Course Design for Indigenous Students

The paper "Design for a Culturally Affirming Indigenous Computer Literacy Course" provides some good advice for the design of courses for Indigenous students.

The key points

The hidden curriculum is alive and well. Indigenous students feel it and react to the assimilationist nature of our courses, even though we do not plan it to be that way.

The use of ICT in all courses can be a great asset because it can be used to facilitate

• greater use of visual-spatial learning assets
• tactile
• patient (activities can be repeated without anyone needing to feel frustrated) and with lots of positive reinforcement
• can have lots of multimedia
• allows teacher to become coach on the side and removes the temptation to be judgmental and so students getting more 1 on 1 attention that delivering to the group style of teaching
• learning materials can be more easily customised to suit.
• learning can be more easily negotiated.
• opens the door to my project based learning
• can be used to facilitate collaborative activities
• facilitates lots of options for creative expression
• feedback without shame - basically a computer delivering a quiz result is better than a teacher doing it.

Strong case for eLearning I reckon.

SA TfEL and Anangu schools

South Australian schools have recently received a lovely new glossy "South Australian Teaching for Effective Learning Framework Guide". More information about this is here

The actual framework is here.

Our glossy is 88 pages.

The first part (domain) of the framework deals with "Learning for effective teaching" and it was element 1.3 that caught my attention. Element 1.3 states "Participate in professional learning communities and networks" and of all the 6 elements in this domain I see this one as the one that facilitates the others.

I've been participating in online education communities since the early 2000's and have been teaching since the late 70's. I've had a go at establishing some niche communities over that time. What I have learned since my involvement in these online state, national and international communities make all of my professional learning prior to that look pale.

This involvement has facilitated

• 1.1 - Understand how self and others learn
• 1.2 - Develop deep pedagogical and content knowledge
• 1.5 - Discuss educational purpose and policy
• 1.6 - Design, plan and organise for learning and teaching.

Having taught in a very isolated school at the start of my teaching career (Fregon Anangu School) I wondered how this might translate for them.

When I was there we had a single radio telephone for the entire community. The school got one after a while. The mail plane flies in each Tuesday and Thursday. Alice Spings was the nearest centre and was a seven hour drive. That's it.

It was this experience that inspired the title for my blog - 'Waraku Education' which in translation means the education belonging to the tall man.

These days the communities have broadband and phones, and some even have mobile phone coverage. However, teachers in the area perform in a way that is different to the main stream and so I wondered where the opportunities to immerse themselves in professional communities might exist.

The OZTEACHERS list is where I began.

I made the following post

Hi
Can anyone point me to some functioning online ESL teacher communities please?
Thanks
Peter

Within 5 days I had 7 responses. Some to the list and some private. The following is a collation of the ideas that I got.

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Australian education and training professionals with an online networking and profile space...

http://me.edu.au/c/ESL

About Me.edu.au...

http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/me

ESL Community Australia ... Google Search...

http://www.google.com.au/#q=esl+community&hl=en&biw=1579&bih=704&prmd=ivns&source=lnt&tbs=ctr:countryAU&cr=countryAU&sa=X&ei=x-xtTfCSCoSecK-O7O8M&ved=0CAcQpwUoAQ&fp=2a63e5032ee47a81

ESL Worldwide... Google Search...

http://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&source=hp&biw=1596&bih=704&q=esl&aq=f&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=&fp=5305acaac95b6150

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Here is a good one

http://me.edu.au/c/ESL

and another one (not sure how active this is)

http://www.edulists.com.au/mailman/listinfo/esl

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this may well be a good place to start

http://evasimkesyan.edublogs.org/2011/03/05/songs-to-teach-grammar/

along

with the #tefl community on twitter.

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Here's a list of Edu-Qld emailing lists. One is simply called, 'ESL' and currently has 246 subscribers so i guess it's a fairly vibrant community.

http://discussions.eq.edu.au/cgi-bin/wa?INDEX

Many of these email-communities look interesting and maybe of assistance.

They're free for everyone, anywhere and have a great professional spirit.

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Links of Interest to Students & Teachers of English as a Second Language

http://iteslj.org/links/

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Even in geographically isolated places, teachers need not feel professionally isolated anymore.

I wonder if an APY teacher community is worth thinking about as well?