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This paper reports on a project to explore the issues/contradictions around supplying teachers for remote Indigenous communities, whilst grappling with the issues of excellence in teacher education. Are there solutions that allow Indigenous teachers to train as teachers, meet national standards for initial teacher education and study / teach in their own language?
The need to supply teachers to remote communities in Australia has generated a range of responses or solutions that considers the best teachers for remote communities to be, for example, ‘a special elite of the best young teachers in the country, defining a dedicated career path of remote area instruction for them and setting up a network of regionally based high-grade boarding schools, complete with paid house parents and a developed, bicultural curriculum’(Rothwell, The Weekend Australian, January 2015). Importantly this paper seeks to investigate what are the conditions that allow Indigenous teachers to train and teach on their terms when all around them systems and governments decide for them what they should teach, what their schools should look like, what language they should speak and what success looks like. The significance of this issue is that in 2019 we need to understand how cultures are represented in remote communities and in our mainstream schools.
My experience of working in and visiting Indigneous Schools for the last 20 years has taught me one thing - non-Indigenous teachers go but Indigenous teachers stay.

Keywords: teacher education, Indigenous teachers, remote schools, Pre-Service Teacher preparation, Cultural preparation for teaching;

References:

[1] Halsey, John (2018) Independent review into regional, rural and remote education : final report, Dept. of Education and Training, Canberra, A.C.T.
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