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Innovative Teacher Training in Remote Australian Indigenous Communities: A Sustainable Staffing Model
Charles Darwin University is delivering its initial teaching degree, the Bachelor of Teaching and Learning, to indigenous students by sending lecturers out each week to five remote rural communities in the Northern Territory in Australia. The students would not otherwise be able to enroll in such a course due to poor housing, few resources, lack of mobility and little internet access. The delivery of the course is integrated into the students’ current work as Teacher Assistants in the classroom, and is designed to allow them to make the shift to being a fully qualified teacher. The communities are indigenous, and some of the schools are bilingual, so the local ways of knowing, doing and being are also embedded into the program.
In remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory of Australia, it is difficult to recruit teachers who stay for more than one year. Typically, they are young and inexperienced, and do not speak the local language. Student attendance at these schools is poor, retention to leaving age is limited, and educational outcomes for the students are well below national benchmarks. Each class in these schools has a local indigenous Teacher Assistant (TA), many of whom have worked in the school in excess of 20 years. They are typically unwilling or unable to leave their family and country, live in substandard housing, have no access to a computer or the internet other than at school and are the mainstay of their families and household. They have a reasonable level of education themselves, and express a great desire for there to be more indigenous teachers teaching their children and acting as role models. In an effort to promote a more sustainable staffing model for these communities, and, as a consequence, hope to improve the outcomes for the students, Charles Darwin University is taking its course to the communities by sending lecturers out each week to deliver the program to these Teacher Assistants.
The ‘Growing Our Own’ project aims to develop an authentic ‘two-way’ model of teacher preparation, learning and professional growth. This will be achieved through:
Provision of creative and accessible pathways for Indigenous staff to train as teachers in their local communities, and;
Provision of significant academically-supervised professional learning for mentors in cross-cultural awareness and indigenous education.
Each week of the school year (that is, for 40 weeks), five different lecturers head out from Darwin to five remote communities (up to 600 kilometres away) by air, boat and car for one or two days. On arrival at the school, the lecturers meet with the mentor teachers, the liaison teacher at the school and the preservice teachers in the school in which they work as Teacher Assistants. Over a period of ten weeks, they attempt to complete the work required for three or four university units towards their Teaching Degree. A full day is spent with the CDU lecturer on academic coursework tasks, such as accessing the literature, discussing the educational issues, reflecting on their lesson planning and implementation, completing assessment tasks. On other days of the school week, the school liaison teacher works with them on the academic tasks and in their practical classroom practice. Most of the preservice teachers do not have English as their first language, and some of the schools involved in the program are bilingual. One of the main roles of the Assistant (preservice) Teachers is as a translator and behaviour mediator in the classroom for the non local teachers with their students. Each lecturer must have many skills. They have to be able to deliver content from a variety of units. They must earn the respect and trust of the preservice teachers who see hundreds of ‘outsiders’ pass through their communities each year. They must possess enormous patience to wait for answers from their reserved students, and to accept that community events (such as funerals and celebrations) will take precedence over their classes. They must be culturally sensitive, indeed knowledgeable, to be able to adapt the curriculum to the local context. They must have a comprehensive knowledge of the teaching program so that they can ensure its objectives are being met in an environment for which it was not originally designed. They must also promote and facilitate the two-way model of teacher knowledge with the mentor teachers. It is also important to maintain academic rigor with students who do not have a background of critical thinking, written planning and evaluation documents. The project is called Growing Our Own, and the pedagogy used is shaped around each student’s individual strengths and context. It capitalises on their existing work as Teacher Assistants and uses their vast cultural knowledge to customise each unit of work and the required assessment tasks so that it blends with their classroom practice. They are encouraged, through this work, to make the shift from teacher assistant to teacher in their classroom.
So far (at the beginning of the second year), most students have stayed in the course. The English literacy levels (most of them do not speak English as a first language) have been a challenge for some students, and some have taken longer than the expected time to complete various units. All students have expressed an enthusiasm for the course, and are keen to persevere to completion. The report by an independent authority to the project’s stakeholders at the end of 2009 was positive in some areas, but also outlined some issues, such as managing conflicting cultural and work ethic expectations. Anecdotal evidence from the preservice teachers, their lecturers and mentor teachers has confirmed that there have been many benefits of the program in terms of ‘two way’ learning.
Developing a sustainable staffing model for remote indigenous communities.
Embeds indigenous cultural knowledge into theory and practice with both the students and their mentors benefitting from this process.
The program is delivered onsite by lecturers who travel by plane, dinghy and four wheel drive vehicle over crocodile inhabited waters each week.
Ongoing support from full time school-based coordinator who liaise with students onsite.
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