Please come to the planning meeting for the Bilingual Education Day Conference this Thursday 23rd September at 6:30 pm
To build on the success of a union anti-intervention speaking tour of Steve Patrick and Peter Inverway earlier this year, Melbourne Anti Intervention Collective is planning a bilingual education day conference on a Saturday in November.
In holding the conference we aim to raise awareness about the ban on Aboriginal languages for the first four hours of school days, and associated measures like welfare quarantining that punish students, families and Aboriginal culture for problems created by chronic under-resourcing. On a more local level, we would address questions of the place- or lack of space- for Aboriginal culture and history in the National Curriculum.
We would also put this attack on Aboriginal educational rights in the context of the NT Intervention, and of the resistance to the intervention.
We see this as an important way to build up the general resistance to Anti Aboriginal racism and resistance to the assimilation push. We want to consolidate primarily education union members, but also more generally teachers, academics, students and other interested parties as Aboriginal rights activists.
We need your help to make this conference as relevant as possible, and to help it reach as wide an audience as possible. We are holding a planning meeting this Thursday evening at the New International Bookshop at Trades Hall.
We would love your ideas about speakers, your knowledge about the issues, your networks and ideas about how we can end these policies.
A tentative agenda for the conference is:
- Session One: Bilingual Education – What’s happening and why?
- Session Two: The National Curriculum and Indigenous Perspectives
- Session Three: Where to from here
Look forward to seeing you there,
Lucy Honan
0404728104
September 23rd, 2010 at 11:20 pm
While I’m not an expert in the field, I have always been interested in developments for Aboriginal languages in Australian schools, so have recently tackled Nancy Hornberger’s book, ‘Can Schools Save Indigenous Languages? Policy and Practice on Four Continents. Perhaps you already know it, but if not, I’d suggest that it’s worth a look – even if it doesn’t contain examples from Australia, as I had hoped. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend your meeting tonight, but intend to support your conference. Do please post details on this site as soon as practicable. Good luck with everything!