Abstract
In this chapter we discuss some of the challenges facing teachers of Indigenous children in the early years of schooling, especially around providing opportunities for students to demonstrate existing knowledge. Our focus is on the ways in which teachers are able to show responsive decision making in leading their classes in learning, and the kinds of contexts that result in effective and less effective outcomes in finding out what their students do and do not know. Using Conversation Analytic methods we show here how this may be particularly challenging in a classroom environment where language differences between students and teachers appear to be a factor, but also that even inexperienced teachers can be highly sensitive to occasions for students’ demonstrations of what they know of curriculum content.
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Notes
- 1.
The situation is depressingly similar to that encountered by Christie and Harris (1985) nearly 30 years ago, when they wrote that factors the lack of success of Indigenous children in schools in Aboriginal communities in northern Australia included “poor attendance rates, the lack of a literate or schooled tradition in the home, “motivational” differences, curriculum materials unsuitable for the cross-cultural setting, high staff turnover, and lack of specialist teacher training” (p. 81).
- 2.
This study was funded through an Australia Research Council Linkage Project (‘Clearing the path towards literacy and numeracy: Language for learning in indigenous schooling.’ LP100200406). We thank the school and community, and the Queensland Department of Education, Training and Employment for their support of this project.
- 3.
Names of children and teachers have been changed.
- 4.
It is worth pointing out that Rinnady’s “Miss” in line 41 is unlikely to have been a bid to answer the teacher’s question, but is more likely to have been another attempt to secure a turn so that she could report to the teacher on her noticing, which was finally produced in lines 46–47.
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Appendix: Transcription Conventions
Appendix: Transcription Conventions
(0.0) | silences measured in tenths of a second |
((Words)) | descriptions of actions of speakers are placed between double parentheses |
= | latching: adjacent turns with no gap and no overlap between them |
? | “question” intonation (i.e. rising pitch) |
. | “period” intonation (i.e. falling pitch) |
, | “comma” intonation (i.e. level pitch) |
underline | syllables delivered with stress or emphasis by the speaker |
CAP | stretches of speech delivered more loudly than the surrounding talk |
°word° | stretches of speech delivered more softly than the surrounding talk |
wo:rd | the lengthening of a sound is marked through colons: each colon |
represents approximately the length of a beat | |
>words< | talk that is faster than its surrounding talk |
<words> | talk that is slower than its surrounding talk |
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Gardner, R., Mushin, I. (2016). The Impact of Interaction and Language on Leading Learning in Indigenous Classrooms. In: Johnson, G., Dempster, N. (eds) Leadership in Diverse Learning Contexts. Studies in Educational Leadership, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28302-9_15
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