'Aborigines are smart' : children's responses to an Aboriginal Studies course: an ethnographic evaluation

Abstract

This thesis explores and evaluates one approach being used in a number of Australian schools to transmit information about and to establish attitudes towards Australian Aborigines. The questions investigated revolve around the central problem of what information is transmitted and how this occurs in a classroom. The focus chosen for this study is The People of the Western Desert a course designed for 11-12 year old children. It is argued that with recent efforts to introduce Aboriginal studies into schools some kind of evaluation and monitoring procedures should exist to ensure that teachers and curriculum developers will be encouraged to strive for new improved courses and resources. With this justification then an anthropological approach to curriculum evaluation has been chosen for it is felt that such methods will more successfully answer and illuminate certain questions that a curriculum of this kind poses than would the more traditional forms of curriculum evaluation. This evaluation has three aspects. First of all, the Western Desert course is examined from the point of view of its design, philosophical stance and context. Secondly, the course is shown implemented in a classroom, and finally, the children's responses to this course are evaluated. To situate this evaluation, a background description of the school and the classroom is given which points to some of the factors that may influence the outcomes of a course of this kind. The outcomes of the course are analysed in terms of the children’s written and spoken responses. For the most part they arose either through teacher-directed activity, researcher's questions, or from recorded material collected as a result of the researcher's participant-observer role in the classroom. These responses reveal what the children know and feel about Aborigines. Attention is directed to the variation between what the children were telling their teacher, their peers and the researcher with what they knew and felt about Aborigines and what was being revealed of their knowledge and attitudes towards them. It is concluded that while a curriculum of this kind may have problems in presenting a truly cultural relativist perspective it can at least achieve a 'culture shock' type experience. People can be made aware that other value systems do exist and that their own are not necessarily the only standard. However, in the implementation of the Western Desert course a discrepancy was shown to exist between the intentions of the curriculum developer and the actual outcomes of the Hanley course. This discrepancy arose because the teacher had not attended the in-service course. Where the curriculum developer's goals concerned values and the 'invisible culture' the Hanley course emphasised the tangible elements of Aboriginal culture. These problems of interpretation demonstrate just how difficult it is to encode in a course the values and life-style of another very, different culture.