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JCPSLP
Volume 19, Number 1 2017
Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology
Results and discussion
Themes
Three main themes emerged from the interview data. The
perceptions of the participants were that:
1. Knowing the child and their family informs practice of the
educators and builds understanding.
2. Systemic factors affect Aboriginal children’s
communication and literacy development.
3. Child and family factors affect Aboriginal children’s
language and literacy development.
Within each core theme, several key concepts were
identified; see Table 2.
Knowing the child and family
Educators and carers valued relationships formed at many
levels for the impact these can have on a child’s sense of
belonging and inclusion in educational settings. Three key
concepts within this core theme were identified.
Community involvement
Early Childhood Educators (ECEs), teachers and carers (C)
emphasised the importance of engaging with the child’s
community and culture. The Aboriginal ECEs and carers
expressed pleasure at the level of community involvement,
and emphasised this as beneficial, as expressed by one
Aboriginal ECE, who worked at an Aboriginal ECEC centre:
“Extensively, everything that we want are available here …
lucky for us!” (ECE3).
Non-Aboriginal ECEs and teachers (T) acknowledged
the importance of community involvement and provided
examples of how the school or service was working
towards engaging the community. “We have cultural
activity days with community members. We’ve also had
cultural awareness training and now we include the
acknowledgement to country in our procedures and
assembly” (T12).
Valuing language and culture
Respect for the Aboriginal child’s heritage and culture was a
theme which emerged from the data. Non-Aboriginal
teachers discussed the need to acknowledge the child’s
culture and language. This was based on information
provided during training either at university or post-
graduation.
I did Aboriginal Education as a subject. We learned
about not discounting their language, acknowledging
what they bring to the school and trying to incorporate
this as much as you can. We should not correct them
because we don’t want to affect their self-esteem. (T3)
Aboriginal ECEs acknowledged the AE dialect that children
used and related this to their real-life experiences. For
example when the following Aboriginal ECE was asked
“What do you think about the way Aboriginal children talk?”
she replied: “It’s interesting. Not all of them, but the majority
have some lingo going that they talk and use at home” (ECE5).
Table1. Participant’s roles
Participants’ roles Aboriginal
participants
Non-Aboriginal
participants
Total
Early childhood
educators
5
2
7
Parents/carers
8
8
School teachers
16
16
Total
13
18
31
Number of males
1
1
2
Number of females
12
17
29
Procedure
Participants were interviewed by the first researcher in the
context of the education centre or school, to enhance
comfort and minimise disruption to daily routines. Interview
guides (Minichiello, Sullivan, Greenwood, & Axford, 1999;
Patton, 2002) were used to ensure that questions were
raised consistently across the interviews (see Appendix),
however the questions remained a loose guide.
Conversational and reflexive processes took precedence
over structured interviewing so as to foster relationship
building and connection and facilitate sharing. Aboriginal
participants were introduced to the researcher by an
Aboriginal community member or a member of the advisory
panel, who provided authentication of the research. The
parent participants were interviewed when their child was in
ECEC, prior to school entry, so the conversations with
these participants focused more on communication than
literacy development.
The interview questions were developed from the
literature (Malcolm et al., 1999; Oliver, Rochecouste,
Vanderford, & Grote, 2011) and through consultation with
the advisory panel. Interviews with the educators were
audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Some parents
expressed discomfort with being recorded in the interview
context, so hand-written notes were taken during these
interviews and read back to the interviewee to check the
content and confirm the meaning.
The interviews were analysed using thematic analysis
(Braun & Clarke, 2006). The researcher coded the
participants’ conversation into themes, some of which were
based on theories from the literature (Dockett, Mason, &
Perry, 2012). In the coding process, several themes also
evolved out of the data, so a mixture of theoretical and
inductive thematic analysis was employed in this process.
Themes were confirmed by the second author and
validated by the participants.
Table 2. Core themes and key concepts
Core theme
Key concepts
Knowing the child and family
Community involvement
Valuing culture and language Developing relationships
Systemic factors affecting Aboriginal
children’s communication and learning
Teacher experience and training in
working with Aboriginal families and
children
Teaching and learning
strategies implemented in
the classroom
Extra support provided
at school for areas of
need
Child and family factors affecting Aboriginal
children’s communication and learning
Health and well-being, including
family life and the home environment
Cultural factors
Individual children’s
skills and strengths