We
got off to a really slow start because it was hard getting
people in place. We were able to offer some time release,
but in a place like Shepherdson [College, at Galiwin'ku
off the coast of Arnhem Land], that's a pretty tricky thing
to manage because there isn't anyone to do the replacement.
We had a basic plot and then we needed to work with that
and they needed to work out what would actually work. I
guess it's easy to talk about what we found out in a sense…
Thinking about it now, what we found out wasn't that surprising.
They are all straightforward kinds of processes and things
that people do in schools, except they were done in really
interesting and unique local ways. Given the chance and
support, teachers are often very inventive.
So…
an intervention program that provides some withdrawal for
kids — a standard kind of thing when kids are struggling
in maths or in other areas. But one of the ways in which
this was done in one of the schools was just so clever and
so interesting. It really empowered them instead of the
reverse.
The
building of relationships with para professional people,
the drawing in of local community — we know that's
an important element of good practice. But these people
just went about it in their own way. I walked down the main
street of Marree [in northern SA] and the woman who sold
me my lunch wanted to talk about the project that her kids
were involved in — It's going really well and we're
talking about maths at home. You can't buy that kind of
thing.
In a learning sense, probably the most important thing that
the teachers kept coming back to was language issues. The
five project sites included a couple where the kids had
English as a second, third or foreign language. But the
issues of Standard Australian English and the 'mathematicalness'
and the precision of the language was really important in
a lot of ways across every site.
In retrospect they clearly reflect the findings in What
Works? They are just another version of those things.
No major revelations, just little lights of intensity and
inventiveness.
There's
still a lot of work to be done which really picks up the
learning issues. Obviously the language one is not going
to go away and that's a big one.
Another
is the setting of high expectations and the issue of trying
to deal with kids, Indigenous kids in particular, not as
ritual learners — happy to sit down and do a page of
sums but as soon as things change minutely from the page
of sums the understanding is not there.
The
whole ritual learning performance in maths is really seductive.
Teachers can say — hey I've got these kids busy —
the kids can feel good about getting a whole bunch of ticks,
but it isn't what matters. It is part of what matters,
being able to go through the rituals of writing out a computation,
but only part of it. The understanding and the knowledge
of the mathematics isn't robust. This is by no means unique
to Indigenous kids and their teachers, but certainly the
people we've talked to have said it's a particularly dogged
issue to get at.
Another
one of the learning things is connecting with kids' lives
— why are we doing this they ask? Again not unique.
Assessment.
We've got assessment regimes around the country that frankly
aren't geared to enabling Indigenous kids to demonstrate
what they know and can do. We have to get the processes
for assessing in that way right, and then get the community
and the bureaucrats and the school principals and so on
to actually value that as a real measure of real learning
that's important and empowers people in their lives.
Lots of kids fall off the truck of learning as it goes through,
and that certainly happens for lots of Indigenous kids.
Absenteeism is an obvious issue. There's all sorts of issues
around why people might not have kept up with the average
pace of learning in mathematics. No point in dwelling on
those. The issue is welcoming those kids back into learning
mathematics and making it feasible for them when they say
— okay, I need to catch this up, I want to get an apprenticeship,
or whatever.
We
really don't have the mechanisms, because what happens it
seems to me is that it goes back to baby stuff and these
teenagers aren't babies. They are people with real adult
needs and we need to deal with that sensibly. So we have
to have this notion of ramping people back into the learning
and getting them back on track quickly. We have to be very
serious about that because otherwise people are going to
get left out. And Indigenous people are clearly among them.
I
come back to where we started with this project and say
there are people in schools who know this stuff and can
make it work.
At
the start, our project was about a very simple proposition.
Find some places around the country where people could
put programs in place that showed Indigenous kids
achieving well, achieving at least as well as mainstream
kids…
