How Carpenter set Aboriginal Literacy backwards. (Part 1)

Virtual Nourishment - Carpenter’s Impoverishment of Aboriginal Literacy

“Indigenous Australians will make more advances in education when Aboriginal English is respected in all classrooms” declared Alan Carpenter the” visionary” Education and Indigenous Affairs Minister in 2002.

WA Worst Ever Education Minister Alan Carpenter also launched the mandatory video “Ways of Being, Ways of Talk” and echoed the usual plaudits of “international recognition” and “trialling” by other states of this program. The Desert Rat wonders why the content in teaching was never the focus.

This announcement was Carpenter’s most significant Indigenous Affairs media release in his 3 years on the bow of the ministerial ship. Unfortunately he had no idea where he or the ship were headed, or what he was really promoting. As usual, on this journey to nowhere, no one had their hand on the tiller.

Since 2002 we have seen none of the promised advances, only a chronic deterioration in Aboriginal literacy.

Who in the Department of Education will put their hand up to claim ownership of this disaster?

What was the PROBLEM?

The WA Department of Education and the then new Minister Carpenter had been captured by a group of linguists from Edith Cowan University who promoted a new way of Aboriginal learning that has been an abject failure. The new Aboriginal literacy and learning program was focussed on feel good processes which had no empirical research basis. Phonics and other traditional methods which had proved successful for 200 years and basic curriculum content were nowhere to be seen.

The Desert Rat senses this educational “movement” (it was not a pedagogy), is gradually being moved sideways into the rubbish bin of educational fads – at an almost unnoticeable rate, so no face will be lost by those responsible for the failure.

Teachers in Aboriginal education have been subject to all sorts of feel-good, heart-warming professional development and proselytising about this method. All sorts of strategy distractions such as promoting “Aboriginal English”, “Two-Way Literacy and Learning Project” and “Solid English” have been espoused as the answer to Aboriginal literacy and drawn teachers away from basic program content and teaching skills. These strategies have been an abysmal failure and yet they still have their advocates in the Department. They culminated in Carpenter’s failed and still terminally ill Aboriginal Literacy Strategy which you will hear more about.

Future posts will show how Alan Carpenter’s gullibility some would say stupidity, has irreparably set back the education of most rural and remote Aboriginal children.