PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT // EXPERT CONTRIBUTOR
How much do you know about the diversity of Aboriginal culture in Australia? MANY MAINSTREAM CLASSROOMS IN AUSTRALIA ARE PERCEIVED AS MONOCULTURAL AND MONOLINGUAL, THIS PERCEPTION COULD ALSO BE EXTENDED TO THE COMPOSITION OF THE TEACHING WORKFORCE. UNFORTUNATELY, CONSIDERING THIS, THE TEACHING AND LEARNING TAKING PLACE COULD BE QUITE LIMITING AND EXCLUDE AUSTRALIA’S RICH HISTORY AND FIRST NATIONS PEOPLE.
E Dr Tracy Woodroffe is a Warumungu Luritja woman with years of experience in the field of education - Early Childhood, Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. The majority of that time has been spent in the classroom teaching and in associated leadership roles. She is a lecturer at Charles Darwin University who coordinates, develops and delivers teacher education units about teaching Indigenous learners and the importance of Indigenous knowledge in education.
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3.3 per cent of Australians (798,400 people) identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander in the 2016 census (ABS, 2018). Colonial attitudes and bias would have you think that Indigenous Australians mostly live in the remote areas of Australia. The reality is that “79 per cent of Aboriginal Australians live in urban areas, and the vast majority of Aboriginal children (83.9 per cent) receive their education in government schools” (Morrison et al., 2019, p. 2). Not all teachers feel prepared and confident to teach in Aboriginal contexts – Aboriginal content, with Aboriginal students, and in remote communities (Ure et al., 2018). The geographic location or spread of Aboriginal peoples across Australia highlights a diversity and a complexity that is seldom considered when thinking about cultural aspects of classroom learning. The ABS website shows an interactive map of distribution https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australiaswelfare/profile-of-indigenous-australians . If you overlay or compare the distribution map with the AIATSIS language group map, you can develop a better understanding of the diversity of Aboriginal people represented. See https://aiatsis.gov.au/ explore/map-indigenous-australia Teachers wanting to enact cultural competence and demonstrate expected Australian professional standards for teachers may feel overwhelmed with the job at hand.
education matters primary
The complication is that Aboriginal people may not necessarily be living on their own ancestral lands. There are several reasons why this may be the case such as employment availability or study options, it could also have something to do with the fact that during the processes of colonisation many Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their land, displaced, and moved to missions or homes, and stolen as a matter of government policy. Teachers can join reconciliation efforts to work together on a shared history moving forward by at least knowing the traditional owners of the land that you are on and learning how and when to say an acknowledgement of country. Make a point of teaching this to your own class. Websites and online resources such as the Gambay map of Australia’s first languages and Reading Australia have teaching notes to assist teachers to build inclusive learning programs that teach about Australian Aboriginal people. What is required is an approach that highlights the strength of Aboriginal culture and the many Aboriginal knowledges represented across Australia. A place to start looking for this is the CSIRO website with Indigenous science. Answer the following questions – Do you and your class know about David Unaipon and why he is seen on the $50 note? Do you and your class know about Charles Perkins and what he has done
