“Extending the Teaching Competence of Urban Aboriginal Mothers”*
Abstract
The 1972–73 program entitled Extending the Teaching Competence of Urban Aboriginal Mothers, described by Watts and Henry,(1977), drew both on cultural deprivation and cultural difference theory, in a way that invites consideration of the possibility of reconciliation of these two apparently opposing positions.
First, to elucidate the program and its research bases, it aimed to enhance the prospects for school success of Grade 1 and later 4-year old Aboriginal children in Brisbane, not by focusing directly on the child in a school or pre-school setting, but by working with parent and child at home.
This focus was suggested by a number of studies in the sixties (e.g. Bernstein, 1961; Hunt, 1961; Dave, 1963; Douglas, 1964; Hess and Shipman, 1965; Coleman, 1966; Wiseman, 1967), indicating that the home is a more important determinant of school success than the school itself.
In particular, Hess,(1969) saw ten family characteristics as significant for the child’s optimal development: demand for high achievement, maximization of verbal interaction, engagement with attentiveness to the child, maternal teaching behaviour, diffuse intellectual stimulation, warm affective relationship with the child, feelings of high regard for child and self, pressure for independence and self-reliance, quality and severity of disciplinary rules, and use of conceptual rather than arbitrary regulatory strategies.
Watts, (1971) found maternal characteristics such as active interest in, and high aspirations for the child, to be more significant for the school achievement of Aboriginal than white adolescent girls.
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