Evaluation Guidelines for Aboriginal Studies Courses

1981 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 23-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Catchpole

A number of issues critical to Aboriginal Studies Courses are extrapolated from the literature. These issues are expressed as questions important for evaluators of Aboriginal Studies Courses to ask. They may also be seen as guidelines for the construction of Aboriginal Studies Courses. In conclusion, a summary of the developed guidelines is presented.The Commission of Inquiry into Poverty (1975:183) reported of Aborigines and Islanders: …they stand in stark contrast to the general Australian society, and also to other ethnic groups whether defined on the basis of race, nationality, birthplace, language or religion. They probably have the highest death rate, the worst legal status of any identifiable section of the Australian population.The National Aboriginal Education Committee (1980:4) notes that the Australian Schools Commission Report (1975) adds that they also have the least schooling. With this in mind the NAEC, in its policy statement on Aboriginal Education (1980:3), says: Since 1788 the Aborigines of Australia have been subjected in varying degrees to an authoritarian system which has rationalised their dispossession from the land, and deprecated their cultures. This dispossession forced indigenous people from their land and from the source of their own rich cultural background and uniqueness.

1975 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 42-54

Over the last two years Australians have become more aware through the bitter comments of Aborigines in the media that a new government cannot overnight solve problems which have been festering for more than a century. It is still possible for the National Population Inquiry Report to note in 1975 that ‘in every conceivable comparison, the Aborigines and Islanders … stand in stark contrast to the general Australian society, and also to other “ethnic” groups, whether defined on the basis of race, nationality, birthplace, language or religion. They probably have the highest growth rate, the highest death rate, the worst health and housing, and legal status of any identifiable section of the Australian population’. They also have the least schooling.


Author(s):  
Milada Disman

SUMMARY ABSTRACTThe book discusses the socio-cultural background of the Euro-American elderly; focuses on social institutions such as family, the ethnic neighbourhood and the church; addresses programs and services; identifies program models and describes some intervention strategies. The issues discussed appear to apply to the ethnic elderly from a range of ethnic groups in addition to the ones analyzed. Besides practitioners, this book should prove of interest to researchers, policy makers and gerontology students.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alf Walle

Indigenous people and ethnic minorities face economic and social pressures that potentially disturb the social order, undercut cooperation, and spawn distrust. Such pressures can threaten prosperity, peace, and security for all. Strategies are needed that help distinctive groups gain parity, self-determinism, and sustainability. Supplementing neoclassical economic models with more socially relevant paradigms (such as substantive economic anthropology and the triple bottom line) are means of doing so. Regions ethnic groups are showcased to demonstrate the value of such an approach.


1981 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Liberman

Education is suspect among traditionally oriented Aboriginal people because it has been used by the dominant Anglo-Australian population as a means for forced acculturation. Having had little control over schools in their communities, most Aboriginal people have failed to give them their enthusiastic support. Aboriginal leaders recognize, however,that Aboriginals need to develop literacy and cognitive skills to protect their culture from outside domination, and are now pushing for control of their schools. The Strelley School marks a progressive and successful Aboriginal effort to administer education on their own terms.


1993 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 33-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Gibson

This paper attempts to explore current issues in Aboriginal education within the urban sector of Australian society. Identifying specifically both the current positive and negative trends within the urban Aboriginal education scene.


1995 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Corson

ABSTRACTThe Sámi (formerly called Lapps) are the indigenous people of Arctic Scandinavia and northwest Russia. Legislation giving major language and cultural rights to Norway's Sámi people was enacted in 1992. As an introduction to discussion of the impact of the Sámi Language Act on Norwegian education, this article begins with an outline of the schooling system in Norway. Its review of the act itself covers the following topics: the Sámi culture and the Sámi languages, social and political problems that affect the Sámi, the place of the Sámi languages in education, and recent educational changes that flow from the Sámi Language Act. Three research questions, covering the practice and organization of bilingual aboriginal education in Norway, are then addressed at length. The article concludes by drawing emancipatory implications from the Sámi experience for members of aboriginal cultures and for the future of aboriginal education generally. (Power and culture, Sámi culture, minority education, native language education, bilingual education)


