JCPSLP Vol 19 No 1 March 2017

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

Extra support provided at school for areas of need Individual children’s skills and strengths

Teaching and learning strategies implemented in the classroom

Systemic factors affecting Aboriginal children’s communication and learning

Teacher experience and training in working with Aboriginal families and children Health and well-being, including family life and the home environment

Child and family factors affecting Aboriginal children’s communication and learning

Cultural factors

36

JCPSLP Volume 19, Number 1 2017

Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology