ABSTRACT

The chapters in this section cover a lot of ground in Indigenous education in North America, from Indigenous language programs, to literacy learning in the early years of school, to family support programs, to college recruitment and student support programs. In a concluding commentary for this section, I relate these North American experiences to my own, as an educator in Indigenous Australia, which are fortunately relevant to the themes of these papers. Over thirty years ago I started working for Indigenous communities in central Australia, was adopted into the kinship system though my ancestors were not Indigenous, and learned to speak the Pitjantjatjara language. Since then I have been involved in teaching language and literacy in schools in both Indigenous languages and English, in Indigenous family support programs, and in tertiary education for Indigenous students. But my primary focus for the past two decades has been on changing the practices of schools and teachers, to better meet the needs of Indigenous students to succeed in the school. This goal was given to me by the Indigenous Elders who taught me and directed my work, particularly my adoptive parents Nganyinytja and Charlie Ilyatjari, who devoted their lives to teaching their community’s children about the world, and teaching the world about their culture, 1 and has been sharpened by experience over the years. To achieve the twin goals of enabling Indigenous children to succeed in school, while strengthening their Indigenous identities and community languages, we cannot simply focus on the children themselves, or their home and cultural backgrounds; we have to focus on what schools do that currently fails to meet the learning needs of so many Indigenous children, and fails to give them coherent, secure identities as both Indigenous community members and successful learners in school. Armed with this knowledge, we can re-design what schools and teachers do. This has been my mission and that of my colleagues, resulting in a teacher education program, Reading to Learn, that has now trained many thousands of teachers around Australia and the world in the strategies needed to make every student successful, particularly Indigenous students. The following commentary is offered from this experience.