There is a unique culture being followed by indigenous children and their natives and the government is completely dedicated towards improvising their access to resources and services mandatory for their lives. Undoubtedly, there is a massive difference in the life experiences and results between non-indigenous and indigenous children. Narrowing this gap is the first and foremost duty of the government in question. (“Warin J.”, 2007)Multiple research forms have concluded that it is wise to invest on children in early childhood, more so for those who are disadvantaged children, for it yields huge benefits in the long run through abridged expenses on law and order, health and welfare and increased productivity and participation. Unfortunately, it has been found through relevant sources that the indigenous children and their families are less inclined towards accessing those services because of their unavailability in most of the locations, tough competence in service, service delivery fragmentation and the non presence of cultural awareness among masses.
In order to improvise the outcomes for indigenous people, mostly children, the council of Australian Governments has set a number of targets to be achieved. These targets relate to mostly early childhood development. (“Warrki Jarrinjaku ACRS Project Team”, 2002) Some of these include, making pre- school educational program available to all during 1 year before a full time schooling program by the year 2013, bringing the gap in mortality rates for indigenous children to be below five within next 10 years, making early education available to all four years old indigenous in remote areas within a span of next 5 years and ensuring a gap for indigenous students in writing, numeracy and reading within next ten years.
A majority of indigenous families have their better half’s residing in homes where average family size consists of five people residing together. For nearly 3% children, their grandparents are the primary care takers. A wide majority of indigenous children, nearly 81% population resides in a rented place and the remaining 16% claim to have resided in four different types of houses. Very unlikely did the unpartnered parents listed their wages as the major source of income. (“Warin J.”, 2007)
Studies have identified that a huge 95% population speaks English and a meagre 20% spoke one or more indigenous languages. Nearly 15% of the indigenous children learn two languages and a little, 4% learnt three or more than three languages. (“Warin J.”, 2007)
In order to assist indigenous families and to help them and their families to start a good life, the Australian government has initiated a huge funding for a group of early childhood initiatives. (“Warin J.”, 2007)
A couple of research documents reveal that over-representation of aboriginal people especially, young people and children constitute around 4% of all children and young people and still make up to only 29% of all children and young in out of home care. (“Warrki Jarrinjaku ACRS Project Team”, 2002)The Australian government is making huge investments in the form of significant sources for prevention and implementation of early intervention strategies for aboriginal families. Strategies for instance, the Aboriginal Maternal, infant Health Strategy and Brighter Futures concentrate mainly on imparting early help to young mothers who take care of their babies and aboriginal families so as to prevent unfavourable connection with the child protection system. (“Warrki Jarrinjaku ACRS Project Team”, 2002) Some of the very common areas where aboriginal people still continue to be over represented include, child care systems, health systems, homelessness, welfare systems, juvenile and criminal justice systems and unemployment.
Considering them the most unfortunate socio-economic groups in Australia, practices enforced on Aboriginal people and the government legislation have contributed a great deal to the aboriginal people. (“Warin J.”, 2007)
Such policies have had inter-generational effects which need to be tackled. Several government policies and agencies have contributed towards Unemployment, poverty, dispossession of land, poor housing standards, mental health issues, grief and loss issues, family fragmentation, alcohol and substance misuse and poor health outcomes.
The framework developed by the Victorian early years learning and development focuses mainly on children’s development from zero to eight years. This is accomplished by supporting all professionals during their childhood to work together with their families to support them in order to achieve common results for all children. The early childhood professionals include all persons who work with children between the age group zero to eight years. It includes mostly the school teachers, preschool field officers, educators, primary welfare officers, education officers in organizations, play therapists, teachers, inclusion support facilitators but at the same time is not limited to child health nurses only. (“Stanley J, Tomlinson A & Peacock J”, 2003)
Each young Victorian learns during his growth period to enjoy a rewarding, productive and a satisfactory life while making huge contributions towards global and local communities. The Victorian framework is well aware of the principles of the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006 and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Both these organizations regard children as complete members of society who are able to participate in all social activities with their relationship with others. These principles are compliant with usual early childhood research process. (“Stanley J, Tomlinson A & Pocock J”, 2003)
Indigenous perspectives teaching and learning guide teaches the indigenous children to establish true, genuine and effective relationships based on mutual understanding and trust between, staff, students and teachers and their families. (“Stanley J, Tomlinson A & Pocock J”, 2003) It also teaches to be fair and supportive to all. Genuine grouping as a gesture of learning provides greater opportunities to improvise the educational results of most indigenous children. The learning guide also lays special focus on incorporating ESL strategies and to patiently take all the decisions by suspending decisions and clarifying issues related to students support. (“Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing them home”, 2007) It also teaches to employ more and more discussions, include diagrams, pictures, models, charts and tables instead of text in order to enhance the learning process.
