Summary

Emergence of the Aboriginal and Islander Teacher Education Program: AITEP
A/Professor Lynette Henderson and A/Professor Noel Loos

During the 1960s and seventies, there had been a growing awareness that special efforts were needed to improve the position of Indigenous people throughout the world, especially those who had suffered from the colonisation of their land. In Australia, this meant Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders lost ownership and control of their land, were denied citizenship, administered as Wards of the State in Indigenous communities and provided with an education, if at all, to a Grade 4 standard. This was the educational equivalent of a 10 year-old child. From the 1960s, there was a world-wide attempt to raise the education level of Indigenous people. In Australia in 1967, an important referendum was passed that allowed the Federal Government to become involved in its own right in Aboriginal advancement. This resulted in 1969 in its creation of the Study Grants Scheme which provided Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with access to tertiary education and financial support for them. In 1970 there were fewer than 100 Indigenous Australians involved in tertiary education in Australia. By 1980, there were almost 900.

In 1975, the decision was made at the then Townsville College of Advanced Education (TCAE) to create a Division of Aboriginal and Islander Education from which emerged in 1975, a race relations subject - Race and Culture - a one semester subject taken by all third year students. Then, in 1976, a one-year Graduate Diploma in Aboriginal Education was launched for qualified experienced school teachers who had worked in schools with a large Indigenous enrolment or who wished to work in such schools. Next, the then Queensland Deputy Director of Education, Mr Bill Hamilton, asked the TCAE if it could develop a primary teacher education program for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students whom the secondary school system had not been able to graduate successfully to the standard acceptable for tertiary entrance. This course was the Aboriginal and Islander Teacher Education Program, known to all as AITEP.

The Planning Committee resolved that the Indigenous students would complete the same subjects as the regular entry students and be taught by the same lecturers so that they would graduate with the same professional qualification as the regular students, none of whom, at this time, were Indigenous. The AITEP Planning Committee insightfully decided that (a) the first academic year of two semesters would be stretched over three semesters commencing in July, the middle of the academic year and (b) two pass/fail subjects - Introductory Mathematics and Introductory Science - and an assessable subject, Contemporary Australian Society - would occupy the gaps created in the time-table to focus on any weaknesses resulting from their secondary school experience. Grammar and essay writing were addressed in the AITEP support tutorials and Contemporary Australian Society. It was also crucial to employ qualified teachers as AITEP tutors to teach these subjects and to provide academic support to the students in their Diploma subjects. They also had to relate successfully to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

It clearly worked. The AITEP students only studied as a separate Diploma of Teaching group for their first semester. Increasingly throughout their second and third semesters, they selected from the number of areas and subjects on offer and worked with other students. When they progressed into the second and third years, they were scattered throughout the whole range of subject areas and options.

Townsville's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program (AITEP) had been one of the first three in Australia and the first in Queensland involved in this exciting outreach. It was also the most successful. It was a study of the program after ten years by Lyn Henderson and Geoff Coombs, Confronting Disadvantage: A Demographic Study of the first 53 Graduates through AITEP, that revealed that AITEP had, in the majority of years, either a slightly higher or equal graduation rate in Primary Teacher Education at the Townsville College of Teacher Education and, after amalgamation, James Cook University, than did the regular entry program. AITEP was disbanded in 1987 soon after the School of Indigenous Australian Studies was established. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander enrolments in Education have since diminished.

[Noel Loos and Greg Miller (eds.), Succeeding against the Odds: The Townsville Aboriginal and Islander Teacher Education Program, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1989, pp. xii – xiii, 17 – 31.]