Teaching reading and writing to older Aboriginal children can be one of the most satisfying teaching tasks in the Northern Territory. Most of these students have a culturally different background from the teacher’s. Their perception of a topic therefore may be quite different from the teacher’s. A good teacher will value this difference and use it:

In an endeavour to provide a handy guide to available materials for secondary-aged students, a two-part review has been collated. It is anticipated that the following specific needs will be met.

We would like to share with others our role as Aboriginal teacher aides at Healy State School, Mount Isa.

The administrative staff of the school has encouraged us to keep our roles and timetables very flexible. Our timetable changes as the needs of the Aboriginal children change within the school.

The Aboriginal population at school is 16%. Half of these children come under the heading of ‘assimilated Aboriginals’.

The suburb of Healy was built by the Mount Isa mining company for sale to mine employees. The Aboriginal children from these homes have equal housing and their parents have no trouble ‘fitting in’. They are accepted on their own worth along with children from first and second generation migrant families. These children could be called success stories but we see them as the result of equal opportunities.

Close to our school we have the ‘camping area’. These are the children we mainly work with in Reading and Maths. Within this area we have found two distinct groups. Families who say ‘I never had much schooling, so I always send the kids’, and families who see no benefit in schooling. From the first group children come on a regular basis and we are able to help individual members of the family to catch up and return to ordinary classroom activities, or keep them learning at a different level. The other group from this area do not see the benefits of school and have heavy social problems. Consequently we have a truancy problem with their children.

Bilingual education programs are being developed in some remote Aboriginal communities that have retained their own languages and a high degree of traditional orientation. As bilingual education in the Northern Territory is today beginning really to mean bilingual/bicultural education, this means that Aboriginal teachers are expected to act in different ways from when they worked as Teacher “Aides” and assisted in programs that were solely based on the non-Aboriginal culture. It is also a new situation for many non-Aboriginal teachers who, particularly in the Early Childhood area, have been trained to work with small children and now find that their most significant activity is the interaction they have with adult Aboriginal teachers as they help these teachers work with children. This paper outlines an approach that assists teachers develop more meaningful early childhood programs for Aboriginal children, and in addition helps teachers function more effectively in their new roles.