Remembering multilingual pasts, reclaiming Anangu wisdom in the present, and resituating bi-/multilingual educational futures among local communities.

Anangu Educators are the mainstay of bilingual education on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands. Anangu (preferred self-reference for Pitjantjatjara speaking people) have always been multilingual educators. Along with bilingual and often multilingual expertise, Anangu teachers provide cultural safety, continuity of knowledge and consistency in classroom teaching. In the current approach to English Medium of Instruction (EMI), classrooms become a ‘highly colonised space that inevitably reinforces the unequal understanding of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples within the western education frame’ (Osborne, 2015:3) and where Anangu linguistic and cultural knowledge is eclipsed. Lack of professional training and pathways to formal teaching qualifications (Wood et al., 2014) and ambiguous educational policies about use of home language in English-only schooling (Devlin et al., 2017; Ober & Bell, 2012; Wigglesworth et al., 2018) result in keeping Anangu Educators in professionally vulnerable roles of little status.

However, Anangu Educators resist an imposed ‘lingua nullius’ (Arnold, 2016), continuing instead to push back against ‘monolingual practices and deficit views of students’ multilingualism’ (Lopez-Gopar et al, 2014: 1098). Anangu Educators engage in their own form of decolonising pedagogy through building upon generations of family expertise, creating opportunities to challenge the presumed universality of the formal curriculum, and maintaining the teaching of Pitjantjatjara in formal classrooms and on Country. This is important work in an era when governmental and non-governmental stakeholders are proposing development of bilingual education without clear statements about training and professional status of the most essential teachers, Anangu Educators.

The symposium celebrates learning experiences over vast geographical spaces and the course of lifetimes within remote Anangu communities. In so doing, we also recentre and resituate Anangu communities, knowledges and languages in a southern decolonial stance in education. We do this mindful of the opportunity for conversations between stakeholders engaged with decoloniality in additional contexts: an Aboriginal school in New South Wales and the roles of educators in promoting and teaching marginalised languages in Morocco, and the twin UNESCO priorities in the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL), and the Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS).

 Paper 1

Intergenerational bilingual teaching and learning of Pitjantjatjara; reflections on teaching programs and considerations for the future.

Ernabella Anangu School has a unique place in Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands schools as the original centre of vernacular education. The school and community maintained a strong focus on teaching Pitjantjatjara language and culture using Anangu knowledge and expertise despite Department for Education policies in the 1990s that dictated that schools would be English only. Daphne Nyaningu and Rowena Taylor, Anangu Educators, and Trish Jenner, a Piranpa (non-Anangu) teacher, analyse their bilingual classroom work and the compatibility of their respective areas of expertise. Nyaningu and Taylor share their significant family history of generations of teachers of languages and culture. The culmination of a lineage of Anangu teachers, Nyaningu and Taylor explore lived experience and its impact on teaching of Pitjantjatjara in classrooms. Trish Jenner, a school-based Coordinator of Bilingual Futures, analyses the dilemmas and challenges of developing bilingual resources and programs while simultaneously teaching the macro skills of bilingual literacies, i.e. reading and writing in alphabetic script. Jenner works with colleagues who have extensive multilingual expertise in expressing knowledge through Anangu literacy practices while she supports confidence and capacity building in the domains of formal classroom practice and school-based literacies. 

Nyaningu, Taylor and Jenner critique their bilingual work in classrooms and how their professional practice strategically navigates tensions between northern frames in education and southern approaches that reposition the work of Anangu Educators as high-status, visible and valued. These colleagues move positively towards future developments in professional training and increased numbers and participation of Anangu teachers.

This is a multimodal bilingual video, online and face-to-face presentation. 

