A specialist in Indigenous education says Australia needs to stop sending young and inexperienced teachers to work in remote Aboriginal communities.
(Transcript from World News Australia Radio)
Professor Lester-Irabinna Rigney says the teachers are ill equipped to deal with what are often the most challenging conditions they could face and the quality of education is suffering as a consequence.
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His views are in line with a United Nations report which calls on governments worldwide to send the best teachers to the most challenging parts of their countries to overcome inequalities in learning.
Paying new graduate teachers a higher wage to work in remote Aboriginal communities is a flawed approach according to Professor Lester-Irabinna Rigney.
"We've got inexperienced teachers graduating currently and they go into some of the most difficult regions of our country, of Australia and they teach the toughest scenarios that could be confronted with the teacher and they expect to flourish or close the gap in these areas and I think that we've got to be mindful of teacher quality brings out best educational outcomes."
Professor Rigney is the Dean of Indigenous Edcuation at the University of Adelaide and has worked in Aboriginal education for more than two decades.
The professor says another problem is that teaching degrees tend to have crowded curriculums and that can mean Aboriginal education doesn't get sufficient priority.
He says undergraduate teachers need to be broadly educated about a range of issues when it comes to teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
"Indigenous contexts of learning, Aboriginal children, Aboriginal schooling and they can be in first and second and third and forth year topics but you also when you're dealing with numeracy and literacy you're also dealing with teaching pedadogy and curriculum matters and Aboriginal matters and perspectives and content need to be built into those so that the teacher is not just getting an isolated topic in the first semester of the first year then not getting anything throughout the rest of the degree."
A report by UNESCO on the progress countries are making towards achieving global education goals set in the year 2000 has found that 57 million children are failing to learn simply because they're not in the classroom.
And one-third of children are not learning the basics whether they're in school or not.
UNESCO researcher Catherine Jere says there's a global shortage of teachers and, in Australia, they're not adequately trained to be teaching Indigenous children.
"We're seeing around the world that there's a shortage of qualified teachers and teachers are not prepared for the tasks that they face in the classroom. In countries like Australia and New Zealand difficulties are faced dealing with specific needs of Indigenous children. For example, more effort needs to be put into having teachers that understand the culturally appropriate methods of teaching and have a curriculum that supports this."
Catherine Jere says not adequately addressing the needs of Indigenous children is why they're still falling behind their non-Indigenous counterparts.
"The difficulties faced by Indigenous children is one of the main reasons for these wide gaps in learning between rich and poor students. These gaps have persisted since the mid 1990s but are still not receiving sufficient policy attention. If you look specifically at Indigenous students in Australia only around two thirds of them are achieving mandatory benchmarks compared to almost 90 per cent of non-Indigenous children."
Professor Rigney from the University of Adelaide says there's some merit in the current approach in the Northern Territory of using truancy officers to get Indigenous children to school.
But he says getting kids to school is one thing, keeping them there as engaged learners is quite another.
"We've got to be mindful of what quality the teacher has and what resources the teacher has at her disposal to be able to make a real good difference. The other aspect is that if aboriginal kids don't see themselves in the curriculum or in the classroom or in the assessment processes they'll vote with their feet and leave so it undoes the work of the truancy officer so we can get them to school, the issue is what have we got for them and how do we turn them on to education once we have them in the classroom."
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