2009 Speech: Bilingual Education

They are our children, this is our community

AIATSIS Research Symposium on Bilingual Education

Tom Calma

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner

Australian Human Rights Commission

National Museum of Australia, Canberra

26 June 2009

---

"They are our children, this is our community."

- Yirrkala Action Group 28
April 2009

Good morning friends, supporters, Dr’s Peter Toyne and Lester-Irabinna
Rigney and distinguished guests. I would also like to acknowledge my Indigenous
sisters and brothers who have travelled here to be with us and to share your
experiences and stories.

I begin by paying my respects to All the traditional owners of the land where
we gather today. I pay my respects to your elders, to the ancestors and to
those who have come before us. And thanks you Aunty Matilda House for your
generous and warm welcome.

I’d also like to begin by commending AIATSIS for convening this
symposium. It is actions like these that can have an impact on policy and lead
to positive change – but more on that later.

The title of this presentation: “They are our children, this is
our community” is a quote from Yolgnu parents and community
members – spoken in response to the government policy aimed at dismantling
Bilingual education.

“They are our children, this is our community” is a
powerful statement of self determination – as well as a commitment to take
responsibility for the health and well-being of the next generation, and, in
fact, all generations of people in the community.

We Aboriginal people should use words like these more often – yes they
are our children, yes these are our communities – and these are our
futures, our cultures, our languages and our lives – and we want to
preserve them for future generations.

Today I am going to extrapolate on this theme of taking control over our
lives and valuing our culture – something that I think is exemplified in
Bilingual education approaches. The Bilingual approach bestows many educational
advantages. We know that it is a language learning medium – and we know
that it provides opportunities for students to become literate in two languages.
We also know that language is the medium through which culture is transmitted.
I will leave it to the linguists to discuss the cognitive advantages of the
Bilingual language model – because this morning I want to focus on the
cultural advantages that are bestowed by the Bilingual approach.

So, In the first part of this presentation I aim to demonstrate the links
between strength in culture and resilience in children. And to use government
speak, I will point to this resilience as a key learning outcome.

In the second part of the presentation I will outline the extensive
government promises to give our people a say in education, and I will explore
some strategies for holding governments to their promises.

So first, let’s consider the importance of resilience in learning and
its relationship to Bilingual education. Earlier this month I went to a
National Summit at Parliament House entitled: Resilience for Children 0
– 13 years.

The Summit brought together 80 leaders in children's health, education, media
and recreation – to develop strategies for establishing a culture that
will build children's resilience, mental health and wellbeing.

Resilience was described as the quality that allows us to withstand and
rebound from adversity. When we develop resilience in children, we teach them
to problem-solve and to accept and address life’s challenges.

A lot of what we heard at the Summit was that resilience can be built and
developed in children – but it is most likely to flourish when children
are raised in a safe living and learning environment – in the home, the
school and the community.

The nurturing environment begins at the pre-birth stage, and follows on
through pregnancy, babyhood, early learning and schooling.

We heard that investment in resilience in the early years is investment for
adulthood. Speakers at the Summit emphasised the need for the child to develop
abilities beyond rote learning, something which is strongly supported by
research.^[1] Resilience in children
is experiential – it requires pre-conditions which allow the child to
integrate the skills of communication, negotiation and problem-solving in many
environments. The child needs key building blocks to strengthen his or her
ability to be resilient, to ‘bounce back’ from adversity. These
building blocks can create vital, protective
factors.^[2]

We heard that resilience is linked to experiences which enable us to take
some control over our life and circumstances. It helps when children have
consistency in relationships as this creates a secure base for the child.

