linked with educational achievement. Education officers associated with the Aboriginal Secondary Grant are sought out, asked for help to “have the kids sent to boarding school”, as the Rural Town high school does not teach classes beyond Grade 10, and their expertise enlisted to find employment. This concern is not restricted to high school students either. Mothers generally recognise that:

Working with beginning teachers to assist them to begin to ‘think what we do’ (Arendt, 1998) in both mainstream and Indigenous education is problematic. This is particularly so because the majority of our teacher candidates, and indeed most of their university lecturers, are positioned close to the racial, social and cultural centre of Australian education. That is, teachers and teacher educators tend to be white, middle class, educationally successful, and accepting of the main premises and assumptions, purposes and values of formal schooling in Australia. This proximity to the centre can lead to an inability to question ideas and practices that, while everyday and seemingly innocuous, are frequently dangerous and destructive for those at the margins. In this article, we illustrate the normative power of hegemonic ideas by using aspects of the teen fiction The Hunger Games as an analogy for ‘thoughtless’ and unquestioning acceptance of authority. We then describe and discuss a pedagogic practice used within the Master of Teaching program at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. The practice is designed to challenge normative understandings about Australian history, teaching Indigenous Australian students, and to encourage engagement with the German-American Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt's provocative question ‘What are we doing?’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 5). We conclude the article with a challenge to re-think current policies and practices in the education of Indigenous Australians.

The benefits of school and community partnerships are well documented in government reports and the academic literature. A number of government initiatives have been introduced to actively involve parents and the community in school matters. In addition, various agencies have produced resource kits and guidelines to assist schools and communities to develop and foster partnerships, and partnership agreements. Much of this study has focused on working with Aboriginal peoples. The use of the term, ‘Aboriginal’ in this paper refers to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Initiatives such as ‘What Works’ have had some success in building strong Aboriginal community and school partnerships, however, the literature also reveals that despite such initiatives, the levels of success vary from school to school, with some partnerships unable to develop or be sustained. In responding to a gap in the current knowledge, the authors examine the value of school–community partnerships in a rural and remote school where the percentage of Aboriginal Australian students is high. A brief summary of the outcomes of some of the major initiatives with aims to build effective school and community partnerships is provided. This is followed by the findings from a small pilot research study on the implementation of initiatives to build strong school–community relationships in rural and remote Indigenous school settings in Western Australia. The challenges that may inhibit the establishment of successful school–community relationships/collaboration are discussed and suggestions provided on how these challenges can be addressed.

Despite the continued investment in Indigenous support networks and dedicated education units within universities, levels of key performance indicators for Indigenous students—access, participation, success and completion (attainment)—remain below that of the overall domestic student population in most institutions. It remains important to determine what works to achieve Indigenous student success in higher education. This paper proposes that such methods have an integral role to play in providing a holistic view of Indigenous participation and success at university, and are particularly useful in the development and evaluation of strategies and programs. This project found no quantitative correlation between financial investment and success rate for Indigenous students. A negative correlation between access rate and success rate suggests that factors other than those that encourage participation are important in supporting successful outcomes. Those universities that have high success rates have a suite of programs to support Indigenous students, but it is not immediately clear which of these strategies and programs may be most effective to facilitate Indigenous student success rates. In this discussion, we suggest that a multi-layered determinants model is a useful way to conceptualise the many factors that may impact on student success, and how they might intersect.