ABSTRACT
Disclaimer: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers please be advised that one of the authors of this chapter has since passed away. Her family have given permission to retell this story and to use her name.
For over 40 years the late Jacqueline Amagula and Helen McCarthy worked together with parents/carers and teachers observing and listening as communities often expressed dissatisfaction with how mainstream non-Indigenous education was delivered in their schools. They share their story how as allies they continued to seek ways to reform educational experiences for Aboriginal learners. They believed Aboriginal children needed to be taught in more respectful, culturally sensitive ways.
Jacqueline was the past-Chairperson of the Ngakwurralangwa College Advisory Board. She made it her life’s work to reform education through this role in educating her people through her teaching and experiences, symbolised in the name Ngakwurralangwa ‘Our Way’: we own it and we lead it; we have our say and we have the voice.
Helen shared Jacqueline’s struggle in this long-term commitment to craft ways of learning, different to those espoused by mainstream Departments of Education. Exposing some of the realities of these governmental decisions, they show what happened in communities when intervention directives determined programs be abolished or when highly effective learning centres were shut down. They conclude their chapter with what can happen when these same governmental decisions allow Aboriginal communities to control and take responsibilities for their own schools.
