Community+action+support

**Community action support: An interventionist mechanism for supporting indigenous school students in remote areas of Australia** Loshini Naidoo, Professor, University of Western Sydney [ l.naidoo@uws.edu.au ]



**Keywords:** Indigenous knowledge, pre-service teachers as mentors/tutors, meaningful outcomes for indigenous students, Community Action Support program

**Track:** Student development and learning

**Format:** Research paper **Date & time:** Friday 3:20-4:30

**Location**: Salon 6

** Summary: ** There is a call for educators and institutions to build bridges between Indigenous and Western knowledge systems to achieve meaningful outcomes for Indigenous students (Williamson & Dalal, 2007). It has been suggested that what is needed “is a recognition and appreciation of the complexities and tensions at the cross-cultural interface” (Nakata, as cited in Williamson & Dalal, 2007, p. 51) where negotiation between the Indigenous and Western knowledge, standpoints and perspectives, can take place to reframe, reinterpret or redefine meanings.

The Community Action Support (CAS) program is a partnership program that assists Indigenous secondary school students in remote locations to improve their literacy skills. Volunteering pre-service teachers serve as school mentors/tutors. This paper uses a case study approach to examine the experience of four UWS pre-service teachers involved in the CAS program in Tennant Creek, including research on the impact that participation in CAS had on pre-service teachers, their understandings of Indigenous student populations and the challenges they encountered in mainstream schooling. Findings demonstrated that the tutors learned much about teaching such as: understanding literacy acquisition; understanding student diversity; and gaining knowledge and insight into Indigenous students and their specific needs. Having first-hand experience of the difficulties and challenges faced by students in remote Indigenous communities meant that pre-service teachers became more concerned about culturally inclusive teaching for the future. In addition, both the students and the wider community seemed to welcome and engage positively in the CAS program.

The results of this research will be of profound importance to schools and of relevance for educational policy development. It will indicate how secondary schools in Australia and elsewhere, in both urban and remote settings, might provide effective support for Indigenous students in mainstream classrooms and articulate the needs of teachers and students engaged in teaching and learning in diverse contexts.

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