Comments on: Four hours in English – The NT Government’s Indigenous ed. plan built on misinformation.

By: Tim Trudgen

Tim Trudgen — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 00:14:19 +0000

Appologies for the delay in posting comments. I have been out of the country. Comments will post automatically in the future unless picked up by spam filter.

By: suzanne

suzanne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:45:21 +0000

Carrie I am very interested in your comments. Could you explain what you mean when you stated that the ‘bi-lingual approach of the past 20 years did not enable them to learn’ – wouldn’t this be part of the argument for not encouraging bilingualism in schools now?

By: Carrie

Carrie — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:06:24 +0000

I have worked in a remote community for a bit over 2 years in a primary school. Having learnt some language has been helpful in the classroom, and having stayed longer and developing a relationship with my students has benefitted my ability to teach them even more.
The problem is that there is no-one who wants to teach language formally to a group of willing teachers. We are left to our own devices, and pick up as much as we can that generally amounts to nouns, some verbs and behaviour management phrases. And the upcoming Teacher Assistants have very little or no literacy in either language because the bi-lingual approach of the past 20 years did not enable them to learn.

By: Tim Trudgen

Tim Trudgen — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 02:54:22 +0000

Kathy,
Totally agree community based training of local adults is probably even more important that training of non-Indingeous school teachers. I believe the absolute best appraoch is to teach the adults to teach their children. But, we must remmber that trainers/educators for Indingeous adults will also require extensive language and cross-cultural training to be effective.

I suspect that training non-indingeous teachers in the local language would lead to significant improvements in retention rates of teachers and facilitate non-indingeous and local indingeous teachers to train and support each other better.

By: kathy mcmahon

kathy mcmahon — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:16:40 +0000

Yes it would be most helpful if non-indigenous teachers learnt an Indigenous language. Some do of course, but most seem to see it as irrelevant to their work with Indigenous language-speaking students. A bizarre belief in my opinion!
The other side of the coin of course is that if local Indigenous teachers once again had the opportunity to study Teacher Education courses in a community-based mode, dependence on the “plastic bag” white teachers (hang around for awhile and then blow away!) would decrease and eventually disapppear. Then we would really see some results! Already we know that almost half of the feted Commonwealth teachers ( 20 so far, trained for 10 weeks) have left the NT after less than a semester. Assuming the other 190 go the same way, I keep asking myself why do we keep assuming more of thr same will change the current unsatisafctory results??