The child’s sense of identity is a crucial factor in resilience. Young
people need to know and understand who they are, where they belong, and to whom
they are important. One doesn’t have to go deep into the research to find
that support and coherence between the family life and the wider society are
predictors for resilience in
children.^[3] In other words, an
integrated environment that links the culture of the child and the family to the
wider society will assist children to become emotionally and spiritually healthy
and more able to operate in different
environments.^[4]

So, what has this got to do with Bilingual education? Well we know that
Bilingual education is about integrating the knowledge systems of the
pre-schooler into the learning environment of the school. It is about creating
a fluid learning process where the child begins formal schooling speaking the
mother tongue and exploring known concepts of the home before moving to new
knowledge areas and introducing the second language. This is scaffolded
learning.

A child that is able to make the connections between each phase of learning
and development is more likely to be able to transfer the skills from one phase
to the next. According to what we heard at the Summit – this, in effect,
is a precondition that assists children to develop resilience.

If you separate the world of the home from the school – a consequence
of dismantling Bilingual education – you fracture or fragment the
relationship between the home and the school cultures. In effect, you reduce
the preconditions that create resilience in children. You take away the means
for children to have control over their learning and their environment.

So there I was in Canberra at this Summit, with some of the biggest thinkers
on childhood development, all espousing the value of integrating the learning
and development processes of early childhood.... and here we are today,
fighting to have these very things retained in Bilingual schools. It really
makes you wonder...

And it is not just at places like the Summit that we hear about the
importance of retaining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture in
schools. The government’s own studies pile up on this topic. You cannot
read a single government policy or document about Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander education that does not include statements about the importance of
valuing and integrating culture in the learning environment.

There is abundant evidence that demonstrates this point. In 2008 a MCEETYA
study assessed programs that transition Indigenous children to primary school.
It found common characteristics among successful programs. They are:

• a focus on relationship building
• a meaningful, relevant and challenging curriculum that makes clear the
  benefits that school can provide
• valuing Indigenous culture within the program and school, and
• recognising the strengths within Indigenous communities and tapping into
  existing programs and networks.^[5]
  

The transitional periods in education are crucial in developing
educational confidence and learning competence in children.

Developing confidence and aptitude at moments of transition is surely an
essential educational outcome.

In trying to dismantle Bilingual education – the NT Government has done
more than vandalise a program that was teaching children to be culturally
literate in two languages and two cultures. It has torn at the fabric of the
relationships between Aboriginal people and governments... again... The NT
Government has damaged the trust and enthusiasm with which Aboriginal people
have offered our languages and culture into school classrooms.

And on that point, I’d like to move onto the second theme of my
discussion this morning – and that is the nature and the extent of
government promises and commitments to us about education – particularly
Bilingual education. I want to explore this issue of trust and consistency in
agreements and reveal what is obvious to most of us – the enormous chasm
between the rhetoric and the action of Australian governments, particularly the
NT Government.

There are many levels of agreement and promises which purportedly support the
right of Aboriginal people to retain Bilingual education.

Firstly in the international arena, this government has made some promises to
allow us to control our education systems. As many of you know, on the 3rd of
April 2009, the Australian Government issued its formal support for the UN
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In doing so, the Australian
Government agreed to the following:

Indigenous peoples have the right to establish and control their educational
systems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner
appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning.

The international promise to respect and value culture in education is
reiterated in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. In signing this
treaty, Australian governments committed to, and I quote:

the development of respect for the child’s parents, his or her own
cultural identity, language and values, for the national values of the country
in which the child is living...

These are big promises, to which, as a state, they are expected to abide.

At the national level the Commonwealth Government has also made firm
commitment to reflect diverse linguistic and cultural approaches in education.
Paragraph 82 of the Australian Labor Party’s National Platform reads:

Labor supports bi-lingual and bi-cultural education and believes they have
value for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Well you can’t be clearer than that.

Now let’s look at the Territory level and the commitments made there.
In the first instance there is the Northern Territory’s own Indigenous
Education Strategic Plan which says at Priority 3, and I quote:

Incorporate Indigenous perspectives into teaching programs and deliver high
quality Indigenous languages and culture programs.

