Skip to main content

How not to report on Indigenous education

Yesterday I got a phone call out of the blue from a journalist from The Australian newspaper. Initially, I felt a bit chuffed being cold-called by a big newspaper. I soon realised however that the journo was asking me about stuff that wasn’t really my area of expertise. She wanted to know about ESL teaching in the APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) lands. This is out of my area – geographically (desert, South Australia) and professionally (education, ESL teaching).

When I started to explain that I wasn’t going to be terribly helpful to her, she said ‘Oh. Well I just got your contact details. I don’t really know what you do”. That should have been a big enough clue to realise that there wasn’t going to be much good journalism going on.

When I saw the resulting story, I learned that she didn’t do a good job of reporting on the issue at all. The story, "Language skills poor in 40pc of APY children", can be found here.

It's a prime example of how not to report on Indigenous education. The result is a misleading and negative article. Ultimately, it contributes no worthwhile information to the issue and serves only to perpetuate misconceptions and prejudices many Australians already hold.

The entire premise of the article is flawed. It claims that 40% of children in the APY lands have 'poor language skills' – a claim based on census data of children from 0-14. It implies that it is newsworthy that 225 of those 600 children are not proficient in English. In actual fact it is entirely acceptable, predictable and expected that children in the APY lands up to the age of 5 - which probably number around 225 - would be proficient only in their own Indigenous language. Children are not expected to start to develop English proficiency until they enter the schooling system. The journalist has disappointingly gone for a dramatic sounding headline based on not much news at all.

Regarding that headline, "Language skills poor in 40% of APY children", this is again misleading. It assumes that "language skills" means only English skills. It ignores the fact that all children in that age bracket would have perfectly adequate oral language skills in their mother tongue – Yankunytjatjara or Pitjantjatjara. By ignoring the skills children have in their own language and claiming that they have poor "language" skills (when they really mean “English” skills), it falsely perceives them as deficient. Their Indigenous language skills and knowledge become invisible.

It should also be noted that 225 out of 600 is actually 37.5%, not 40%. Okay, not a big difference, but that’s actually falsely adding 15 kids to the total of kids with ‘poor language skills’. That’s nearly a classroom of kids.

"I've got poor language skills?
How good's your Pitjantjatjara?"
Aboriginal people are regularly fed messages by media that tell them they are unsuccessful in education and many other aspects of life. It is not nice that Sarah Martin has created another of these messages based on insignificant ABS data while at the same time ignoring important language skills that these children have.

I emailed her today with these concerns. I would like to hear back from her. At the very least, I hope she has simply made honest mistakes that she will avoid next time.

Of course, I'm not the only person to comment on negative and misleading reporting on Indigenous issues and its potential affect on Aboriginal people's lives. This article quotes an Aboriginal academic at a health conference who said, "We’re tired of being told that we are helpless, hopeless and useless". The article also quotes Professor Fiona Stanley who advocates for more positive reporting on Aboriginal issues: "The more that the dominant culture reports negative stories about Aboriginal people, the more that Aboriginal children feel bad about being Aboriginal,” says Stanley. She goes on to say:
“I have these fantasy conversations with Rupert Murdoch and say, ‘you could actually turn around Aboriginal people if you could change the way you report, even if you just made just 50 per cent of your articles positive, you could reduce suicide rates.’”
I would happily have that same conversation. If not with Rupert Murdoch, then at least with Sarah Martin.

Further readingIs the media part of the Aboriginal health problem, and part of the solution? by Melissa Sweet. Inside Story, March 3, 2009

Comments

Anonymous said…
thanks for writing this, greg, and for following it up with the journalist. so much i could say here, but i may never stop. the big failing is of our 'system' more broadly in not recognising aspects of language variation and multi-lingual acqusition in australian communities. not just in education, but as you can see here, in census and other forms of data collection. (i won't even start on the australian early development index :-(). *sigh* we can only but try, as you're doing, to pull people up whenever they spout ignorance, such as in this unfortunate article. thanks again. renae
Claire said…
Your pic reminds me of another thing I find with a lot of reporting on Aboriginal issues (not this post though) - that the pic or video is file footage that has very little to do with the story. The worst examples were when reports of child sex abuse had random (fully identifiable) pics of kids who had nothing to do with the story (that got me angry enough to write to Media Watch). I wonder if it reinforces an implicit perception that aboriginal people are all kind of similar.

Popular posts from this blog

A conference, language policy and Aboriginal languages in Federal Parliament

The other day, I was priveleged in attending a TESOL symposium about 'Keeping Language Diversity Alive'. One of the speakers, Joseph Lo Bianco was excellent and discussed Language Policy. He gave a handout at one of his sessions that I'm going to type out in full here, because it was a real eye-opener. It's from the Official Hansard of the Federal Parliament from a debate that happened on 10/12/98. Here's how it went: Mr SNOWDON: My question is to the Prime Minister. Is the Prime Minister aware of the decision by the Northern Territory government to phase out bilingual education in Aboriginal schools? Is the Prime Minister also aware that his government funds bilingual education programs in Papua New Guinea and Vietnam? Prime Minister, given that article 26(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children, will you take a direct approach to the Norther

The pitiful state of Recommendation 11.6 of the NT Fracking (Pepper) Inquiry

Today the NT Government announced that it's ok to start fracking the Beetaloo Basin, claiming that all 135 recommendations from the 2018 Pepper Inquiry report have been met and, therefore, fracking can proceed.  Most of the recommendations - and you can go through them all here:  Action items | Hydraulic Fracturing in the Northern Territory  - are outside my field of expertise as a linguist. There's a lot of regulatory stuff, things about the mining industry, stuff about land and water management that others know much more about than me.  However, as a linguist working in the Katherine Region for 20 years, there is one recommendation that sits in my wheelhouse so, after today's announcement, I wanted to take a look at it. It's Recommendation 11.6, which says: That in collaboration with the Government, Land Councils and AAPA, an independent, third-party designs and implements an information program to ensure that reliable, accessible, trusted and accurate information ab

Subtle features of Aboriginal English that I love: agreeing or confirming by copying

Linguists aren't supposed to play favourites, but I love Aboriginal English. Maybe because it's what the love of my life speaks and separating language from people and society isn't a realistic prospect. I'm lucky to regularly be around Aboriginal people speaking English in all sorts of ways and privileged to have insights into some of the more subtle ways in which Aboriginal ways of using English differ from the suburban white English I grew up speaking.  I want to share some of these more subtle features. Not just because I am fond of them but also because they seem to be features that escape the attention of most academic discussions of Aboriginal English / Aboriginal ways of using English. I'm going to skip over the complexities of what Aboriginal English is (and isn't) and also if/why that label is worth using at all (a chapter I wrote on Aboriginal English(es) dips into some of that discussion - email me if you want a copy). For brevity's sake, let