Remote Kids ‘Need English to Prosper’

FAILING to provide indigenous children in remote communities the same skills in English as the rest of the community would seal them in a cultural envelope, experts in reading and remote education said yesterday.

In response to an article questioning whether indigenous literacy needed “fixing” and whether English was the language Aboriginal children should be assessed on, emeritus professor Richard Smith rejected the notion that Aboriginal children did not need to demonstrate competency in national literacy tests because they lived in remote communities.

“These kids aren’t museum pieces, they’re Australian citizens, and we have a responsibility to ­induct them into the world in which they live,” he said. “That includes being able to conduct themselves like everybody else in the world, and knowledge of English is critical for that.”

As reported in The Australian yesterday, a literacy academic respon­sible for training English teachers at the University of Southern Queensland, Stewart Riddle, has questioned the need to “fix” indigenous literacy rates.

He has likened measures to closing the education gap to “making Aboriginal kids more ‘white’ by sending them off to missions to be properly educated”.

Dr Riddle, a former high school English teacher, said “we get too caught up in a narrow understanding” of literacy that defined it as performing well in English language skills measured by the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy.

Dr Riddle’s comments were rejected as offensive and nonsense by indigenous leaders Noel Pearson, Warren Mundine and Chris Sarra, who said strong English skills were a must and did not preclude indigenous children retaining their language and culture.

Dr Riddle clarified on Twitter yesterday that, “I support indigenous kids reading and learning Eng­lish but question whether a one-size-fits-all approach is the key”, referring to the federal rollout of a particular teaching approach championed in Cape York by Mr Pearson.

Dr Riddle is on the management committee of the Queensland English Teachers Asso­-c­iation and edits its journal, and his research interest is in the links between music and literacy, preferring the term “musicking”, and investigating the “literacies learning and schooling experi­ences of young musickers”.

Professor Smith, a former dean of education and developer of the Remote Area Teacher Education Program in Queensland, pointed to the Greek community in Australia as an example of a culture that keeps its language and traditions but is still made up of citizens of the world. “They’re not locked up in some cultural envelope which prevents them from doing anything else,” he said.

Education researcher and lecturer at RMIT University and former high school teacher Kerry Hempenstall said sections of the education profession had become overly worried about defining literacy, rather than teaching children to read words on a page.

“There’s been a great deal of jumping the gun in some areas of education, in wanting children to immediately have critical literacy, which is being alert to apparent bias in what they read,” he said.

“That’s actually a very sophisticated long-term goal of reading and the problem in saying that’s a necessary part of beginning reading is it takes time away from actually teaching children first how to get the words off the page. “They seem to be ignoring the elephant in the room, which is the number of children who can’t get the words off the page.”

Dr Hempenstall questioned the belief many teachers held that different approaches were required for teaching different stud­ents, and said all the evidence pointed to the fact everyone learned to read in the same way.

“There’s a fundamental assumption that teachers are able to decide the best teaching approach for each child in their classroom, which implies that every child has different needs,” he said. “It’s become clear in the neuroscience research on reading that we tend to learn in the much the same way, despite our … differences.”