ABSTRACT
As part of a national research project concerned with the relationship between the literacy of home and school (Cairney & Ruge, 1998), case studies were conducted of four schools and selected families. The purpose was to try to understand incongruities between discourse experiences in the varied contexts that make up children’s lives and the impact this has on school learning. In one of the schools, Woodgate Elementary,1 an Indigenous Australian teacher provided a valuable metaphor to help understand how some students struggle with the instructional discourses of schooling. As I sat talking on one of our regular visits about our desire to understand why so many of his indigenous students struggled at school, he exclaimed, “You know, I just think that often these kids don’t get it.” When asked to elaborate, he replied that students often had trouble understanding (“getting”) what the intentions of the curriculum activities were each day. He continued:
Just last week I was trying to teach the Koori2 kids some maths and I thought I’d try to use a concrete example. And some of the kids just didn’t get it. I was trying to explain some basic subtraction using the example of eating oranges-to make it real. The conversation went something like this. I said to them, “Now I want you to tell me what
would happen if I had 5 oranges and then gave 3 of them away?” Out of the blue, Sharon pipes up next to me and says: “Where are the oranges?” I ignored her. I asked again, “How many would I have left?” She piped up again, “What’d you do with them oranges?” I said to her (quietly, and as an aside), “There aren’t any oranges really.” She came back at me, “What’d you do with them?” I said to her (a bit frustrated by now), “There aren’t any oranges!” She comes back again, “Why’d you give ‘em away, we could’ve eaten them oranges.”