Paper 2

A brief history of local-remote educator involvement in schools

in the APY Lands

The establishment of schools in Anangu communities in the remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY Lands) heralded a significant shift away from traditional models of Aboriginal education where teaching was everyone’s business, a continuous process of modelling and observation, inclusion and participation, and the curriculum un-‘disciplined’. In Australia, formal schooling carries an implicit program of socially and culturally embedded norms and expectations. The experiences and recognitions of local-remote (Anangu) educators has a diverse history that is useful in making sense of the past, the present and the future of Anangu Education in the APY Lands.

In South Australia, the 10-year Aboriginal Education Strategy (2019-2029) makes unequivocal statements in support of bilingual education and culturally responsive pedagogies in Anangu schools (Department for Education, 2018). These focus areas are drawn into tension with limited funding and training support available and the push and pull of upward accountability models where education leaders are caught between (at times) competing logics of local communities and remote (metropolitan) system data and accountability measures. Similarly, non-locally trained teachers who aspire to high quality teaching in the Red Dirt context of Anangu schools remain fairly limited in accessing opportunities for fit for purpose training and preparation for this task.

In this paper, Osborne argues the urgent need for significant attention, and long-term planning and investment in ‘Both Ways capital’ (Osborne, 2015) where a workforce of local and non-local educators can operate in a collaborative and power sensitive approach towards achieving the aims of the Department for Education’s 10-year strategy. Investment and reforms are needed across local and non-local preservice course development, recruitment and orientation strategies, and formal recognition of existing and developing cultural knowledge expertise of Anangu Educators.

Paper 3

A Country to classroom approach to teaching languages and knowledges

In remote Central Australia, non-Indigenous teachers arrive not knowing local languages and, with a high turnover of teaching staff, they often leave within 18 months. How then can local Pitjantjatjara-speaking education staff, with many years of employment at the local school, ensure that their language is maintained, preserved, and taught in schools?

This presentation builds on that of Osborne’s (Paper 2) historical context of a strong era of bilingual education, making it even more surprising that education in the 21st century is English as Medium of Instruction (EMI) or English-only instruction in very remote schools. Anangu children often arrive at school with little contact with speakers of English and are expected to learn in and through a language that is foreign to them. The tenacity of local community members, who ensure that Pitjantjatjara is included in classroom learning, supports an ongoing, organic, and shared process of the teaching and learning of languages. By working with non-Anangu teachers this becomes a collaborative and hopeful space to further explore a combination of local and institutional approaches to bilingual education.

Emily Buddy, Anangu Educator for many years and teacher of Pitjantjatjara, shows the significance of locating learning on Country and being able to navigate the shifts between Country and classroom, supporting language and curriculum learning in Pitjantjatjara and English. Buddy and Armitage work together to comment on challenges to the presumed universality of curriculum content and the language of instruction. In a hopeful approach to working together, Anangu forms of knowledge, languages and cultures find ways to gain parity in remote EMI schools.

Paper 4

Emerging perspectives in research: widening the view to national and international perspectives

In a shared presentation, the first of these short papers brings a focus to the tensions and insights of a non-Aboriginal researcher in her first experiences of teaching in a remote Aboriginal school in New South Wales. Observing and understanding the sensitivities, ethics and politics of working in a government school while seeking to centre local linguistic and cultural forms of knowledge takes time. Wiles offers her initial reflections on the significance of developing relationships, living multiple roles as a parent, teacher, friend and colleague, while being guided towards a decolonial stance in classroom pedagogies.

