NEO-Learning – Interactive Online Digital Education Platform.
Launched August 26, 2021. Yindjibarndi Community, Ieramugadu, (Roebourne) WA and Big hART
Commentary by Frank McKone
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NEO-Learning
is a First Nations education program for primary schools, devised by
the Ieramugadu children and guided by their elders as a continuing gift
to all Australians.
Big hART was first invited to work in
Ieramugadu (Roebourne) 10 years ago by senior women Elders, who wanted
Big hART to deliver projects which highlight heritage as living,
continually evolving in the here and now. It was thereby vital that
NEO-Learning celebrated living continuous culture, and was co-created by
young people from Roebourne and guided by Elders and senior members of
the community.
As Elder Michelle explained at the launch,
“How do you bring stories about your life? We’re in control of our
story in NEO-Learning,” going on to show how the children in the schools
using the platform are “not just consumers” – because they are actively
engaged – and that learning online in this way is a “new literacy” for
her children, as well as for everyone else.
Most important,
from the Yindjibarndi perspective, is how NEO-Learning works “to
maintain our culture” from the old into the new. “We are the teachers
now,” said one of the Roebourne students, while their Elders talked of
the importance of their young people taking on their role as creatives
and innovators in their culture, and so being engaged and committed to
their community.
The Yindjibarndi people are one of the five
clans who had to take over the responsibility to care for the land known
as Murujuga or Burrup Peninsula, after the ancient traditional
custodians – the Yaburara – were massacred in 1869. The area, with
literally tens of thousands of rock art drawings, has been extensively
damaged mainly by the LNG gas and chemicals industry which should never
have been allowed to operate there.
The Ngarluma community has
taken on the task of managing as best they can what is now the Murujuga
National Park, in the face of Woodside attempting to expand their
operatons. When I spoke to a Ngarluma Elder, in 2018, his central
concern was that the rock art, which scientific studies show dates back
to at least 35,000 years ago and was still being actively worked until
the massacre, is essential in the education of young people today, so
that they understand and respect their culture, and are committed to
their community.
Despite the WA Government doing its part in
requesting Murujuga be nominated for World Heritage (which requires the
Federal Department of Environment to prepare for the Minister to put the
nomination, representing Australia, to UNESCO), Woodside may yet be
given what I would call a red light to go ahead with their proposed
expansion.
Watching
the launch of NEO-Learning, two points important for education became
clear. First is how the engagement of the teachers and their students
works. Second is the arts education principle, which underpins the
process.
This is where an appreciation of Big hART comes in. I have previously written of Scott Rankin’s work, on this blog: Cultural Justice and the Right to Thrive by Scott Rankin. Platform Paper No 57, November 2018 (Currency House, Sydney).
Speaking
at the launch he made his philosophy clear, in simple terms: “It’s
harder to hurt someone if you know their story.” Big hART people are
“servants of society”, operating not as a generalised charity, but as
facilitators of specific projects through the arts. “We are the
privileged ones,” he says, because of what the Yindjibarndi people are
doing for us.
The Canberra Hospital School teachers – team leader
Jo Daly, Penny Fry and Debbie Sam – spoke enthusiastically of the
flexibility of the NEO-Learning program, with Big hART’s highly
practical facilitator Mark Leahy, in their constantly changing
situation.
The students come and go according to their hospital
treatment requirements, and what they are capable of doing from day to
day is unpredictable. The NEO-Learning program consists, for a start,
of videos made in Roebourne with such enthusiasm and sense of fun, that
even hospital inmates who can’t get up and dance are thoroughly enthused
about their own futures. And for teachers in more stable
circumstances, it is through the arts activities, perhaps especially in
dance, painting and music which the videos generate, that real
understanding of First Nations culture becomes built into their
students’ learning.
Governor-General David Hurley spoke
powerfully of the essentially inclusive nature of the project – bringing
us together as Australians in a multi-cultural society – as he
introduced the first Indigenous woman Member of Parliament, Linda
Burney, to officially launch NEO-Learning. She spoke of her own work
teaching, and then in advocacy and curriculum development for Aboriginal
Education, remembering her own experiences when young, of being made to
feel inferior, in the time when “Aboriginal” meant at best “primitive”,
and at worst meant to be massacred, as the Yaburara had been in 1869.
Though
she spoke more briefly than she had intended – because the enthusiasm
of previous speakers had let time get away – I thought of the great
contrast between the treatment still of Indigenous people in the
“justice” system, and of the explicit racism I have seen in many places
on my travels around Australia, compared to the dictum provided to us by
Scott Rankin
It’s harder to hurt someone if you know their story. And even harder if you join with them in the art of story-telling through NEO-Learning.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
