Indigenous adults on site: A caution

'We all have the responsibility'

An important issue that has emerged from our visits and consultations is the stress felt by some Indigenous teachers and other staff members arising from the presumption that they, personally, will take on the whole weight of looking after a school's or training institution's Indigenous students, keeping up community contact and, in some cases, responsibility for much larger issues of interracial relations. And that is neither reasonable nor fair. Working in education and training is hard. Loads have to be shared.

Nor is it good for the effectiveness of the institution. Julianne Willis describes the evolution of new practices in this regard at Kormilda College, Darwin.

We used to have people who were employed at the College with this specialised knowledge about Indigenous cultures, and so they would be the people that everybody would defer to in relation to anything to do with our Indigenous students. There are people who have a lot greater understanding, and others of us who have a lot less understanding. But what that meant was that these people then were the only ones who could ever work with the Aboriginal kids successfully, or talk with the Aboriginal parents successfully.

And so for those individuals, they had these enormous responsibilities of being the people who were the ones who could do things with Aboriginal kids and the rest of us couldn't. To me that divided the College and some people could avoid their real responsibilities. People could say — oh well I don't know. I don't have the specialist knowledge, therefore I don't need to do anything. And the people who did have the specialist knowledge were crumbling under the weight of it all. The major change over the last couple of years was to actually say, well Aboriginal education is core business at Kormilda College, therefore that means that it's everybody's responsibility.

So we are not going to have special positions that only cater for the needs of the Indigenous kids. We all cater for the needs of the Indigenous kids, and we'll spread that responsibility and try to resource it as well. For example we had full-time positions that worked in the area of Aboriginal education. Now what we've got is people in positions of responsibility who have, say, extra time allocation in order to work effectively with Indigenous students. So no longer is there this divide across the campus as to who does and who doesn't. We all do.

You also need to think about the most effective use that can be made of Aboriginal and Islander education workers, and the personal professional support they may require.

It is easy to assume that their role is confined to student welfare, getting kids to school and so on. Closer scrutiny will reveal that they work in classrooms supporting students with their work, a task for which they are not necessarily well-equipped. As recent experience in New South Wales has shown, their confidence and effectiveness can be increased dramatically by providing them with professional development — good for the school, good for them and very good for your students.