Enriching the panel’s theme, Quattrini presents perspectives from remote Moroccan educators to reflect on the similarities across roles, contexts and languages from Central Australia to Morocco. In Morocco, the 2011 Constitution recognised Tamazight (the Indigenous language) as ‘an’ official language alongside the already-recognised official (Modern Standard) Arabic (art.5). Even before the officialization of Tamazight in 2011, the language was being gradually introduced in hundreds of primary schools all over Morocco, but in 2019 a law defining the implementation of Tamazight and its integration into education and public life was passed with consequent practical changes for educators (Quattrini, 2023). French, as the colonial language – despite not having any form of official recognition - still plays an important role in education and accessing the job market as a ‘prestige’ language. Moroccan Arabic (derja) has also no form of recognition, and mostly remains an oral language, despite being arguably the most used language across different communities at the everyday level (being the mother-tongue of Arabic-speaking communities and the language of communication with Indigenous peoples) and does not receive the same perception of prestige as French and MS Arabic among the speakers’ communities. Nevertheless, Moroccan educators in remote areas (Amazigh and non) are increasingly using translanguaging in Indigenous Tamazight and derija to deliver content and to teach what are considered ‘prestige’ languages (French and MSA, and now English too). This presentation will provide emerging perspectives from Moroccan language practitioners, in particular Amazigh language teachers and researchers, whom the presenter has collaborated with over the past year.

Paper 5

Situating local languages, knowledges and education: decolonial theory and transnational frameworks

This paper brings to conclusion conversations in which we look back on the history of Anangu Bilingual Education, remembering pasts, reclaiming Anangu Educators’ roles and wisdom in the present, and resituating Australian bi-/multilingual education futures among Anangu communities. We are mindful of communalities of learning and teaching, careful listening, carefulness with words and languages; and Anangu ways of multilanguaging, making knowledge, translating knowledge, transknowledging, and teaching in companionship. It is the ethos and pathos of this companionship that we argue is at the centre or heart of bilingual teaching and learning. We link this companionship to UNESCO’s twin priority programmes, the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL) and the Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS), at a time that these coincide with transnational awareness of how climate change, conflict and disaster result in human displacement and precarity (UNGA 2018; UNESCO, 2021). The coincidence, scale and complexities of hardship for minoritized, Aboriginal, First Nations, displaced and refugee peoples brings unprecedented attention and urgency to the future of bilingual and multilingual education worldwide. While it is often assumed that post-colonial discourses of language brought a departure from colonial language regimes, many remain entrapped within the architecture and habitus of coloniality (Heugh, 2017). This coloniality rests on a misconception of a singular, universally relevant set of educational principles despite the plurality of peoples, contexts and worldviews (Connell, et al., 2018; Nakata, 2007; Smith, 2021). If public sector education has not yet turned its attention to rethinking, retooling and ensuring provision for context-attuned and situated bi-/multilingual education, then this is a failure of responsibility. This is an opportunity to take stock and rethink how southern experiences of pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial multilingualisms, layered with historical traces of conquest and changing ecologies of language, are many and pluri-dimensional (Heugh, 2017). It is a time in which ‘ethical’ southern and decolonial scholarship (Connell et al., 2018; Nakata, 2007; Smith, 2021; Watson, 2014) and grassroots engagement with communities on the ground, ‘on Country’, may be uncomfortable spaces for education officials and indeed many researchers languishing in metropoles and comfort zones of Australia’s coastal peripheries. This is not the time for evidence-poor theory and pedagogy crafted in luxurious environments and institutions of northern institutions to be imported and transposed to educational spaces of remote Indigenous and First Nations communities. Nor should these be foisted upon traumatised communities in the dust-bowls of over-crowded, poorly-serviced, ramshackled, insecure and unsafe camps into which refugees and internally displaced people are crammed. Instead, we argue that it’s time to listen carefully to Daphne Nyaningu and Emily Buddy and women like Katrina Tjitayi and Makinti Minutjukur (2018, in Minutjukur et al., 2019) and Katrina’s sisters, Janet and Umatji Tjitayi (2020) and think of how we might resituate Anangu bilingual education in the Central Australian Desert, and engage in conversations with vulnerable communities elsewhere, and stretch these outwards towards cacophonous peripheries that cling to coloniality.

Discussant/ Q&A 

In lieu of a sixth presenter we propose a discussant - to be determined, or a Q&A session with the audience. With an extensive panel of presenters we feel it is worthwhile allowing time for discussion and reflection on the many aspects of our thematic panel.