The Community-Based Aboriginal Teacher Education (C-BATE) programme empowers Yolŋu teachers to study in their own homelands, where they serve as vital role models in both teaching and learning.
Story by Janne Rytkönen
C-BATE Trainer Lana Pearse alights from the aircraft, shoulders her bags of books and teaching materials, waves to the pilot, and heads off along a red dirt track into the Gäṉgaṉ homeland, a 10-minute walk from the airstrip through dense scrub land.
“It’s all MAF for me,” says Lana in describing how she gets to the homelands, many of which would take six hours or more for a return trip by 4WD vehicle in the dry season. In the monsoonal wet season, Gäṉgaṉ can be cut off from overland access for days at a time.
She currently flies to the homelands of Gäṉgaṉ and Waṉḏawuy each week and will soon start an additional one day a week of teaching a regular class in Gutjaŋan on Bremer Island.
The C-BATE programme offers flexible pathways to formal teaching qualifications for Yolŋu Homeland Centre Teachers, and most of the studies can be completed in the homelands thanks to training and mentoring provided by Laynhapuy Homelands Schools specialist trainers such as Lana.
It’s all MAF for me.
Under an exciting new initiative, teachers can also progress to undergraduate level study in a partnership with the Charles Darwin University out of Darwin, Northern Territory, with the programme to be delivered in the homelands.
“I’m working today with a Yolŋu teacher who's only been teaching for a couple of years, who's just started studying, so she's in her first term of study,” said Lana.
The Yolŋu teacher was inspired to teach in the homeland when her own daughter started school, and she herself was taught by her grandmother and an aunt, also homeland teachers.
Lana said, “She felt drawn to education, and now that her daughter's there, she wants to be a big part of that.
“So, I'm doing some of the pre-uni courses with her now, which will teach her the basics of writing an essay and how to access the library so that we can start on some of the course work next term. It's really exciting.”
The C-BATE programme and the reliable access provided by MAF overcome the barrier of isolation, and Yolŋu homeland teachers can remain ‘on country’, where their dual roles of teacher and learner have the greatest effect on the next generations.
