Imagining Childhood - Children, Culture and Community
20-22 September 2005 - Araluen Centre, Alice Springs
What we say about our children says a lot about who we are and the kind of society we want. What is our vision for society and its members? What demands are we imposing on children, and what does this say about us? Who is vulnerable in our society and what do we do to help them? How can our children reach their potential in a changing world?
These questions are addressed in a challenging symposium on children and childhood. International speakers from the United States of America and the United Kingdom, with leading Australian researchers and policy makers will come together with community members and practitioners to explore these themes in Alice Springs in September 2005.
Key symposium themes
The Child and Early Intervention: Possibilities and limits of current strategies
The modern state invests vast resources in programs and services, which directly and indirectly affect children, their parents and families. However, a great deal of the resources in child welfare respond to acute problems or meet legally defined requirements for protective intervention, but do not appear to have any impact on the causes of disadvantage. It is increasingly argued that there must be far greater investment in preventive strategies to assist communities and families to support early childhood development.
The challenges in the Northern Territory are acute. The Territory has, proportionately, the youngest population of any Australian jurisdiction. It also contains diverse Indigenous cultures resting on principles of childrearing thousands of years old, with families exposed to multiple stresses as the social and economic basis of community and family life undergo complex and far reaching changes. Government can no longer opt for continuing minimal intervention, responding to obvious difficulty with least disturbance to established practice. Is, therefore, more intervention in childhood and family life called for? If so, what do we need to know to make it work, to avoid the crudity and destructiveness of much former policy - including past assimilation policies and their echoes today? How should systems of welfare continue to address the immediate problems and needs of children and families? What does research tell us about directions for policy, and what should be the priorities for further research?
A Crisis in Education? The challenge of learning and literacy
In some respects the attainment of universal formal education is taken for granted in Australia. Yet there is increasing nervousness about failure or deterioration of key outcomes - in particular literacy, numeracy and writing - and awareness that there are extreme and perhaps widening variations in academic achievement across social strata and among many socio-cultural groupings. Nowhere is the reality of disparity in the outcomes of education more apparent than in the case of the Indigenous populations of the Territory and comparable regions of Australia. On the other hand, there is little research into the impacts and outcomes of formal education on Aboriginal life-worlds their developmental processes and practices.
The Charles Darwin Symposium explores the challenge of Indigenous education and the complexity of educational delivery in the context of the adaptation of traditional cultures to contemporary institutions and settlement patterns. This includes an exploration of children's language and social capacities outside the institutional setting of the school.
Children, Culture and Community
If we are to foster the creative capacities of children, we need to understand how children acquire skills and competences across cultures and in diverse contexts of learning and experience. Current efforts to improve Aboriginal literacy outcomes take place against a backdrop of influence of the mass media and the challenges of improving child participation, and representation of children's interests in public culture generally.
The symposium aims to present important insights into children's social and emotional development, play, art and the creative imagination. Recent accounts of child development and socialisation focus on children's worlds as distinct, culturally meaningful spaces in which human individuality is formed. They emphasize the agency of the child and critically extend the perspective of adults and the social institutions responsible for monitoring and channelling child development.
It is our aim that all papers will be available on-line at the time of the symposium and will be peer reviewed for publication.
Contact personnel
Co-convenors Dr Gary Robinson |
Dr Ute Eickelkamp |
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