Abstract
What counts as bilingual education for Australian Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory (NT) has varied significantly depending on geographical location and temporal context, Indigenous community involvement and the prevailing political environment. This chapter discusses NT bilingual education in relation to national and international cultural ethics, legislative acts and public policies and proclamations and declarations, alongside the effects of value differences and ideologies. It emerges that Indigenous social agents have mostly enhanced literacy education in communities and have been instrumental in the evolution of culturally informed pedagogy and team-teaching practices over the last 40 years. The chapter discusses the educational effects (assessed outcomes and school persistence rates) among Indigenous children through bilingual/biliteracy programming and exposes the recurring failure of bilingual and culturally appropriate pedagogies to attract mainstream legitimacy or consistent funding. Finally, the chapter discusses human rights questions entailed in this pervasive and continuous neglect of Indigenous languages in Australian education.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Teachers who extensively developed the oral first language of their students in bilingual oral and monolingual English literacy programs, however, achieved a higher level of success.
- 3.
Devlin (2017: 12) notes that in 1950, an agreement to provide education to the “natives” also stipulated remote Indigenous children (with strong language and culture) should be provided first-language education.
- 4.
These rights included the Land Rights Act and the introduction of Aboriginal advisory and representative bodies such as the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee in 1972 and the National Aboriginal Conference 1977 and eventually Australian and Torres Strait Island Commission (abolished in 2003).
- 5.
The NPL in fact sustained bilingual programs in the NT at a time when their legitimation and resourcing were being denuded by the NT government according to Devlin (2009).
- 6.
Indeed, as noted in a contemporary NT education review, 65% of remote Indigenous children still speak an Indigenous language at home (Wilson 2014: 44).
- 7.
Batchelor Institute was specifically set up as an Indigenous-controlled institution for teacher training of remote Indigenous students in 1972 to accommodate the influx of Indigenous trainees (Watt 2017). Originally named the Aboriginal Teacher Education Centre, it was renamed Batchelor in 1979.
- 8.
Hoogenraad (2001) reported that the early Warlpiri work in particular used community resources, including funds from the local shop, as opposed to Education Department resources to fund eminent linguists such as Ken Hale to work with Warlpiri assistant teachers on Warlpiri language and literacy. Warlpiri have retained and continue to use “the technical linguistic discussion of the Warlpiri sound system and grammar taught to them by Ken Hale” (Hoogenraad 2001: 130).
- 9.
This is not to be confused with the poorly structured Two-Way policy of the early 2000s.
- 10.
While in the USA this is constitutionally recognised, as well as being embedded in treaties and laws, this is not the case in Australia (McCarty and Lee 2014). However, Australia is a signatory to United Nations Rights of Indigenous Peoples which encapsulates these USA Federal Indigenous rights of “self-government, self-education, and self-determination” (McCarty and Lee 2014: 101).
- 11.
The term Both Ways originates with the Gurindji people of Kalkaringi, who needed a term to represent their desire to generate an effective pedagogy, a distinctive Indigenous culture and language of education, and to align this with the prevailing practices of schooling.
- 12.
Because of non-Indigenous teacher resistance, a class may not follow an Indigenous bilingual biliteracy program or follow a diluted form of programming in a bilingual school, and this effected the academic performance outcomes for a whole school (Hoogenraad 2001).
- 13.
This is evidenced by Tiwi bilingual school students in the early 2000s whose very strong MT focus in lower grades achieved literacy rates higher than the Australian average and who won two Australian (English) Literacy Awards in competition with mainstream monolingual students in 2003 (Devlin 2009).
- 14.
A set of reforms that led to the suspension of Indigenous human rights as well as the forced acquisition and government control of Aboriginal lands, housing and assets, including state-supported income.
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Oldfield, J., Lo Bianco, J. (2019). A Long Unfinished Struggle: Literacy and Indigenous Cultural and Language Rights. In: Rennie, J., Harper, H. (eds) Literacy Education and Indigenous Australians. Language Policy, vol 19. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8629-9_10
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