The aim of comparative studies in education is to improve our understanding of our own problems of education at the national level. In the words of Phillip E. Jones (1973:24), “Comparative education can lead us to understanding, sympathy and tolerance”. More than that, it is hoped that it can lead to improved circumstances for Australia’s most disadvantaged minority group – the Aborigines.

The Aborigines were the first people to have a social system in Australia. That system, however, has undergone dramatic change in the last 200 years at the hands of ‘white’ migrants. Changes in educational policy in Australia have been largely a reaction to what the ruling majority has regarded as the ‘Aboriginal problem’. Schooling for Aborigines thus moved, early this century, from an era of mission schools and reserves to ‘formal’ schooling which was introduced in the 1960’s. Policies then shifted in turn from ‘assimilation’ to ‘integrationism’ to ‘self-determination’ and self-government’ for the Aborigines.

Racism certainly exists amongst primary school children in Australia. Through both experience in school and teaching, the authors have noted marked prejudice amongst students. This prejudice takes the forms of slurs, name calling, recitation of myths and stereotypes, and occasionally violence, and is directed at all minority groups, but notably Aborigines and Asians.

Students in minority groups have most likely been on the receiving end of this prejudice during their school lives and, because of this, may have felt alienated and humiliated. In this paper it is proposed that the teaching of race relations and cultural understanding is one method teachers may use to decrease the racial attitudes of the white non-minority students.

Language is an important part of a child’s total development as a person. Through language the child learns the behaviour patterns that are expected within his society, the society’s religious beliefs, and how the society sees the organisation of the world around it.

“Language is a powerful force of socialisation or the preparation of a young person for later life in a social group.” It has a vital function in “accumulating and transmitting culture” (Bostock, 1977, p.6).

Indigenous people have been for a long time deprived of financial benefit from their knowledge. Campaigns around the stolen wages and the “Pay the Rent” campaign highlight this. As does the endemic poverty and economic disenfranchisement experienced by many Indigenous people and communities in Australia. Recent enterprises developed by Indigenous people, such as the sale of art works, can be seen as examples of people receiving remuneration for tangible products deriving from their knowledge. Also, tourism involves the sale of selected knowledge in context. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is a rich and expanding area of enterprise development which supports the development of knowledge and its use in enterprise. While such work depends on the owner’s, or in this case Indigenous, control of the knowledge, it can open up new avenues for enterprise development. Knowledge about local land can be included in children’s computer games, knowledge about successful projects can be shared between communities through the immediacy and multimedia format afforded by online environments, and government reports and statistics can be accessed and analysed by Indigenous groups, given tools that suit a community’s abilities and needs. In particular the way in which ICT can be adapted to individual requirements make such tools ideal for communities which form such a varied and complex environment. The author believes it is important that Indigenous communities not only benefit from ICT by taking control of the technology for their purposes, but are also part of its creation and design to suit their aspirations. ICT is a highly flexible technology which can be tailored to many different enterprises. This paper presents some of the projects being developed at the University of New South Wales and suggests how these can be extended.

These are the views on the current position of Aboriginal disempowerment in Australian society, expressed by Lois O'Donoghue (1995: 5).

Teenagers in the Western world are increasingly vocal in their demands for “relevance” in their school experience. Young Aboriginal men in their teens (although perhaps not fully conscious of what they are doing, or able to verbalize their feelings) are also “demanding” relevance in their school experience by several kinds of passive resistance. Two examples of this resistance are, that attendance at some Northern Territory schools is extremely low, and that young men trained in various trade courses are generally working in other trades. The educational system, of course, is not solely responsible for this situation, but we should respond to this new “post colonial” mood in Aboriginal communities. Examples of the “post colonial” era are: that Aboriginals know they are free to resist white pressures to work or attend school, or in fact to do anything “white”; that local Aboriginal councils are assuming much more responsibility for local management; that local Aboriginals cherish their new found power to say which white people can or cannot live in their community, and so on. Our prediction is that if schools don’t move with the times we will find that schools in Aboriginal communities will soon begin to appear to Aboriginals as the last “white strongholds” in these communities; that is “white” in terms of initiatives, in terms of ultimate authority, in terms of environmental setting, materials used, times at which things are done and content of what is taught.

For the white teacher to say, “But I’m open to Aboriginals taking more initiative”, is hardly practical because the Aboriginal teenager has not learned to be sufficiently aggressive or expressive to take initiatives in the face of the technologically dominant white teacher; therefore the first initiative-to-allow-initiative must be taken by the white teacher.

While conducting research intended to explore the underlying thoughts and assumptions held by non-Indigenous teachers and policy makers involved in Aboriginal education I dug out my first book on Australian history which had been given when I was about seven years old. Titled Australia From the Beginning (Pownall, 1980), the book was written for children and was not a scholarly book. It surprised me, then, to find so many of my own understandings and assumptions about Aboriginal affairs and race relations in this book despite four years of what had seemed quite liberal education in Australian history.

I doubt that anyone would disagree with the need to establish a positive teacher/child relationship in any classroom situation. The fact is that most young children are expectant of this happening and are conditioned by their home environment and experience to relate to the school and the teacher. There is no doubt that this attitude tempers any sense of strangeness and assists in the development of a feeling of security so necessary to a successful school experience. Many of the steps taken to foster a positive relationship between teacher and pupils occur spontaneously and as a result of mutual interaction, on the basis of a common cultural background. In the case of Aboriginal children in a class situation, this common cultural background cannot be presumed to exist. Many aspects of the Aboriginal culture are vastly different from the European one, not the least of the differences being that the very concept of the school institution does not belong to the Aboriginal culture.

