Case story

Developing Capacity and Community Training Through an Action Research Project

The Mending the Broken Spirit research project was conducted through the Institute for Aboriginal Development in Alice Springs.

Project leader Debra Maidment, an Arrernte researcher from Artekerre outstation, about 80 kilometres out of Alice Springs, worked with Willian Jungarrayi Wright and Doug White. They used action learning and participatory research methods to find out what people thought would be the best way to improve their health and education outcomes, and to develop an Indigenous curriculum based on local priorities.

Debra had observed that educated Aboriginal people are still very much a part of the high mortality and morbidity statistics, and are still struggling to obtain employment and a good quality of life, regardless of their education history. She was concerned that the younger generation in the town camps of Alice Springs are coming from very poor environments that aren’t conducive to learning, and are struggling to learn in mainstream classrooms – also that people living on outstations were feeling disempowered about being unable to get the type of resources they wanted to make their outstations better places to live.

Debra and her co-researchers wanted to find out what people thought would improve their health and education outcomes. They used interviews and workshopping to consult with people in three homeland communities and with relevant Aboriginal stakeholders around Alice Springs 

The process that we found was the best method to use with the group that we were working with was Action Learning & Participatory Research. We would do consultations on the ground, find a common theme to work with community people on, and then put that into action and empower them and to go through this … process.

We … started by talking about ‘issues that concern me’. So if a group wanted to look at, say for example, land degradation, then we would take that, use it as a theme, workshop it with a whole lot of participants, work out an Action Plan, carry out the activity, and work out – after trialling it - whether this actually worked. One group of people had never written a submission before and out of this process they wrote a submission to the National Heritage Trust and managed to get some funding for their outstation. They then put in a plan to deal with the land degradation because a lot of cattle were running on their Country and for environmental health reasons it wasn’t good, it was like having a big dust storm with cattle running everywhere and cars driving everywhere and not using roads.’

We asked the research participants, “How would we have much better health outcomes and what would you like to see in education process that would improve health outcomes?” People started making real decisions on what they thought would go into an education system that could improve their health outcomes or the other way around, and some of the barriers to do with that.

During our consultations, the Elders and people that lived on the outstation, they kept saying; ‘Well how can you educate anybody if you don’t look after your roots, if you don’t look after your history, your identity? That’s when we came to the metaphor of the Artekerre tree, to develop a curriculum.

Knowing  your history, your culture and having connection to your Land, being strong in your language and acknowledging the positive things of generations before us - these are the roots of the tree. Then after dealing with that and coming in to the learning processes as a strong Aboriginal person, then there’s a willingness to learn. The trunk of the tree is all the Social and Emotional Wellbeing issues, because there’s things that have an effect on Aboriginal people, like the stolen generation, like family violence, all the things that are happening around us at the moment. People are living in despair and in poverty and are struggling and so that trunk of the tree was really saying, “Go through your healing process by getting strong in your history, your language, your culture. Then you will be able to learn more mainstream subjects or things that are going to help you, or a new vocation.”

The more mainstream subjects are the leaves of the tree, the things that were important to them for helping them to become more economically independent. They included Community management, Horticulture and Land, Tourism, Managing Community Resource Organisations, Environmental Health, Community education and Enterprise development.

Capacity building through research outcomes:

We wrote and trialled a pilot curriculum [based on the learning needs people identified]. We involved Elders in this consultation and in the process of teaching, because if you wanted to know about your Country and you wanted to know about bush foods and medicines and all those sorts of things then you had to have an elder to actually teach the stuff, as well as a facilitator.

We then wrote up and accredited two course documents - a Certificate III in Community Development Facilitation: Landcare and a Certificate IV in Aboriginal Land and Community Leadership. These curriculum documents acknowledge the role of Elders and Aboriginal people as the most important in teaching the courses. In addition to that, we took people from the outstation and trained them through Certificate III and Certificate IV in Workplace Training and Assessment. This is the qualification that you need to teach our courses.

The end result was that 60 students actually completed these two courses and we trained seven facilitators who were recognised as leaders within their communities. The facilitators came from the homelands and they taught these 2 accredited programs to their own people.

Our project produced a holistic approach to education and health by asking people at the grassroots to articulate what type of education process or training outcomes would improve their quality of life. Our most important achievements were that local Aboriginal people were empowered to make informed decisions about their lives and conditions, and were included and trained as facilitators of learning (Maidment 2000).

Maidment, D 2000, ‘Mending the Broken Spirit: An Indigenous Framework for Adult Education Practice’ (unpublished report)