Developing Local Curriculum Materials—Learning Metaphors, Insightful Collaborations, Community Involvement

Abstract

When bilingual education began in remote schools of the Northern Territory only the most basic printing technologies were available. By the time bilingual education was revoked as a government policy thirty years later, schools were well and truly in the digital age. The remarkable evolution of the materialities of teaching and learning was underpinned by an equally remarkable transition of pedagogical theories: from those underpinned by colonialism and the enlightenment, to those reflecting and supporting distinctive local Aboriginal epistemologies and knowledge practices. This paper deals with the complex interactions between the theories and technologies of NT bilingual education, from the early 1970s until the present. In doing so, he discusses the following key topics: literacy materials inherited from the mission era and the development of new materials and literacy pedagogies; the move to language experience and child-centred approaches; Aboriginalisation and the role of the classroom teacher; the assertion of ancestral connections—songs, histories, and designs—in education, and the development of both-ways curriculum; and finally, the appropriations of digital media.