Some understanding of the basic cultural differences is necessary to provide for the building up of a feeling of mutual trust and ease. Suggestions, hopefully of a practical nature, are offered to facilitate this most important aspect of a class teacher’s responsibilities, for without it, I am convinced little meaningful learning will occur.

Dr Ian Malcolm (WA) has shown in several papers the difficulties teachers have communicating with Aboriginal children in the classrooms. Dr Stephen Harris (NT), in his PhD thesis, defined some of the differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal sociolinguistic rules of communication.

This study hypothesises that the rules of communication and organisation in the classroom used by Aboriginal teachers at Milingimbi will be different from those used by white Australian teachers.

It concludes that the two groups are significantly different in teaching styles, each tending towards its own traditional sociolinguistic rules, with some integration of rules from the other culture.

No conclusions are drawn as to the effectiveness of each group.

It is stressed that this is very much only a pilot study to open the way for further research and discussion.

Aboriginal artists, authors and songwriters have expressed their thoughts and experiences about Aboriginal education through plays, poems, short stories, novels and songs. Their views cover a broad spectrum of educational issues that focus on educational experiences since contact, the teaching of traditional Aboriginal knowledge as part of the school curriculum, and other issues in both ways education.

The following article has been based on personal experiences and dealings with over 40 teachers and three different principals during the period 1976–1981, while at the Mornington Island State School. It is also based on discussions with teachers from other communities, advisory teachers, principals and inspectors during this period.

The article intends to look at the meaning of burn-out oomplaoenoy and how this syndrome so easily affects teachers and other workers, especially in remote Aboriginal communities. Although the article strongly supports all the recent innovations and planning in the area of curriculum development, conferences, and support systems in Aboriginal Education, still, that most fundamental criterion is missing – selection of teachers to work in these isolated areas with these innovated programs.

More importantly, the article also hopes to show what happens to the majority of teachers in these particular areas and how the burn-out oomplaoenoy syndrome operates. Perhaps the reader may then realise why such schools have enormous staff turn overs. Perhaps, also, education authorities should view these proven burn-out teachers in Aboriginal Education with greater understanding, support and value.

It remains my strong belief that each and every one of us is capable of working in •burn-out’. It is, however, much easier to adopt ‘complacency’. ‘Burn-out’ is that period of time during which one strives to work at maximum level and efficiency. Set-backs and failures are brushed aside and the person keeps attacking, keeps forcing himself to reach goals pre-set by himself or by others. By forcing ‘burn-out’, working to the limit, however, one can soon become burnt-out. Burnt-out is a dangerous time for the individual. Either he recognises the situation and opts for complacency, or he ‘cracks’ and is in that situation of being of no use to anyone, or he leaves the situation.

This article documents the establishment of the Indigenous Specializations program in the School of Social Work at the University of Victoria. In the absence of funding for Indigenous programs, First Nations professors Robina Thomas and Jacquie Green developed the Indigenous Specializations program ‘off the side of their desk’. This article describes the process of creating a culturally specific program for Indigenous students in a mainstream university. Many of the challenges depicted in the article are ongoing, alongside various successes and victories for Indigenous graduates.

This article examines the role of the multilingual education (MLE) teacher in the mother tongue-based MLE program for the Juangas, a tribe in Odisha, an eastern state of India, and is part of a broader study of the MLE program in the state. For the specific purpose of this article, I have adopted Welmond's (2002) three-step process: identifying culture-specific knowledge about the role of a teacher; examining the state's education objectives that influence teachers’ behaviour and experiences; and focusing on the behaviour and experience of teachers at the local level. These three steps constantly merged into one another during the examination of the subject under discussion. The paper recognises that the MLE teachers are not only first-generation teachers, but also first-generation practitioners of MLE, and therefore need to be resourceful and experimental in their classroom practices. However, given the national imperative to achieve universal elementary education by 2015, within the para-teacher framework adopted by the Government of India, the MLE teacher seems to be just a means to an end.

The athlete role model has emerged as the new pastor invested with the task of leading young people classed “at-risk” from entering into self-destructive pathways. The logic invested in the athlete role model is that young people identify with their sporting heroes and in the process try to emulate them. This holds for the major sporting codes in Australia including the Australian Football League (AFL), which supports the formation of role model programmes based on the input of Indigenous athletes to target Indigenous youth living in rural outposts. Armstrong (1996) sees the push to emulate the deeds of elite athletes in terms of a mythic function, the creation of desire to be like the hero. This article explores the theoretical implications for Indigenous learning grounded in the athlete/hero as role model. It is proposed that the athlete role model in the contemporary context of capitalism can work to obscure the realities of competition in sport and in the process promulgate false opportunity through sport at the expense of education.

In this qualitative study, over the period of one year, we assessed the appropriateness of a mainstream early childhood education intervention, the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) programme, in five on-reserve First Nations communities, by focusing on the experiences of the Aboriginal women who delivered the programme. Findings revealed a process of “taking ownership” of HIPPY. “Taking ownership” included three subprocesses: changes in the women’s views regarding (1) the strengths of the programme; (2) self-identity; and (3) the identification of the programme as Aboriginal. Through taking ownership, the women were no longer content to deliver HIPPY strictly as it was described in the programme manuals. Although the women continued to maintain that HIPPY was valuable for their communities, their actions and words clearly demonstrated that sharing cultural knowledge in the context of the programme was important to them and, they believed, important for the children and families they worked with. The process documented here points to the importance of Aboriginal culture reflected in educational provisions for Aboriginal children - whether this can be appropriately achieved through supplementing and/or adapting mainstream programmes remains a point of debate.