Building on Indigenous children’s strengths
- Working with children who speak Indigenous languages/dialects
- Partnering with family and community
- Working with children’s first language(s)
- Understanding the local context
- The impact of Australia’s history on Indigenous languages
- Resources
- Building on Indigenous children’s strengths
- Which Indigenous languages are spoken where?
- Mapping Indigenous languages
- Traditional languages
- New contact languages
- Englishes
- What is a dialect?
- How children learn Standard Australian English as an additional language or dialect
- A day in the life of …
- The difference between language and literacy learning
- The role of language in learning
- Bilingual schools
- Setting up for success
Young children feel encouraged to learn when the people around them recognise their interests and knowledge.
The Early Years Learning Framework talks about this practice as ‘responsiveness to children’:
Responsiveness to children
Educators are responsive to all children’s strengths,
abilities and interests. They value and build on
children’s strengths, skills and knowledge to ensure
their motivation and engagement in learning. (p.14)
Early childhood teachers know how to look for children’s strengths and build on them.
However, if you are non-Indigenous and are working with Indigenous children, it might be worth thinking about your own level of cultural competency, which is 'a set of behaviours, attitudes and policies that come together to allow people to work effectively in cross-cultural situations' (Aboriginal Cultural Capability). It is an attribute educators need to consciously cultivate.
This is an important point to reflect on, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their knowledges, cultures and languages to this day are not always valued equally and developing cultural competence will lead to recognition of the strengths that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children bring to their learning from their linguistic and cultural backgrounds.