What is Connecting to Country?
Connecting to Country is an Aboriginal community cultural awareness teaching programme. This programme provides a much needed cultural conduit between the States teaching fraternity and Aboriginal peoples and communities. Teachers are offered a unique opportunity to engage directly with Aboriginal Australians at the local community level.
Over the course of three days, participating teachers will learn about local Aboriginal culture, history and social experience. By the end of the programme it is anticipated that participating teachers will have significantly bettered the depth of their insight into the myriad of social, cultural, historic, economic and political issues that continue to affect and concern Aboriginal peoples and communities. Teachers will similarly attain a culturally informed awareness of the cultural geography of their local school precinct and more broadly their school’s region, and encounter firsthand the concept and meaning of country from an Aboriginal cultural standpoint.
This programme proudly:
- affirms our social, cultural and political identity as Australia’s first peoples
- expresses our historical, social, cultural and political position and experience
- honours and legitimises our spiritual knowing as our autonomous foundational epistemology
- asserts and voices our cultural discourse through the conscious use of ‘Aboriginal English’
- endorses our orality through the conscious use of a culturally embedded conversational style of written dialogue – ‘yarning’
- articulates our collectivism through the conscious use of a collective vernacular emphasising the collective pronoun ‘our’
- empowers our ownership over what is our cultural programme
For more information on accessing a Connecting to Country program near you, please contact the NSW AECG Secretariat on 02 9550 5666 or email: email@example.com