It goes on to say:

DEET believes introducing a greater focus on Indigenous languages and culture
programs in NT schools will improve Indigenous student outcomes by... increasing
the level of engagement of Indigenous people in
schools.^[6]

It is hard to know how to respond to this Strategic Plan – are we to
believe what we read?

And then there are the Ministerial statements endorsing partnerships with
Aboriginal people. In August 2005 the then NT Minister for Education, Sid
Stirling said this:

...to overcome the disconnection between the aspirations of the community and
the direction of schooling and training... My vision is for a genuine
partnership between Indigenous parents, students and those responsible for the
education of young Indigenous Territorians with a view to better life outcomes
for Indigenous people...

To progress this vision, the then Deputy Chief Minister, Marion Scrymgour was
working to establish Community Partnership Education Boards. She said this
about the Partnership Boards:

These structures must allow communities to assume more responsibility and
accountability for the delivery of quality education and training services by
empowering them to coordinate the effective use of resources and expertise. The
new approaches to partnerships must allow groups of Indigenous communities to
form regional governance structures that can act as consumer representative fund
holders with responsibility for purchasing education and training services for
their communities.

As we all know, Marion Scrymgour has resigned from the NT Labor Party,
saying, amongst other things, that decision to dismantle Bilingual education was
a mistake. It’s a sad irony that Aboriginal people have suffered at both
ends of this ill-thought and contradictory policy process.

Some of you
here were at the signing of the first Remote Learning Partnership Agreement at
Garma in 2007. I was a witness to it – the first big broken promise. The
Partnership Agreement was to be a contract between the NT Government and the Yampirrpa School Council to establish a self-managing school.

And now we know that the NT Government has reneged on its part of this
agreement by attempting to do away with Bilingual education. The status of the
Yampirrpa agreement is now in limbo.

You can’t get away with reneging on a contract in business without
consequences. So what can we say then about the capriciousness of the NT
government – what is the worth of their contractual commitments? Is this
a lack of planning or incompetence?

In dismantling Bilingual education – Australia is in breach of its
international obligations. Our international report card reflects this.

In May this year, the United Nations assessed Australia’s compliance
with Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and had this to say:

The Committee notes with concern that according to the National Indigenous
Languages Survey, only about 145 of the original estimated 250 indigenous
languages exist in the State today, and most of them are critically
endangered...

The Committee recommends that: a) the State party strengthen its efforts to
guarantee the indigenous peoples' rights under articles 1 and 15 to enjoy their
identity and culture, including the preservation of their traditional languages
... [through amongst other measures] ... preserving and promoting bilingual
education at schools...

I sincerely hope the governments of Australia take heed of this UN
recommendation.

It was somewhat of a cruel irony for me to read last week that NSW schools
are to offer bilingual education in Asian languages. Yes, the NSW government is
funding a four-year $2.25 million program starting in 2010.

The NSW Education Minister Verity Firth was reported as saying the program
was vital to the state's future economic and social prosperity and the language
lessons would start in kindergarten. She said:

...students will learn the grammatical components of Mandarin and will also
be taught other subjects such as creative arts, health and technology in that
language^[7]

These policy inconsistencies and hypocrisies are extremely disheartening for
Aboriginal people. Unfortunately we are all too familiar with promises that are
not kept – and government’s seem to think they can get away with it.

So how do we hold governments to their promises?

One way to do this is to develop powerful coalitions of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander people who are prepared to stand up and question bad policy, and
more importantly, be involved in creating better policy.

While we do not as yet have a representative body at the national level
– though we are working on it – we do have some forums for guiding
and developing policy. I’ll give you an example about a process to give
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a voice in health policy.

In my annual Social Justice Report to Parliament in 2005 I proposed a
new approach to achieve health equality within a generation. I proposed that
there be a target to achieve equal life expectancy rates between Indigenous and
non-Indigenous peoples within 25 years. I argued that we needed to have equal
access to primary health care and health infrastructure within a decade.