The existence of true relationships based on trust, understanding and respect for each other between students and staff and their individual families is the foundation of ensuring top quality education for all students, no matter indigenous or non-indigenous.
Current educational trends truly indicate that schools and the like institutions which create and nourish positive relationships with their families, communities widely make it possible to improve the educational results/reports of most indigenous students. Most importantly, such schools and communities tend to expand their range of values, cultural diversities and perspectives to children and hence connect them to the real world. (“Procedures and principles to be followed when working with Aboriginal children, young people and their families/carers”, 2004)
The key forum, Garma 2006 on providing indigenous education and training focused mainly on the significance of community involvement so as to support the educational requirements of indigenous learners and learning communities. (“Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing them home”, 2007)
There are eight aboriginal ways of learning as described in the chart below:
(“Procedures and principles to be followed when working with Aboriginal children, young people and their families/carers”, 2004)
Basically, aboriginal issues are not dictated in the aboriginal text but the aboriginal processes it. In the aboriginal pedagogy framework, there are eight interconnected pedagogies which involve visualised learning processes, use of symbols and metaphors, narrative driven learning, land based learning, indirect logic, reflective learning techniques, connectivity to communities and modelled genre mastery. But these do change with change in settings. For instance, below mentioned is a small example of how orange public school along with local aboriginal community members have organised aboriginal ways of learning into a dynamic learning cycle to declare their curriculum plan. (“Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing them home”, 2007)
With changing places, different people have their own unique pedagogies. The eight simplest ones mentioned above are a mere starting point for the discussion. Every single school has its own way of engaging and producing a unique framework of aboriginal education through talks with the community regarding local ways of performing tasks. The traditional eight ways strategy has been adopted from a particular ethic, a way of doing things that goes beyond cultural awareness, cultural responsiveness and cultural sensitivity. The conclusion of this analysis seeks to answer a million dollar research question, “How can teachers use Aboriginal knowledge in their classrooms authentically and productively?” The contention related with the same is that working with meta-knowledge, specifically Aboriginal pedagogy, is an effective way for teachers of any background to embed Aboriginal perspectives in any lesson or topic. Moreover, Indigenous content is more possibly to have been associated with cultural integrity in an Aboriginal pedagogical framework, thus helping to resolve the issues of trivialisation and tokenism of Aboriginal culture in the syllabus. (“Stanley J, Tomlinson A & Pocock J.”, 2003)
With context to the sociocultural theory of learning, in constructing such a theory of psychological phenomena, Vygotsky (1978) confronted many existing schools of psychological thought and argued that none of them could provide a firm platform for starting an integrated theory of human psychological process. Vygotsky (1978) also stated very specifically that they were not able to successfully describe and highlight the complex problem solving behaviours. He also argued that the kind of memory that a child has does not change with the growth of the child. With a change a psychological processes there is observed a change in the interfunctional relations that link memory directly with other psychological processes (Vygotsky, 1978). For instance, rote memory is a characteristic of the early phases of cognitive development rather than an abstract thought.
The data collected from forty different learning sources correctly proved that lessons which are more culturally responsive can be produced on Aboriginal pedagogy itself, without making use of Aboriginal content. Many high-scoring actions were developed through verbal partnerships between both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal participants. (“Procedures and principles to be followed when working with Aboriginal children, young people and their families/carers”, 2004) Hence, it can be summed up that the ideal way to make use of aboriginal knowledge in education field is to design learning techniques through intercultural collaboration, permit quality cultural text to emerge through aboriginal pedagogy and through intercultural association and also through creating in depth understanding of aboriginal pedagogy.
References:
Stanley J, Tomlinson A & Pocock J 2003. Child abuse and neglect in Indigenous Australian communities. National Child Protection Clearinghouse. Child Abuse Prevention Issues 19, 32 pages.
Warin J 2007. Joined-up services for young children and their families: Papering over the cracks or re-constructing the foundations? Children & Society 21:87–97.
Warrki Jarrinjaku ACRS Project Team 2002. Aboriginal child rearing and associated research: a review of the literature. Canberra: Australian Government Department of Family and Community Services.
Localised community engagement strategy for the Operational Review and Reassessment of Care Arrangements for Children in ACS Care, 2006, Western Region, NSW Department of Community Services.
Procedures and principles to be followed when working with Aboriginal children, young people and their families/carers, 2004, Western Region, NSW Department of Community Services.
Use of appropriate language when working with Aboriginal communities in NSW, 2007, Research to Practice Notes, NSW Department of Community Services.
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing them home, viewed 7
May 2007, www.humanrights.gov.au/social_justice/bth_report/apologies_state.html
