Australia's history is often mis taught, skimmed over or not taught in schools, as a pre service teacher I see the importance of teaching the history of the land we live on and respecting Australia's first people and linking it to identity and belonging of the children, that everyone is different and comes from different backgrounds. In a society that is so multicultural, children need to be taught to Respect everyone diespite being different. Through my own experiences in school I can not recall being taught much about Australia's history, dot paintings, spear hunting and grubs Come to Mind.. In high school I remember even less being taught to us. I had hardly any knowledge of aboriginals and the history until recent studies, it was a real eye opener in how poorly it os covered in school.
The most common way of teaching aboriginal history is dot painting which is actually an inporpriate way of teaching and is not the only art the first people used.
In conclusion as a pre service teacher I believe aboriginal history needs to be covered in more depth and detail and teachers need to be better educated on the topic..
Very insightful!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on this but even though many teachers try to do the right thing they still pass on misleading information, for example, teaching Aboriginal dot paintings as you mentioned.
As you mentioned teachers need to be better educated on Aboriginal culture in order for us to close the gap and I feel as though this is starting to happen. One of the ways teachers are becoming better educated is with more accurate Australian units becoming compulsory for most education qualifications. Teachers are also beginning to teach Australian history differently in our schools so our children will hopefully learn the truth.
I have enjoyed the way you have linked you experiences in school as a way of linking your current professional studies together. I totally agree that aboriginal studies needs to be taught in a way that is realistic as false and misleading information for me as a pre-service teacher is unacceptable. I want the children in my classroom to gain learning experiences that are in depth and in detail in order to teach the topic of Indigenous Australians
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