Yolŋu Way: An Aboriginal Approach to Talent Development

Abstract

<p>Australian Aboriginal learners have a long history of underrepresentation in gifted and talented education. Numerous frameworks have been proffered to explain this lack of participation. These include deficit theorising, involuntary minority status, identification issues, and epistemological differences. A number of initiatives have sought to redress one or more of these issues in an effort to increase Aboriginal participation in gifted education. These programs; however, tend to focus on intervening to redress perceived deficits that prevent Aboriginal achievement, thus overlooking important epistemological questions. In effect, they make little attempt to account for the contested nature of giftedness and are framed exclusively around Western understandings of the gifted construct. Where Aboriginal culture and knowledge have been incorporated, it has often been derived from a pan-Aboriginal perspective and usually included as a tool to aid engagement. Ideally, gifted education should move beyond such approaches to harness students’ existing knowledge by engaging with local conceptions of the gifted construct.</p> <p>This two-phased mixed methods case study sought to develop a talent development model that would bridge the “contested knowledge space” of gifted education for Yolŋu learners. This model was to be a realisation of the Yolŋu <i>Ganma</i> metaphor where new knowledge is generated at the intersection of two different knowledge streams. Thus, in Phase 1, a facilitated dialogue protocol was used to support teachers and Yolŋu Elders to co-construct a talent development program that would be suitable for use with gifted Yolŋu youth. To support this work, a qualitative interview was conducted with eight Yolŋu Elders to canvass their views on giftedness, talents and talent development, and to compare these understandings with Gagnés Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talents (DMGT 2.0), a popular model used in Australian schools. A short quantitative exit survey was also conducted in this phase to determine participant satisfaction with the facilitated dialogue process. In Phase 2, the coconstructed talented development model was implemented at the study site. Stakeholder views of the program were collected using simple qualitative surveys alongside a Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis.</p> <p>Three overarching conclusions were developed from this research. First, for the Yolŋu people, gifts, talents and talent development are deeply entwined with their foundation law (<i>Djalkiri Rom</i> ). This meant that the talent development model developed in this research needed to be built with the <i>Djalkiri Rom</i> as its base, which enabled the model to support both intellectually gifted Yolŋu students and those who were deemed culturally gifted. This could not be done without the support of the Yolŋu community and it is not surprising then, that the second conclusion relates to meaningful engagement with Aboriginal peoples. Dialogue emerged as the key to achieving <i>Ganma</i> ; however, to ensure new knowledge development, this dialogue needed to tackle difficult questions of contested epistemology. The facilitated dialogue protocol was found to be an effective tool for shifting dialogue into the realm of knowledge generation in the contested arena of gifted education. The third conclusion in this research held that a Funds of Knowledge approach within gifted education is able to enhance the student experience.</p>