I. Kral & R.G. (Jerry) Schwab,
Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU

Policy debate in Australia in recent years has increasingly focused on the need for remote communities to engage more with the ‘real economy’ (Pearson 2000). At present youth employment in remote Australia is conceptualized around normative assumptions associated with the typical mainstream individual learning trajectory: through schooling and into accredited training and ultimately to gainful employment. Schooling is almost invariably portrayed as the key to successful futures.

I. Kral & R.G. (Jerry) Schwab,
Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU

The development of communicative competence continues beyond childhood (Romaine 1984). Register, cultural patterning and adept handling of narrative and conversational competence are features of language development in older childhood and adolescence (Hoyle and Adger 1998). Only during this later stage do speakers begin to encounter to a substantial degree the styles, registers, and genres of discourse that advance negotiation, exchange, knowledge acquisition, and skill build-up. These syntactic and discourse structures, provide young speakers with the linguistic and conceptual tools to move toward mature adult roles as workers, parents and community leaders (pers. comm. Shirley Brice Heath ANU, 2008). School is an important site for the acquisition of language, and literacy. However, in remote Indigenous contexts where attendance and retention rates are low, schooling alone cannot provide the highly complex and intertextual structures of discourse required for later language and literacy development and mature adult communication needs. This dilemma is amplified in locations where teaching is in English as a second language and many adolescents are effectively bypassing critical institutional learning moments, and living in a world where reading and writing are not integral to everyday communication, recreation and livelihood.

I. Kral & R.G. (Jerry) Schwab,
Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU

Indigenous youth are encountering a more diverse range of lifestyle options and future choices than ever before and domains of knowledge are in a state of rapid transformation. Yet the young people in these projects are not rejecting culture; access to elders and traditional knowledge remains a vital part of what matters to them. Rather, they are seeking new ways of expressing a contemporary Indigenous identity. They are change agents, applying pre-existing knowledge and skills drawn from being members of the local community, but also seeking to know more about the outside world. Nevertheless, the cultural values that determine young people’s aspirations are commonly inclusive of caring for kin and country and transmitting knowledge, language and culture to the next generation. In this sense, many young people are acutely aware of their responsibility to look after the linguistic and cultural heritage that has been passed down to them. Many of them are realising these roles and responsibilities through becoming the mediators between old knowledge and new technologies.