Ethnicities ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 526-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarno Valkonen ◽  
Sanna Valkonen ◽  
Timo Koivurova

The article addresses the problems of defining an indigenous people by deconstructing the Sámi debate in Finland, which has escalated with the government’s commitment to ratify ILO Convention No. 169. We argue that the ethnopolitical conflict engendered by this commitment is a consequence of groupism, by which, following Rogers Brubaker, we mean the tendency to take discrete groups as chief protagonists of social conflicts, the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations and races as substantial entities and the tendency to reify such groups as if they were unitary collective actors. The aim of the article is to deconstruct groupist thinking related to indigenous rights by analytically separating the concepts of group and category. This allows us to deconstruct the ethnicised conflict and analyse what kinds of political, social and cultural aspects are involved in it. We conclude that indigeneity is not an ethnocultural, objectively existing fact, but rather a frame of political requirements.


Author(s):  
Anton Opanasenko

Keywords: Indigenous peoples, Crimean Tatars, Karaites, Krymchaks, Gagauzpeople, representation, legal status, self-determination, language, culture, traditions,people, identity The article analyses indetail the legal status and certain types of rights as signed to indigenous peoples ofUkraine under the recently adopted Law of Ukraine «On Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine». The criteria of belonging of separate communities to the indigenous peoplesof Ukraine, features of realization by these peoples of their collective rights, and alsorealization by separate representatives of indigenous peoples of their individualrights in the corresponding spheres are defined. The study also defines the characteristicsof the indigenous people, which distinguish this concept from other related concepts,in particular, the concept of national minority. Also, the article, based on theaforementioned Law, determines why only the indigenous peoples of Crimea:Crimean Tatars, Karaites and Krymchaks can be recognized as indigenous peoples ofUkraine, in contrast to the Gagauz people, who currently in Ukraine’s Odessa region.The study also highlights the peculiarities of the representation of indigenous peoplesof Ukraine at the local, national and international levels. A detailed interpretation ofthe provisions of the Law clarifies its role and significance, as well as prospects for theimplementation of its provisions in the future. The specifics of the representation ofindigenous peoples in Ukraine have been studied, in particular through the functioningof separate representative bodies of indigenous peoples, as well as the representationof the aforementioned communities within public authorities and local governments.The process and peculiarities of interaction of the representative bodies of theindigenous peoples of Ukraine with the bodies of state power and local self-governmentin Ukraine are analysed, along with the specifics of the legal status of such bodiesof the indigenous peoples. The publication proves the need for further the legislativeprocess to implement the requirements of the law, as well as the development ofdetailed and transparent mechanisms for such implementation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Marsden

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which the mobility of indigenous people in Victoria during the 1960s enabled them to resist the policy of assimilation as evident in the structures of schooling. It argues that the ideology of assimilation was pervasive in the Education Department’s approach to Aboriginal education and inherent in the curriculum it produced for use in state schools. This is central to the construction of the state of Victoria as being devoid of Aboriginal people, which contributes to a particularly Victorian perspective of Australia’s national identity in relation to indigenous people and culture. Design/methodology/approach This paper utilises the state school records of the Victorian Department of Education, as well as the curriculum documentation and resources the department produced. It also examines the records of the Aborigines Welfare Board. Findings The Victorian Education Department’s curriculum constructed a narrative of learning and schools which denied the presence of Aboriginal children in classrooms, and in the state of Victoria itself. These representations reflect the Department and the Victorian Government’s determination to deny the presence of Aboriginal children, a view more salient in Victoria than elsewhere in the nation due to the particularities of how Aboriginality was understood. Yet the mobility of Aboriginal students – illustrated in this paper through a case study – challenged both the representations of Aboriginal Victorians, and the school system itself. Originality/value This paper is inspired by the growing scholarship on Indigenous mobility in settler-colonial studies and offers a new perspective on assimilation in Victoria. It interrogates how curriculum intersected with the position of Aboriginal students in Victorian state schools, and how their position – which was often highly mobile – was influenced by the practices of assimilation, and by Aboriginal resistance and responses to assimilationist practices in their lives. This paper contributes to histories of assimilation, Aboriginal history and education in Victoria.


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