Last year I had the privilege of spending half a day in the company of Frances Bodkin (Aunty Fran), an elder of the D’harawal (an aboriginal language (tribal) group of south-western Sydney). The time spent with her and her husband Gavin Andrews was focused on her knowledge of the aboriginal uses of plants, but it revealed so much more. I think the thing that struck me most was the traditional knowledge they held and graciously shared, based on thousands of years of their ancestors’ observation, can be backed up and explained by today’s ‘western’ experimental science. Aunty Fran describes her people’s knowledge as Aboriginal Science, which I think is very appropriate, and I hope her dream to share this knowledge and have it fully acknowledged comes to fruition. Her book D’harawal Seasons and Climatic Cycles is a great starting place to begin to appreciate the depth of knowledge and understanding her people have to share.
Aunty Fran's Dream
Image Source: ABC DreamBox
http://open.abc.net.au/projects/dreambox-41gz2pv/contributions/frances-bodkin-27lo4af
Black science has observation and experience, white science has measurements and experiments. If we put the two of them together we’d get a much deeper science.
—Frances Bodkin, Dharawal Elder, NSW—
In the last 5mins of my time with Aunty Fran she discovered I was a school teacher and told me about a research project she had been working on in schools using stories to teach. Her methods were based on traditional aboriginal teaching methods, from an oral culture that had no written language other than the symbolic art found painted in caves and engraved on rock platforms.
She outlined that in a typical 60min lesson she would take the class outside into the natural environment and engage as many senses as possible (touch, smell, taste, hearing, seeing, balance as well as common sense). She would tell a story related to key points in the curriculum and then ask students in small groups to reconstruct and recount the story. Students were not allowed to record any notes, until after they had recounted to each other what they learned. Thus a 60min lesson is broken up into 20mins story, 20mins recount and 20 mins of recording. As Fran outlined this method and the success they had measures ( a year later students could recall over 50% of what was taught) it ticked off a lot of the learning theory boxes for me. The elements that struck me were;
- Engagement: engaging with story – narrative, space and inclusion of the senses)
- Metacognition and collaboration: reconstructing the story in small groups, produces deeper thinking and
- Personalisation: recording your personal record of the learning.
These are all aspects that dominate the research literature on how people learn. I have instinctively included elements of story or narrative in my lessons. I think statements like “the way humans learn in the C21st has changed” are misleading. Humans now have an array of technology to assist learning, but my gut feeling is that at a biological level we still learn the same way we always have and that the reason narrative is a part of all ancient cultures teaching practices is because that is how our brains are wired to learn. The narrative helps us link new concepts to old and allows us to remember the important bits associated with the story. I would also make the bold claim that all children learn similarly and that taking an ancient aboriginal approach to instruction should also work with non-indigenous children. I have since experimented with my own classes and developed a unit around the ecology we teach to year 9 students. I will recount my experiences in future posts.
References
Bodkin, Frances & Robertson, Lorraine (2008). D’harawal : seasons and climatic cycles. F. Bodkin & L. Robertson, Sydney
A great introduction to Aunty Fran was produced by ABC Message Stick :
EduRuminate 
Learning using Narrative: Collaborative reflection, group feedback and individual records « EduRuminate said
[…] This post describes the second part of an introductory lesson to our year 9 Ecology topic. It uses the technique of teaching with narrative. A description of the first part of this lesson is found here and an overview of the inspiration for using narrative teaching is found here. […]
miadalbyball said
Children, and now Adults, have a super high recall of all the wisdom shared by Auntie Fran when they learn with her be seeing, tasting, smelling, hearing and refecting on what is around us. One of the main reasons we started the Seasons and Cycles Eco-Tours was to make these most wonderful opportunities for learning open to many. To put some kindling on Peoples Fire growing Passion for the Natural World adn themselves in it. A a key aim is to bring this dream of —Frances Bodkin, Dharawal Elder, NSW— to Life:
Black science has observation and experience, white science has measurements and experiments. If we put the two of them together we’d get a much deeper science.