I proposed that there be targets set to measure progress and to hold
governments, and other service providers, accountable for their obligations to
Indigenous peoples and to ensure that health (and other) policy was realistic,
and capable of meeting the level of need among our communities. And I did this
by articulating a human rights based approach to health.

This eventually grew into the Close the Gap campaign, a non-government and
community led initiative that began in 2006. The Campaign was developed by a
coalition of Indigenous and non Indigenous health experts from peak bodies
across the nation. It became a voice that was hard to ignore – though the
previous government managed to do so.

Today it is a standard government policy, agreed through the Council of
Australian Governments and backed by significant commitments of new funding and
with reporting mechanisms. The Prime Minister himself delivers a Close the Gap
progress report on the first day of Parliament each year.

More relevant to our concerns here today, I am pleased to say that there have
now been preliminary discussions about how the ‘Close the Gap’
approach can be applied to Indigenous education. Already, the Australian
Education Union, the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at the ANU, the
National Indigenous Higher Education Council and senior Indigenous education
professionals have started this conversation together. I hope we will see
further developments in this regard in the coming year.

I will keep you posted and we may need the voices of people here to assist.

We can be powerful when we join our voices. While we may want different
things in different places – we all want self determination. We all want
to manage education in ways that best suit the needs of our children. And in
saying that, can I go back to one of my opening statements and reiterate my
appreciation that AIATSIS has brought us together at this symposium. This
symposium may well lead to further action – and this is where we see
change.

We have to be able to hold governments to account for bad policy. In my view
the policy to enforce four hours of English in all Northern Territory schools is
bad policy, It is bad on a number of levels. It is bad because it is simply
impractical. How can you teach English to a majority of students who speak
another language? It is bad because it reduces the capacity for Aboriginal
children to develop resilience. It is bad because it erodes the potential for
the continuation of our languages and cultures. It is bad because it reduces
the potential for students to develop a second language literacy. It is bad
because it has damaged relationships between Aboriginal people and governments.
And It is bad because it was conceived in bad faith and it contradicts existing
agreements between Aboriginal people and government.

When governments make bad policy they should own up to it. To keep
implementing a policy that is practically, educationally, ethically and morally
wrong is absurd.

This approach is what Lieutenant General John Sanderson, Chairman of the
Indigenous Implementation Board in Western Australia calls, ‘riding a dead
horse’. In a recent speech at the University of Western Australia, the
Lieutenant General urged that “if you find yourself riding a dead horse,
the best policy is to
dismount”^[8]. I agree entirely.

As we know, education theory changes over time. There are no real
orthodoxies – even for the teaching of English. There are still arguments
over the whole word and the phonics approach. You may have seen the 7.30 Report
recently – and a two part interview with one of the architects of
Blair’s education revolution in Britain – Sir Ken Robinson. He
argues that education systems around the world are too narrow, backward looking
and too often ignore the talents of students. He said a couple of things that I
found very interesting.

Firstly, he said this, and I quote:

... every education system in the world currently is being reformed. I know
it's true here in Australia, but it's true wherever you go – Asia, Europe,
America. And it's happening for two reasons. One of them is economic;
everybody's trying to figure out – as parents and as employers and as
students – how on Earth do you educate people to find a productive life in
the 21st Century, when all the economies are shifting faster than we've known
them. So the economic thing is really important. But it's also about culture,
about how do you give people a sense of identity and what do they need to know
to be literate and fluent in these extraordinary times as well. The thing is
that most reform movements are looking backwards; they're looking back to the
old system that was the result of the industrial revolution.

And then he goes on to say:

You can't achieve educational improvement for everybody with a standard
template. In the end, every child goes to a particular school, works in a
particular classroom with particular teachers. You know, this doesn't happen in
the committee rooms of Canberra. This happens in these neighbourhoods with
these kids. And great head teachers always knew that. And what I would like to
see is politicians giving teachers room to breathe and do the job they're being
paid for. And instead what they aim to do is to try and make education
teacher-proof, as if it's all machine minding.

