Teachers might like to consider the implications this article has for their teaching strategies and for the mannpr in which they interact with their Aboriginal students.

Since 2001 there has been an increase in migration patterns by Indigenous families from remote communities to urban and semi-rural locations. Indigenous student emigration from remote Indigenous schools to urban and semi-rural schools is an emerging crisis as there are routinely inadequate service providers for Indigenous émigrés. Migration away from a particular location from which a person's ancestors, kin and Dreamings come (henceforward named as Country) to semi-rural and urban locations raises many complex issues. This article outlines Aboriginal Community Education Officers’ (ACEOs) role as support workers for Indigenous students who utilise an Indigenous ethics of care framework as a support mechanism to aid the transition of Indigenous students into new schools. The article draws on research undertaken between 2000–2008 (MacGill, 2008) in conjunction with current literature in the field (Pearce, 2012) to highlight ACEOs’ border work and ethics of care practices necessary for successful Indigenous student transitions as émigrés.

Minimbah is an Aboriginal word whichmeans ‘place of learning’. Since self-management in 1987 by the local Aboriginal Management Committee, the school Director, Dianne Roberts has promoted parent, staff and community input at this place of learning. Improved parental involvement in this Aboriginal preschool was essential following the policy change from outside control to self-management.

There is little doubt that the most effective teacher of Aboriginal and Islander children would be a person from the community in which the children live, or at least one who shares many of their life-ways. However, until Aboriginal and Islander children have access to teachers from their own cultural groups, it is important that what has been learned about how best to provoke a learning environment for them is readily available.

Since the early 1970s there have been many positive developments in the education of Aboriginal Australian children as well as education about Aboriginal society, past and present, for all children. We only have to look at such developments as Aboriginal Secondary Grants, Study Grants, home-school liaison, language programs, (e.g. Van Leer or the bilingual programs), family support/counselling (e.g. the Inala Family Project), Aboriginal Education Consultative groups at local, regional, state and national levels. The list of positive developments appears to be endless. Certainly teachers, schools and State Departments of Education have consulted with Aboriginal groups to develop policy statements about Aboriginal Education/Aboriginal Studies in schools. Money has been spent on employing (and sometimes training) Aboriginal teaching assistants; Aboriginal schools have received some support and in areas such as the Northern Territory and Northern Queensland, efforts are underway to decentralise education.

In a very real sense giant steps appear to have been made in Aboriginal education over the past ten years or so. If we are really honest, however, the results of these giant steps remain comparatively disappointing. Thus, although we know that Aboriginal children stay at schools for longer now than they did during the 1960s, the proportion who actually complete senior high school at a satisfactory level is small. For example, in the North West Region of New South Wales, only 11 Aboriginal students were enrolled in Year 12 at the beginning of 1981. See Table 1 for further information.

In that same year, 224 Aboriginal students entered high school throughout the region. If the 1981 patterns of enrolment for Year 12 persist, then only 5% of the 224 children who started high school will actually complete the program. These figures are not encouraging, particularly as non-Aboriginal students’ enrolment patterns indicate that 29% of those who begin high school actually make it to Year 12.

First Peoples' knowledge at university lies within a contested knowledge space. The incompatibilities and differences between Western and First Peoples' knowledge systems means attempts to superficially ‘add’ First Peoples' content to university courses are often ineffective and tokenistic. Considering these issues, this paper reflects on the design and implementation of weaving First Peoples' knowledge and perspectives throughout a service-learning course. The course is a nationally awarded work-integrated learning programme delivered to undergraduate and postgraduate students. Drawing on a theoretical framework of Woven Law, the design of the module was led and authored by First Peoples. Throughout the design process, the module was critically examined in terms of the content developed and methods of content inclusion, while also responding to institutional demands of student learning outcomes. Survey results show a positive student reception and early success in enabling students to achieve learning outcomes. While initial results are promising, data are limited due to this being the first assessment of the programme and the fact that students were asked to rate their own experience. Nonetheless, Woven Law and carefully weaving First Peoples' knowledge throughout the curriculum represents a promising methodology and area for future research.

The current agenda in public health training in higher education works to produce well-trained public health professionals. Operating within a western pedagogical framework it aims to build a cohort of critical and analytical thinkers, skilful problem solvers and extraordinary communicators across key disciplines in health. Many graduates possess interdisciplinary specialities, skills and knowledge transferable within health and other sectors. Core competencies in the curricula, which notably does not currently include Indigenous health, are considered the foundational platform of theory and practical understandings of public health and the health system. Despite a framework that aims to produce health professionals capable of improving the health of the population as a whole; the lack of engagement with an Indigenous health criticality maintains a longstanding Australian public health tradition of failure when it comes to addressing the health disparities experienced by Indigenous people. As a recent Indigenous public health graduate with practical training and experience working in the public health system, I consider possibilities for decolonising the curricula through an Indigenist approach to health, including theories of transformative learning which could strengthen public health practice and in turn facilitate the changes necessary to improving Indigenous health outcomes.

The Aboriginal learning system is not a functional learning system for everything that needs to be learned in school. Whether a formal or informal style fits the task best is dependent on the nature of what has to be learned, more than on the student’s cultural affiliations. Today Aboriginal children not only need to acquire age-old knowledge in traditional ways but they have to acquire new knowledge...and they need to develop new ways of learning.

