Teachers, explore the unique and special role of Elders with SBS Learn’s National NAIDOC Week education resource

SBS Learn has once again published a curriculum-aligned education resource for National NAIDOC Week, with thousands of educators across Australia accessing the guide to support learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perspectives, histories and stories.

Authored by proud Yankunyjatjara and Wirangu woman, Shelley Ware, and marking Shelley’s fifth SBS Learn NAIDOC Week resource, it explores this year’s NAIDOC Week theme, For Our Elders. Through questions to prompt meaningful discussions and targeted reading lists appropriate to each year level with suggested activities, students can deepen their understanding of what it means to be a First Nations Elder, and the unique and significant role they have in communities.

Created for all Australian schools, the resource features classroom-ready clips, engaging activities, suggestions for whole-school events and discussion guides. SBS Learn teaching resources aid teachers to embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives into primary and secondary units of work. Since launching on the 26th of June, more than 6,500 copies of the free resource have been downloaded, with tens-of-thousands of visits to the website.

Shelley Ware said: “It’s an honour to, once again, write the SBS Learn NAIDOC resource, as they support and help educators connect and share with their students the beauty within First Nations culture and history. So many teachers stop me in the street, to say how much these resources help them embed our history and culture, into their everyday classroom as they use them all year round.

“This year’s SBS Learn NAIDOC resources are extra special as they celebrate and pay respects to our beautiful Elders. I hope you love them as much as we do!”

This year, the SBS Learn team has also launched a new teaching resource based on the theme For Our Elders featuring iconic interviews by Karla Grant from NITV’s current affairs program, Living Black. The resource includes additional worksheets and classroom activities linked to the Living Black clips, available in English, Arabic and Simplified Chinese to elevate First Nations perspectives in multilingual communities. The resource celebrates the integral role of Elders in communities, recognising the importance of the continued practice of teaching and sharing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.

These SBS Learn resources form part of SBS’s extensive NAIDOC Week offering, which has included programming and coverage across the entire network. They also proudly continue the work set out in SBS’s Elevate Reconciliation Action Plan 2022-2026. This Plan outlines SBS’s commitment to reflecting, exploring and embedding First Nations stories, knowledges, cultures and languages across the network, and to connecting the oldest continuous culture on Earth with the newest Australians.

 SBS Learn is the educational arm of SBS Outreach, focusing on creating quality materials for teachers aligned to the Australian Curriculum. Creating resources designed with the values of diversity, inclusion and connectedness in mind, SBS Learn prepares young minds for the world beyond school gates. 

For the pdf version of this media release click here.