Language and Literacy Education in Remote Indigenous Schools

In 1990, Basil Bernstein proposed that pedagogic approaches could be observed as belonging in one of four quadrants: progressivist, transmission, critical and radical approaches. Each quadrant represents differing perspectives on the three intersecting pedagogic elements: curriculum content, the teacher and the learner. These perspectives have a strong influence on the life trajectories of educationally marginalised students, including their access to participatory citizenship. Across the decades, programs from each pedagogic quadrant have influenced in turn the language and literacy education of remote Indigenous Australian students, as policy makers struggle to find rapid, reliable ways of closing the gap in educational outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Examples are bilingual education, Direct Instruction and Accelerated Literacy, as well as the current ‘best practice’ of constructivist progressive pedagogy which is the skill set brought by most Australian teachers to remote Indigenous schools. In this chapter, we reflect on those approaches: the stances they take to the curriculum, the teacher and the learner and their affordances and constraints in remote settings. We conclude that the radical quadrant, with language programs underpinned by sociocultural theory, systemic functional linguistics and Bernsteinian sociology, carries the greatest potential for remote Indigenous citizens, if certain conditions can be established.