What policymakers tend to do is focus on the curriculum and then they focus
on maths, science and languages, and leave the rest. And then they go to
assessment and they do standardised tests, as if the whole thing were like
pumping out widgets. And the bit they leave is the only bit that will ever make
a difference which is the quality of teaching. (end quote)

So what this tells me is that there are no certainties in education, except
for the need for good teachers who have room to breathe. Given that
governments do not have all the answers, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander people we need to be certain that we keep the things that are valuable
to us. We mustn’t bow under the pressure of the latest policy.
Governments can keep arguing about the approaches and pedagogies but if we want
language and culture – we should hold fast.

I’d like to conclude with some definitions from the Secretariat of
National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC). The definitions are taken
from a continuum of protective factors in culture. At one end of the cultural
proficiency spectrum we have:

Holding culture in high esteem: seeking to add to the knowledge base of
culturally competent practice by conducting research, influencing approaches to
care, and improving relations between cultures. [This] promotes self
determination

At the other end of the continuum, – is cultural destructiveness
– that is characterised by:

Intentional attitudes, policies and practices that are destructive to
cultures and consequently to individuals within the
culture^[9]

The Northern Territory Government would do well to read this publication,
along with the hundreds of education policies, including its own – and
come to grips with what makes a healthy learning environment for children
– one that values their identity and their potential to make a unique
contribution to the world.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents,
guardians and children have to feel part of the system, if we are to benefit
from the system.

Remember, from self respect comes dignity, and from dignity comes hope. And
if we can engender hope we build resilience and resilience is essential for our
kids to thrive.

Thank you

---

^[1] Grotberg, E., Resilience and
Culture/Ethnicity, Examples from Sudan, Namibia, and Armenia, Paper
presented at the Regional Conference, International Council of Psychologists,
"Cross-cultural Perspectives on Human Development," Padua, Italy, 21-23 July
1997. At http://resilnet.uiuc.edu/library/grotb98b.html (Viewed 22 June 2009)

^[2] Dent M., Real Kids in an
Unreal World: Building Resilience and Self Esteem in Today’s Chaotic
World, extract at: http://www.kindredmedia.com.au/library_page1/real_kids_in_an_unreal_world_building_resilience_and_self_esteem_in_todays_chaotic_world/522/1 (Viewed 22 June 2009)

^[3] Utsey S., Bolden M., Lanier Y.,
Williams O., Examining the Role of Culture-Specific Coping as a Predictor of
Resilient Outcomes in African Americans From High-Risk Urban Communities,
Journal of Black Psychology 2007 33: 75-93. Extract online at: http://jbp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/33/1/75 (Viewed 22 June 2009)

^[4] Maclean K., Resilience: What
it is and how children and young people can be helped to develop it, CYC
Online, Issue 62 March 2004 At: http://www.cyc-net.org/cyc-online/cycol-0304-resilience.html (Viewed 22 June 2009)

^[5] Dockett S, Perry B, Mason T,
Simpson T, Howard P, Whitton D., 2008, Successful transition programs from
prior-to-school to school for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
children. Melbourne, MCEETYA Publication

^[6] Northern Territory Department
of Employment, Education and Training, Indigenous Education Strategic Plan
2006-2009, Northern Territory Government. At http://www.det.nt.gov.au/education/indigenous_education/strategic_directions/strategic_plan/docs/strat_plan_2006-09_full.pdf (Viewed 22 June 2009)

^[7] Schools to offer Bilingual
Education, 15 June 2009

^[8] Lieutenant General John
Sanderson, AC. 29 April 2009. Speech at the Local Government and Indigenous
Communities Conference, University of Western Australia.

^[9] Bamblett M., Protecting
Culture and Protecting the Future for Our Children, Secretariat of National
Aboriginal, and Islander Child Care (SNAICC). At http://www.snaicc.asn.au/_uploads/rsfil/00109.pdf (Viewed 23 June 2009)