This paper reports on the use of touch screens to display simple talking books in a minority Indigenous Australian language. Three touch screens are located in an informal context in a remote Indigenous Australian community. The popularity of the computers can be explained by the form of the touch screen and by the intertextual and hybrid nature of the talking books. The results suggest the Kunibídji choose to transform their own culture by including new digital technologies which represent their social practice.

I would like to begin by providing a context that can be used to place my discussion about experiences at a remote school in the Northern Territory (NT) into perspective.

In the NT 53% of schools are located in remote areas and these cater for up to 23% of NT students (Combe, 2000). The NT has the highest proportion of Indigenous students enrolled in schools with 35.2% of the overall student population identifying as Indigenous Australian (Collins, 1999). The next closest state is Western Australia with an Indigenous student enrollment average of 5.1 %, this is compared with a national average of 3.2%.

Newly-graduated non-Indigenous teachers who go to remote Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula (CYP) schools may experience a range of difficulties. This paper makes some observations about one of them: the difficulty of teaching students whose first language is not English and for whom English may well be only one of several languages spoken. Moreover, none of these other languages belongs to the same Indo-European language family as English. The ramifications extend far beyond the intellectual recognition that language, normative modes of thinking and reasoning and social values are interwoven, mutually reinforcing and almost impossible to disentangle.

This paper considers the comments made Indigenous adults returning to school about their earlier experiences at school. They were written by Indigenous people who have chosen to return to education in the Northern Territory after leaving school early. They reflect the variety of factors which contributed to their motivation to stay at school when younger, or to leave school early.

Fifty-two (52) Indigenous students wrote comments on their earlier school experiences. They came from all around Australia and ranged in age from late teens to early forties. What they experienced at different places and at different times was remarkably similar. It would seem overt discrimination was more prominent in times past and has become more subtle in recent times.

While there has been much debate (Christie et al., 1987; Eckermann, 1988; Kleinfield and Nelson, 1991; Gibson, 1993; Ulstrup, 1994; Guild, 1994; Nicholls et al., 1995) on the in-appropriateness of applying culturally descriptive ‘learning styles’ in meeting the educational needs of Indigenous students, the reality of the existence of individual life experiences of Indigenous Australians has often been overlooked. That omission diminishes the dominant role which socio-cultural considerations have taken in past colonising practices with the effects of those practices often having become transgenerational among individuals today. This paper attempts to move on from that debate, questioning the validity of a canon that could be accused of merely perpetuating colonial paradigms and failing to acknowledge the integrity of the individual. The importance of determining and establishing effective communication is the key in understanding, and catering for, differing educational approaches, in the past labelled teaching and learning ‘styles’. Consequently, cultural awareness which is inclusive of the diversity of Indigenous Australians is still necessary in opening and maintaining that communication between educational stakeholders in the school community.

This paper will provide a detailed plan of how the Aboriginal community of Geraldton could plausibly go about correcting its educational problems. Such a correction could foreseeably result in the easing of much poverty and the associated ramifications. The success of this plan is entirely based on the cooperation of not only the schools and the parents, but will require the support of students (both Aboriginal and non Aboriginal), the Education Department (National, State and local levels), Non Government Organisations in Geraldton, school staff and the wider community.

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.

The Indigenous Education and Training Alliance (IETA) is a staff college of Education Queensland. Its primary focus is to broker and deliver professional development to educators around the policies contained within Partners for Success: strategy for the continuous improvement of education and employment outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Education Queensland (Education Queensland, 2000b). This paper describes how IETA's work to support one of the policies, Literacy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Students, has been theorised and enacted. It also discusses the organisation's successes and challenges in the significant area of language and literacy pedagogy for Indigenous students.