September 2009 — Volume 3, Issue 5

Teaching from Country strengthens remote centres

ALTC National Teaching Fellow Professor Michael Christie describes his unique work with Indigenous knowledge holders.

Using new digital technologies, the Teaching from Country program brings together Yolŋu Aboriginal knowledge authorities living in remote homeland centres in northeast Arnhemland, and tertiary level students of Yolŋu languages and culture.

Charles Darwin University has a long history of collaborative engagements with Yolŋu people, beginning with the development of the Yolŋu studies program set up in 1994 in the School of Australian Indigenous Knowledge Systems. This program, which won the Prime Minister’s award for Australia’s best tertiary teaching program in 2005, is still at the centre of a rich diversity of teaching and research which recognises and implements Yolŋu ways of making, sharing and governing knowledge within academic contexts.

Research which precedes and underpins the Teaching from Country program, includes work on the role of digital technologies in the intergenerational transmission of traditional knowledge (www.cdu.edu.au/ik), the use of digital technologies for the long-term sustainability of remote Aboriginal homeland centres (www.cdu.edu.au/inc) and the professionalisation of Yolŋu researcher-consultants articulating a research methodology which remains faithful to both academic and Yolŋu knowledge practices (www.cdu.edu.au/yaci).

So, when the Australian Learning and Teaching Council awarded the National Fellowship in 2008, we were in a good position to develop an exciting teaching program. We made use of our previous work looking at Yolŋu knowledge practices in the academy, the use of digital technologies in Indigenous knowledge work, and the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies in ongoing Yolŋu life in very remote homeland centres.

We were able to engage some key Yolŋu knowledge authorities and teachers, as well as a group of Australian advisers, and some international experts from the fields of the sociology of technology, and computer supported cooperative work.

We were determined from the outset to centre our work in the Yolŋu philosophy of knowledge, place, pedagogy and technology. We started with five key challenges:

• What is a helpful conceptual framing of issues involved in our work that is valid in Yolŋu terms
  and supports translation into academic contexts?
• What are the best socio-technical arrangements for us to put in place?
• How do we understand and support the emergent order of remote Yolŋu pedagogy?
• How do we situate Aboriginal teaching in the academic institution to ensure that Yolŋu are
  fully recognised and paid properly for their contributions?
• How do we ensure that Yolŋu intellectual property is safeguarded through both the traditional
  and the Australian legal systems?

Then we decided upon a process that included setting up negotiated socio-technical configurations in several remote Arnhemland sites and at the university, and working to develop a new remote Yolŋu pedagogy
of languages, culture and the arts.

Maintaining a conversation among all the parties which identifies and explores the challenges that emerge was also part of the process along with developing a website to make the processes public, and transparent, while preserving their complexity, and respecting Yolŋu ways of producing, sharing and safeguarding knowledge. The website can be found at www.cdu.edu.au/tfc

We began with a workshop in Darwin, where Yolŋu knowledge authorities came together to explore the new digital technologies, to play with making digital objects and websites, to experiment with remote teaching (just from one office to the next at this stage), and to think about what the use of remote communication technology might mean for our understanding of Yolŋu and academic knowledge and pedagogy. Details of the workshop can be found at http://learnline.cdu.edu.au/inc/tfc/trials01.html and transcriptions and translations of the
Yolŋu philosophical work can be found at http://learnline.cdu.edu.au/inc/tfc/writings.html

The Yolŋu studies classes at CDU are held on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons, and from the beginning of March 2009 until the end of May we set up over 20 teaching sessions from remote places, to the Yolŋu studies class in Darwin. Each of these sessions was recorded, transcribed and translated, and the videos and transcriptions up loaded to the website http://learnline.cdu.edu.au/inc/tfc/trials.html. The videos and their transcriptions reveal the thrills as well as the frustrations and disappointments of connections and ‘drop
outs’ as the program expanded, as the teachers ventured further and further from their remote homes, and as we even began to do some teaching to interested students of biodiversity ethics in California.

We set up a blog space, and interested people from around the world began to contribute their comments and questions about what they could see.

At the end of July, we brought people together for an international seminar which started with a trip to Arnhemland to show guests some of the key Teaching from Country sites, and to visit a remote homeland centre. Then we met for an extended seminar at CDU where over several days we reflected upon the program to date, and discussed more generally issues of Indigenous knowledge and scientific and academic teaching and research work.

A few key Yolŋu ideas about university teaching and learning emerged during the seminar including that Yolŋu educators found Teaching from Country enabled them better to do the work they see as crucially important: that it is helping students take themselves seriously as learners, to respect their own integrity as learners involved in serious and significant collaborations over knowledge and identity. The knowledge and identity resources of their own country strengthened their ability to help students understand themselves.

Teaching from Country allowed the Yolŋu teachers better access to the active agency of the environment in the production of knowledge. As Yiŋiya the Yolŋu lecturer said: “It’s different, because the classrooms don’t talk to you. We’re learning out there under a tree… the trees are always communicating with you. The hills, the land, the air, are always communicating, teaching you and understands every need the Yolŋu child will have to go through”. When teaching from his ancestral land at Badaypaday, he began by saying – “Now that I’m here, all the stories fit into place”.

In the same way that each place is unique – with its particular ancestral story, its different connections with other people and places, different owners and managers of its stories and ceremonies – so from each site emerged a unique socio-technical configuration of hardware, software, connectivity, spaces, images, elders, kin networks, children and passers-by. Some trial sites failed despite a huge amount of effort, others emerged successfully almost spontaneously. Success was more often a function of ongoing shared experience, good faith and nurturing than of detailed planning.

Yolŋu participate in knowledge production in many complex and often hidden ways – from senior elders sitting silently in the background supervising the use of knowledge for which they are the ultimate custodians – to young children who keep the technology going or act as go-betweens for elders who – for kinship reasons – must not meet or speak to each other. Settling remuneration rates and processes will always be complex, provisional and subject to careful respectful negotiations in good faith, by experienced people.

Yolŋu and Australian intellectual property laws differ and often appear to contradict each
other. Teaching from Country changed that to some extent. We are continuing to explore the ways that the use of digital technologies made our accountability within the Australian law somewhat more complex and within
the Yolŋu law, somewhat easier, and what provisions we need to put in place to protect Indigenous intellectual property within both legal regimes.

We still have much work to do. We have yet to report on the extended seminar, and to publish the proceedings. We have more work to do on the website, and a new semester is just starting where more people will become involved. Others in Japan and the US are interested in being taught from
country, and we continue to explore the possibility of similar teaching programs being tried at other Australian universities.

*Professor Michael Christie was appointed an ALTC National Teaching Fellow in 2008. He is investigating the participation of Indigenous knowledge holders in tertiary teaching through the use of emerging digital technologies.