The failure at school of Aboriginal students from traditional backgrounds has generally been ascribed to cultural differences. This study, however, investigated the relationship between Aboriginal children's learning and hearing loss. Aboriginal students with hearing loss were found to be different in that they used the highly verbal teacher-oriented behaviours, which were associated with school success, less than other students. There was evidence that some students with hearing loss used alternative peer-oriented learning strategies with some success. Also compensatory practises by teachers, including using Aboriginal teaching styles, appeared to assist some students with hearing loss.

Over recent years, considerable effort has been put into increasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (First Nations) participation in higher education. While there are signs that enrolments are increasing, the sustained engagement and successful completion of higher education remains challenging, particularly in remote locations. With this in mind, a collaborative research project among researchers from three northern Australian tertiary education institutions was designed to understand student perspectives, particularly from remote contexts, about their engagement and success towards completion in higher education. Based on a qualitative research design situating Indigenist/interpretive research within a critical realism metatheory, we present findings from the study, based in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and unpack implications for higher education provision in remote contexts. The findings point to the unique challenges faced by students who live in the Kimberley—and perhaps in other remote locations around Australia. In order to meet these needs, we suggest that tertiary education providers must tailor provision to ensure that engagement with Aboriginal students is relational and culturally safe.

The Queensland Department of Education has instigated, planned and supported, over a significant period of time, various programs to enable Aboriginal and Islander entrants to become trained and qualified teachers. Such programs have included for example:

Professor Watts’ (1980) review article of Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children was a welcome, optimistic view of the positive effect schools can have on pupils. It was particularly welcome for the optimistic view that teachers and schools can achieve something in the area of Aboriginal education. Watts reviewed this book against the background reality that many teachers of Aborigines

While accepting Watts’ view, I will argue that an overly optimistic view of the possibilities of schooling for Aboriginal children can be just as debilitating as the pessimistic view that broader structural inequalities such as poverty, poor housing, poor health have to be redressed before teachers and schools can achieve anything. To this extent it will be argued that teachers need to be positive about what they and schools can achieve. Teachers need to be aware of the specific ways in which schools can make a difference. 15,000 Hours… outlines some of these.

This paper presents an analysis of the classroom discourse and strategies of Marcia, an early childhood teacher of a class with a high percentage of Indigenous Australian students. These students have been demonstrably successful on standardised literacy tests, which is not the case for Indigenous students in general in Australia (e.g., MCEETYA, 200). It will be suggested here that Marcia’s approach and relationships with the students, as constructed in her discourse, have been a large contributing factor in this success. Marcia’s discourse can be described as both inclusive and empowering and, as such, it will be proposed that awareness of her techniques may be of benefit to teachers who are working with groups whom education systems tend to marginalise and disempower. Marcia’s lessons were observed as part of the project, “Teaching Indigenous Students with Conductive Hearing Loss in Remote and Urban Schools of Western Australia”. This project was based in Kurongkurl Katitjin, School of Indigenous Studies, at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, and was funded by an Australian Research Council Strategic Partnerships with Industry [SPIRT] Grant and the industry partners: Department of Education of Western Australia, Catholic Education Commission of Western Australia and Aboriginal Independent Community Schools, Western Australia.

This article, written by Aboriginal Nyoongar Elders, Louise and Percy Hansen and Joanna Corbett in collaboration with two Wadjella (white) academics, details the design and delivery of The Reaching Across the Divide: Aboriginal Elders and Academics working together project (RAD) which aimed to develop student cultural capabilities. It is encouraging that many Australian universities aim at embedding Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing yet there remains little information on how to do this. RAD, guided by a Nyoongar framework for engagement, the Minditj Kaart-Moorditj Kaart Framework, provides one example. RAD developed student and staff capabilities, through building trusting, committed relationships, and promoting systems change. The results highlight how co-creating to embed Indigenous pedagogy through yarning and oral storying (Hansen & Corbett, 2017; Hansen, 2017) produces transformative learning outcomes which also meet key national, local and professional directives.

Failure to adequately address language differences between home and school is one of the many ways in which education systems frequently disadvantage Aboriginal students. Children from predominantly Aboriginal English-speaking homes face specific challenges, as the language differences between their home variety and the Standard Australian English (SAE) of the curriculum and classroom are often rendered ‘invisible’, with little explicit accommodation to the fact that such children are essentially immersed into the SAE classroom (e.g. Dixon, 2013; McIntosh, O'Hanlon, & Angelo, 2012; Sellwood & Angelo, 2013). One consequence of this invisibility is that it has been very hard to see during classroom time, where these language differences appear to affect children's engagement with the curriculum. In this paper, we present a micro-analysis of a year 2 maths lesson in a class of Aboriginal learners of SAE as an additional language/dialect, where children are being taught to use location words (e.g. under, above) as mathematical language. We have examined the precise ways in which the children's home variety and SAE were used in this lesson, and where differences between these two varieties appeared to impact their understanding of the concepts being taught. We differentiate between the kinds of classroom language that provide a challenge to learners of SAE and the kinds that do not.

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.