Page 446 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

35 Australian Torres Strait Islander Students 421

Research conducted for the Queensland Indigenous Education Consultative
Body (QIEC 2002) identified very few indigenous students from remote communi-
ties, including those from the Torres Strait who spoke English as a first language.
These findings were confirmed in a socio-linguistic analysis of indigenous students
from sixteen North Queensland boarding schools, including Djarragun College
(Catholic Diocese of Townsville 2003). The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
students who boarded at each of the sixteen schools were grouped into four categories
that describe the language capital they brought to boarding school: Group 1:
A student’s first language is a traditional language or dialect, the second language
is Aboriginal English (AE) or Torres Strait Creole (TSC) and Standard Australian
English (SAE) is, for all intents and purposes, a foreign language; Group 2: SAE
(or a version) is a second or third language and the student’s first language is either
AE or TSC; Group 3: SAE (or a version) is a second dialect and AE or TSC is the
first dialect; Group 4: SAE (or a version) is a first language. Few indigenous student
boarders from remote Aboriginal communities on Cape York or from the Torres
Strait Islands have English as their primary language capital. When they arrive at
boarding school, these students are taught and assessed in Standard Australian
English although they originally learned to construct concepts in Aboriginal and/or
Torres Strait Islander languages.
Winford (2003) writes it is “problematic” to come to school with any kind of
Creole as your thinking and learning language. There is a persistent “linguistic
prejudice” against Creole languages in many parts of the world based on the fact
they are new or recent languages and are the products of colonisation. The lower
status of Creole languages is an ideological position and, “like other ideologies
based on race, class or similar differences, language ideology helps to promote the
interests of a dominant group or class at the expense of less powerful groups”
(Winford 2003, p. 32). To be indigenous in this context is to both belong to home
country that became the nation state of Australia and to also belong to a severely
disadvantaged and marginalised group of peoples. Any state policy that advocated
for officially teaching indigenous children in their first or second languages has
been contested, though many primary schools practice forms of bilingual education
in remote areas at the classroom level.
English is the language of power in this nation, and indigenous children and
migrant children are expected to gain mastery of English in order to gain access to
powerfully hegemonic ways of knowing. In Australian science curriculum docu-
ments, English is positioned as neutral, but it is hardly a neutral language for indig-
enous learners of science from rural and remote areas. Torres Strait Islander middle
school students learning science must accommodate and negotiate differentiated
traditional knowledge systems, a number of languages, school science taught in
English, and their own emerging youth cultures and dialects. Indigenous home
language and Creole thinking students learning a western science curriculum must
be outstanding field negotiators in order to be positioned as successful learners
within formal education systems. In reality, only a small percentage of students are
so adept and indigenous students who do succeed in these fiendishly difficult and
complex negotiations are rarely fully appreciated for how skilled they are.