Melbourne Anti Intervention Collective presents a public forum...
The NT Intervention:
Why Teachers and Communities are Breaking the Ban on Bilingual Education
Thursday 6.30pm, 18 November 2010
James Hardie Theatre, Architecture Building, The University of Melbourne
Speakers:
Senior teacher from Bilingual school (to remain anonymous until video link up)
Rosa McKenna, Friends of Bilingual Learning
Mary Merkenich, Teacher and Unionist
Lucy Honan, Melbourne Anti Intervention Collective
Bans on teaching in Aboriginal language for the first four hours of the school day were introduced in 2008 following the roll out of the Northern Territory Intervention in 2007. Under the guise of “closing the gap” on Aboriginal disadvantage the Racial Discrimination Act was suspended, Aboriginal community land has been seized and community organisations, jobs and access to welfare payments have been dismantled.
The attempt to decimate bilingual programs was a territory government decision, but mimics perfectly the punitive logic of the federal intervention. Communities and Aboriginal culture are being attacked for the problems caused by all governments' chronic failure to support programs of self determination for Aboriginal people.
These schools are the first casualties of NAPLAN- NAPLAN data from 2008 was used to justify the bans, but as Senator Trish Crossin and Dr Brian Devlin and have shown, the literacy and numeracy data was deliberately misconstrued to suggest bilingual schools were under performing. In fact, there is overwhelming international evidence that bilingual learning is educationally sound, and the closure of the programs is a human rights violation.
So what is behind the bilingual bans, why are Aboriginal communities resisting the ban and what we can do?
Contact: Shannon Price 0422 802 984
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