Skye’s Cultural Stories

Teacher Context

Teaching in an open styled unit of year 6/7 students, Skye was looking further at developing her pedagogy and cultural understanding as a teacher. After reviewing the Professional Standards of teachers with her principal, she identified connecting to community and culture as her key areas of focus. Skye recognises the importance of developing strong relationships with her students and parents which had been evident in her previous work at her current and previous sites.

​

School Context

Lake Windemere B-7 opened in 2011 after the amalgamation of Direk Primary School, Direk Junior Primary School and Salisbury North West Primary Schools. It is located on the previous Direk School’s site. Lake Windemere has a Child Parent Centre (CPC) that offers services to families through the Community Development and Family Service Coordinators. Playgroup, Occasional Care and Preschool program are offered along with Speech and Language an Occupational Therapy support. Two area Resource Special Classes cater for students with disabilities—a Junior Primary and a Primary class. The school has a range of new purpose built buildings including contemporary classrooms and gym, and extensive refurbishment of existing facilities. The school is underpinned by the values of Teamwork, Respect, Fun and Learning and a whole school focus on Positive Education to develop skills to engage with powerful learning.

​

Community Context

Lake Windemere students come from a community that is representative of a range of economic circumstances. The community has a mix of owner occupied and rental properties. There are a high number of both single and double income families who are buying their homes. A number of families are dependent on social security support through unemployment, sickness or single parent benefits. There are a number of students who are transient, some of whom are moving between schools that are within a short distance of each other. At the time of the action research in 2018, 86 Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait islander student attended the school.

The action research

Skye’s original action research plan involved connecting the learning of Aboriginal students to Kaurna language lessons that had been recently introduced for Aboriginal students at Lake Windemere. But when the opportunity arose for her to teach across multiple year levels, she decided instead to model the implementation of CRP across the whole school so that it became at the forefront of teachers’ minds when planning units of work. Skye wanted to inspire teachers to think about their students and what they bring to the classroom, and to demonstrate to teachers how they can connect to their students’ lives outside of school. Skye also wanted to engage students in developing connections to culture. She created a series of lessons that could be adapted for a variety of year levels and build upon the work the students and teachers were already doing in the school. Through the use of Australian Aboriginal Dreaming stories, as well as incorporating stories from other cultures around the world, she wanted to open up discussion about culture and the important roles that cultural stories play in communities.

Data collection

• Feedback from the Aboriginal Education Teacher and the classroom teachers
• Student responses—annotated
• Photographs
• Student work samples

What happened?

Prior to the unit:

As an introduction to the lessons, Skye questioned the 206 students she worked with around their understanding of culture. Of those students, 45% could identify that they ‘had’ a culture, but of the group of students, only 13% could explain what this idea of culture meant. 28% of students believed they didn’t ‘have’ a culture and many justified this due to the fact that they were born in Australia and not overseas. 27% of students questioned had no understanding of culture and could not define the meaning behind the word.

At the start of this unit of work, there were mixed emotions from students, one actually stating ‘Not this again, I have already learnt Aboriginal stuff last year’. Students seemed hesitant of new learning but the first lessons using Jacqueline D’warte’s concept of ‘language maps’ opened up some important discussions around how we communicate with each other and how communication has changed over time. Two students from the same class had never discussed langauge before and it turned out that both spoke the same language at home and they had fun in the lessons showing their peers how they could communicate with each other in a common dialect.

As the lessons progressed more explicitly into Aboriginal Dreaming stories, students continued to reflect upon prior experience with popular stories, rather than referring to the morals and important messages behind the stories. Each lesson opened up in-depth and powerful discussions about what stories meant to individuals and how each person has their own interpretation. Student comments included:

• Songlines are a map of their land so they can survive. It shows they knew not to destroy their land. Student 1, Year 3
• Songlines is a map of the land where there is food and where the water is. Connect people to land and history shows they knew not to destroy. Student, Year 4
• It is important that we hear the stories because they are so old and they help us learn. Student, Year 4
• My favourite story is ‘how the birds got their colours.’ I think it is good when we can look at the animals and it tells us what happened to the animals. Student, Year 4
• I think that you can learn lots from stories and little kids like stories so they should learn from the stories. Student 5, Year 6
• My mum tells me and my sisters stories since I was little like the Dreaming Stories and the other ones. I’ve seen Tinga Tanga on TV. Student, Year 6

And in response to listening to and watching an Aboriginal Elder tell a story online:

• I like listening to stories and not reading stories. Student, Year 3
• It is interesting watching his face as he tells the story, I just watched his expressions and hear his voice. Student, Year 7

After the unit:

At conclusion of the lessons I received some feedback from the teachers of the classes I worked with:

• As AET I taught aspects of Aboriginal and Australian history in first term with one of the classes now participating in the CRP. I was faced with comments like, ‘why do we have to learn this again?’ ‘This is boring.’ We had to have conversations about how history can be uncomfortable and that we talk about history to ensure we don’t repeat it. It took them a good few lessons to come around and to get over this idea of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ I found that story books such as ‘You and Me Murrawee’ helped to bridge some of those gaps, as this book compares children across hundreds of years and looks at all the ways we are the same. They began to come around, but it was hard work, and for some students the prejudices they may have from home or from media wouldn’t go away, no matter what we spoke about. Whereas Skye’s unit and the topics around the cultural stories seemed to give all students an opportunity to access the culture without feeling the divide. They began to develop a new respect for Aboriginal culture and history because they could see shared stories about the country we all have to share as opposed to a battle about who ‘owns’ the land. The more they learned, the more they could understand that we have similar views and we have to preserve our land, that Australia can be a harsh country and we all can be proud of it.
• I have looked at the lessons and I think it is so well planned and you should be so proud of the work and dedication that you have put into the unit. I think you have taken a great approach and I would love to use this unit again next year. In the past, some of my students have been quite reluctant to engage in Aboriginal education but they were all so positive and enthusiastic about your unit.

• I can’t believe how excited my students became with this unit. They kept asking when the next lesson was and had such rich discussions about things they had talked about. I didn’t always stay in the class during the lessons and the kids would always update me on what I missed in great detail. There were also a few occasions when in other lessons they would use examples from Skye’s unit in their explanations. I was also really pleased to see how engaged my ‘tricky’ students were as they can be reluctant to work on many occasions.
• I have so many new ideas that I can add to my planning. I have never previously thought about using stories in subjects other than my literacy lessons.