Barriers to Aboriginal education
Barriers include inappropriate teaching materials and a lack of Aboriginal role models.
Aboriginal education requires connection to communities and informed parents.
Factors which are a barrier to Aboriginal students' education are
- English teaching materials because many Aboriginal students' first language is not English.
- Inappropriate context: If the stories told in teaching materials do not relate to Indigenous lives they are of little use for Aboriginal students.
- No 'black faces': If teaching material (books, films) is entirely based on white models Indigenous students cannot identify with their characters.
- Poverty. Because parents cannot afford health services students have poorer health than their peers. Hearing loss is one consequence with all its side effects which affect learning.
- Lack of infrastructure: Analysis showed that for every dollar spent by the government on education of a child in the Northern Territory, just 47 cents was spent educating a child in a remote community (Wadeye). And if all children of that community would attend school, there weren't enough teachers and classrooms to accommodate them all [1].
- Connection to their communities. Many Aboriginal people like to reside in their own communities and will not leave them for skills training.
- Uneducated parents. Native Welfare took Aboriginal children away up until the late 1970s. Aboriginal parents where one parent was white were in constant fear that if they sent their children to school they would never see them again. "I went to school late, I think, because the old people were concerned about Native Welfare taking half caste kids away. They were hiding me in the bloody scrub, until they stopped taking these kids away," says Trevor Parker, a Punjima Aboriginal man from the Pilbara region in Western Australia [2].
We have far too many of our children trying to succeed in an educational environment that doesn't tell the truth about our history, the Aboriginal history of Australia.—Nyoongar Prof Colleen Hayward, Edith Cowan University, Perth [3]
"They had a vibrant school council"
Aboriginal Professor of Law and Australian of the Year 2009, Mick Dodson, says that programs and projects that work are those where schools embrace and involve their local communities and families, and vice-versa. He recounts the following story [4].
"I remember going to a school where the principal lamented that he couldn't engage with the community."
"Now, this school had a two-metre wire fence that got locked up every day, you know… 'Government property, you can't come in here'."
"And I compared that to some schools where they had no fence and they had Aboriginal murals all over, they had put in a special brick wall so the kids could paint their own mural. They had a vibrant school council and the principal understood why it was important to have the school as central to the community [as possible]."
Out of respect for Aboriginal culture I use Indigenous sources as much as possible.
[1] 'Lessons in language', NIT 27/11/2008 p.26
[2] 'Karijini Mirlimirli', Noel Olive, Fremantle Arts Centre Press 1997 p.113
[3] 'Leaders told: Don't ignore urban people', Koori Mail 447 p.18
[4] 'For Mick Dodson, the work goes on', Koori Mail 468 p.21