Since the development of psychological assessments of ‘intelligence’ at about the beginning of this century, many groups of people have been tested. By and large, most have performed at lower levels than people of north-western European origin or ancestry, who belong to the culture within which the tests were devised.

Among the poor performers, with average IQ’s of 80 to 92, have been people of southern and eastern Europe and Caucasian people from further east (Greeks, Yugoslavs, Iranians, Iraqis, Turks, Indians), tested in their homelands, mostly in large numbers and by compatriots, on ‘standard’ non-verbal or translated tests.

These relatively poor performances demonstrate the extent of cultural learning of a particular type involved in most cognitive tests. Presumably, north-western European cultural learning is required for good performances on tests coming from this cultural background, so that children from different backgrounds, even those from other areas of Europe, are likely to be disadvantaged.

Children from more widely different backgrounds, such as those from hunting and gathering groups, can be expected to be disadvantaged even further.

Nevertheless, hunting and gathering people have been tested on Western-type tests, and poor performances interpreted as indicating inferior ability. Kalahari ‘bushmen’ people in the 1930s were assigned a mean mental age of 7.5 by Porteus as a result of their performance on his Maze Test.

In the same period, Aboriginal people of north-west Australia performed poorly on this test, with ages ranging from 8.22 years to 12.17 years for adults. Aboriginal people have performed poorly, but not invariably so, on other tests.

I am an Aboriginal educator based at the Swan Hill Technical School. I started work as an Aboriginal educator in the first term of school in 1982.

My duties involve liaising with Aboriginal students, parents, teachers and the community. I liaise with the students to find out if they have any problems at home or school. If they have problems we discuss them and think of ways to overcome them. I like to walk into classes such as Home Economics, and Woodwork – it is easy for them to talk and I don’t interrupt them too much. I also like to speak to the students out of class, usually in my office or in the school grounds.

Mrs Quinlan’s story has been transcribed verbatim from tapes recorded between October 1982 and February 1983.

I first met Mrs Quinlan in 1981 when her daughter, Mrs P.Dixon became one of four Aboriginal people training at Armidale and New England Hospital. As I was involved peripherally in this training program, I was introduced by the trainees to their families and friends.

Mrs Quinlan decided some time during the following months that she would like me to record her story. She had some doubts about how we might go about it, but she was definite that she wanted to make a statement to leave for her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. Further, she wanted to establish her right to Bellbrook which she considers to belong to her and her surviving siblings because her father established the settlement.

Mrs Quinlan also decided that I would need to see Bellbrook, that she wanted to “show me the place” so that I might understand better what she was talking about once we started recording. Consequently a group of us visited Bellbrook on October 8th, 9th and 10th 1982. Mrs Quinlan began telling her story at our camp site on Nulla Nulla Creek. She continued over several Sunday afternoon sessions at my home, a venue she chose.

One of Mrs Quinlan’s greatest worries was “how are we going to put it all together”, the other “but is it going to be really important?”

It is twenty-five years since I left school. At the moment I’m doing an eighteen month training program to be an Addiction Worker. As part of the evaluation of the training program I have been asked to write down my thoughts and feelings about my training.

Some people involved in the program have suggested to me that teachers might be interested in my early childhood experiences – growing up on a reserve and going to an all Aboriginal school.

As I look at it now, I think that education is so important to Aboriginal people. I have one son attending primary school and one has just left high school. I hope my story will help teachers understand why it is hard sometimes for Aboriginal parents to communicate with them.

I was born in Kempsey and raised on Bellbrook Reserve. I lived there with my family (eight sisters and three brothers) and most of my aunts and uncles also lived there at that time. I had a good, happy upbringing, my family were all very close. In my school days my teachers were kind but didn’t really teach me much. A lot of what I’m learning now I should have learnt then. The teachers in those days were getting paid for doing nothing. That makes me angry now – the teachers, especially on the reserve (unless the government had a policy not to teach us) didn’t think it was worth teaching Aboriginal kids.

The teacher on the reserve was also the manager, and his wife the matron. They didn’t want to let us learn anything – we had to do everything for them (washing, cleaning, carting wood) but they never wanted to show us how to do things for ourselves.

In the Northern Territory there are about 20 adult educators based in Aboriginal communities where the traditional life-style is still experienced to a great degree. These adult educators are required to identify the further education and training needs of the community and to implement programs to meet these needs. In this brief paper I shall examine ways in which the study of Aboriginal adult learning styles can be of use to these adult educators.

Before looking at specific Aboriginal learning styles it is necessary to look at those which are generally universally agreed upon as the basic learning styles applicable to adults. This is necessary in order to ensure that adult educators have a foundation on which to base some identifiably different learning styles inherent in Aboriginal culture.

This document represents the views of many people and groups who have been involved in Aboriginal education. It represents particularly the combined work of all the Aboriginal people who have been members of the South Australian Aboriginal Education Consultative Committee. For over twelve months we have been developing the content of this document to the extent where we believe that we have accurately reflected the views of our community.

We further acknowledge our connections to the the South Australian Education Department and the South Australian Institute of Teachers along with various non-Aboriginal Ministers and educationalists with whom we have spent many hours in earnest debate and discussion. The above has led us to believe that the statements we have made are both urgent and necessary as reflections of an Aboriginal viewpoint.

While this document has a particularly South Australian relevance we have had an involvement with statements made by the National Aboriginal Education Committee and our statements reflect the national view also. We also acknowledge the work done by the N.S.W. Aboriginal Education Consultative Group and the N.S.W. Education Department for we have drawn upon these documents in our statements.

A research report published last year has shaken the very rationale for Aboriginal literacy programs. Eve Fesl says that for the first time, Aborigines have had the chance to say what they want, and that their views are very different from those who have sought to educate them.

