Building High-Quality Relationships With Indigenous Students

Teachers and school communities must become aware that Indigenous students’ learning and development link back to the three interrelated aspects: past historical Indigenous policies, Socio-Economic Status (SES) and healthy wellbeing. The institutional discrimination due to Indigenous policies resulted in generations of uneducated, or partly educated, Indigenous people (Bonney, 2018a). Educational policymakers must learn from the negative educational experiences of Indigenous Australians and make developed policies to overcome the poor performance of Indigenous students (Lowe & Yunkaporta, 2013; Partington, Beresford & Gower, 2012). Building high-quality relationships with Indigenous communities would motivate Indigenous students to become successful

Indigenous Australians are now labelled as disadvantaged (Bonney, 2018a; Harrison & Sellwood, 2016). SES, healthy well-being, academic achievements, employment and access to services are all connected aspects (Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet, 2018). Due to being in the low SES group, it affects the healthy well-being, behaviour and academic performance of Indigenous students. While dealing with Indigenous students from low SES backgrounds; teachers must respect students’ prior knowledge, culture and language, promote flexibility and variety of learning experiences through using proper language and scaffolding (Devlin, Kift, Nelson, Liz Smith & Jade McKay, 2012; Ewing, 2013; Lowe & Yunkaporta, 2013; Partington, Beresford & Gower, 2012). These advice highlight teachers must self-reflect and evaluate their teaching strategies, whilst make themselves available and build rapport with students to know about students’ individual need. Through learning about the individual need of each student can help teachers to choose suitable scaffolding and engage disadvantaged students in meaningful

School and teachers must know Indigenous Terms of Referencing (ITR) while dealing with issues of Indigenous students. Only ITR has the ability taking into account different Indigenous problems in an Indigenous context without conforming to dominant perspectives (Oxenham, 1999). Indigenous Elders and community members are the experts of Indigenous context, and only they can think and act from the Indigenous perspective (Bonney, 2018a; Sarra, 2014). Therefore, school communities must involve Indigenous Elders while planning their strategies. Indigenous education officers, workers, staffs, teachers and Indigenous principals are Elders and can work as media to build the positive school culture and relationships (Bonney, 2018a). Most importantly, teaching strategies must align with the Australian professional standards AITSL 1.4 and 2.4. The Australian professional standards encourage knowledge and appreciation of local Indigenous histories, culture, and language to promote reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL], 2011). Harrison and Sellwood (2016) report the school-community partnership strategy of the Coonamble Public School in NSW has been a successful approach to improve the behaviour, engagement and attendance of students. Positive school-community partnership can thus