Copies of the report, Bala Bala: Some Literacy and Educational Perceptions of Three Aboriginal Communities are available from Australian Government Publishing Service bookshops in all States.

There was incredulity in education circles late last year when Bala Bala: Some Literacy and Educational Perceptions of Three Aboriginal Communities reported that many Aborigines rejected literacy.

The project, instigated by Anglo-Australians, began with the assumptions of an Anglo value system. There was an assumption that, just as literacy in English had aided, for example, the peasant classes of England in their efforts towards upward social mobility, it would also be the panacea of Aboriginal social ills. That Aborigines might not concur was never questioned.

Even non-Aborigines on the steering committee, who had some inkling that literacy would not be warmly embraced by all Aborigines, were surprised at an overall rejection of English literacy per se.

Yet Aborigines were not surprised, and if one cares to look closely into the past, one sees many abandoned literacy programs – testimony that Aborigines have never wanted them.

Aurukun State School, on the Gulf coast of Cape York, is one of the most complex for its size in Queensland. Situated in a community that is arguably the most traditional in orientation in this state, the well equipped and staffed school is a symbol of cultural change. Children,who at home lead largely unregulated lives centred on their families, encounter in the school another language, anotfyer culture, another set of values and attitudes - often very different from those they have learned from birth. The school’s achievements are defined and its goals shaped by its adaptation to this clash of expectations in forging an education that draws on the best of both cultures.

In this article I would like to question one of the explanations offered to help account for the relatively low academic achievement of Aboriginal pupils, namely that they are handicapped by negative self-concepts. The connection between self-concept and school success itself seems plausible enough. For instance, students with negative self-concepts may tend to adopt low occupational horizons which, in turn, can undermine one type of motivation for academic achievement. Similarly, if pupils perceive schooling as a race then lack of self-confidence could lead them to take the attitude, “Why bother, I’m not good enough to win a place to university anyway.” Moreover, as Jackson (1960) points out, classrooms are very judgmental places where the behaviour and work of children is constantly evaluated by teachers and peers. As a result in many learning situations the student “is risking error, judgment, disapproval, censure, rejection and, in extreme cases, even punishment” (Canfield and Wells, 1976:7). If insecure and defensive, pupils may find such an atmosphere very threatening and consequently be inhibited by a fear of failure. Also, it may be suggested, unless children are self-sufficient they may experience difficulty coping with cold, distant, formal teacher-pupil relationships.

What is more open to dispute, however, is whether or not Aboriginal children have negative self-concepts. Fanshawe (1976) observes that there is insufficient experimental data to enable this issue to be resolved conclusively on empirical grounds. And within the literature on the education of socially disadvantaged children there are opposing views that can be related to differences in ideology.

This article briefly describes recent approaches to Aboriginal reading education, and assesses their possible usefulness on the basis of the extent to which they are consistent with present-day cognitive and cross-cultural psychological views on reading. Competence approaches are seen as having least likelihood of success, while other approaches based on indigenous learning styles, explicit metacomprehension skills, and functional literacy provide a suitable base for Aboriginal learning.

Dr Ian Malcolm (WA) has shown in several papers the difficulties teachers have communicating with Aboriginal children in the classrooms. Dr Stephen Harris (NT), in his PhD thesis, defined some of the differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal sociolinguistic rules of communication.

This study hypothesises that the rules of communication and organisation in the classroom used by Aboriginal teachers at Milingimbi will be different from those used by white Australian teachers.

It concludes that the two groups are significantly different in teaching styles, each tending towards its own traditional sociolinguistic rules, with some integration of rules from the other culture.

No conclusions are drawn as to the effectiveness of each group.

It is stressed that this is very much only a pilot study to open the way for further research and discussion.

This report is a limited evaluation of the Tutorial Assistance program within the Aboriginal Secondary Grants Scheme.

Achievement of Aboriginal secondary students receiving tuition was analysed according to several criteria, including sex and the type of school attended. The major findings were:

• Tutored Aboriginal students had significantly higher achievement than untutored students, in both English and Mathematics.

• Aboriginal students in boarding schools had significantly higher achievement than those in state schools, regardless of tutoring.

• There were no significant differences between male and female students.

It could not be concluded that tutorial assistance caused the superior performance of tutored students. Student motivation was a highly possible intervening factor, and there are probably many others.

In addition, various solutions to the problem of underachievement by Aboriginal students were ranked according to their effectiveness as perceived by people in the tutorial program. Three solutions were judged equally preferable and viable:

• Employing more Aboriginal teachers, aides and counsellors.

• Providing tutorial assistance to Aboriginal students.

• Sensitising non-Aboriginal teachers to the problems faced by Aboriginal students.

The language used by Aboriginal and Islander children has become in recent years a major focus of attention, with concern being felt on two broad fronts. There has been an increasing awareness that many use a mother tongue which is not English; at the same time there has been a growing realisation that many of those Aboriginal and Islander children who do use English as a first language use a form of language which differs from that normally used in the school. Whereas originally the tendency was to see these deviations from mainstream language use in terms of language deficit, they are now increasingly accepted as examples of language difference. A major philosophical shift has therefore occurred in the area of language teaching: an early emphasis on remediation and compensation has given way to a stress on language development; and language programs are now based on a philosophy of acceptance of the child’s language, and on the belief that it is necessary to start from where the child is. Thus programs no longer aim to ‘stamp out’ the child’s language or to ‘overcome’ the influence of the home, but instead have as their goal the extension and broadening of the child’s already existing language abilities. The emphasis has shifted from ‘correctness’ in terms of standard English, to ‘appropriateness’ in terms of language use in different social situations.