rnld newsletter newsletter summer 2014.pdf · rnld newsletter resource network for ... and is...

rnld newsletter

Resource Network for Linguistic DiversitySuite 1107, 530 Little Collins StMelbourne, Victoria 3000

(03) 9041 [email protected]

summer 2014

Skype: rnldorgTwitter: @rnldorg0488 086 031

KLRC’s Carolyn McAdam and RNLD’s Paola Fischer and Emma Murphy hold up their alien drawings during the train-the-trainer workshop

Professional Development workshopRNLD ran our first DRIL train-the-trainer workshop in January. Participants included DRIL Regional Community Trainer Roy Tommy, DRIL Trainer Emma Murphy, DRIL Training Support Officer Paola Fischer, Central Queensland Language Centre’s Annalee Pope and Kimberley Language Resource Centre’s Carolyn McAdam.

Over the eight days of the workshop, the participants learned to deliver the 12 modules that will form part of the DRIL Certificate III in Aboriginal Languages for Communities and Workplaces. On the final day each participant led a training session to demonstrate the skills they had been learning throughout the workshop.

The workshop was a great success and participants are already hard at work sharing their new skills with communities in their regions.

Annalee Pope and Roy Tommy learn to plan and make digital recordings

The group hard at work on the first day of the workshop

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Roy Tommy and Emma Murphy plan discussion questions and activities to use with the interactive Indigenous languages map in

module L01 Develop an understanding of Aboriginal languages

Carolyn McAdam and Emma Murphy practice their skills in module R03 Make good quality digital recordings

Roy Tommy delivering module R01 Operate a personal computer

Emma Murphy volunteers during Annalee Pope’s delivery of module L01 Develop an understanding of Aboriginal languages

Carolyn McAdam delivers module R03 Make good quality digital recordings

Annalee Pope receives her certificate from Donna McLaren

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DRIL training activities

VACL community linguist Christina Eira leads a linguistic session

Aunty Colleen McGrady works on a sequencing exercise

In December, RNLD ran its third workshop in Toomelah with the Gamilaraay language group. Community linguist Christina Eira from the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages joined DRIL trainer Donna McLaren for the workshop.

Participants learnt to construct simple sentences in their language, and also looked at ways to raise awareness of Aboriginal languages. The workshop finished with the group preparing their goals for their language and how they plan to achieve them.

Beatrice Torrens maps out the group’s language goals on the board

Sisters Mary McGrady (left) and Charmaine McIntosh

Toomelah, New South Wales

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Jodi Edwards holds up her language bingo cardNoel Lonesborough rolls the dice as part of a language bingo game with Melissa Jackson (left) and Kelli Ryan (right)

In December, RNLD also ran its first workshop in Gerringong, NSW, which focused on the Dharawal language. Donna McLaren was joined by RNLD’s new DRIL Trainer, Emma Murphy, for her first workshop.

Participants learnt how to create successful steps for language projects and practiced sequencing exercises, non-verbal communication, and several immersion exercises.

Melissa Jackson uses non-verbal communication during an immersion

exercise

Kelli Ryan uses Mr Potatohead as part of an immersion exercise

Gerringong, New South Wales

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summer 2014


Children’s Ground staff members Neville Namarnyilk (left), Enoch Nango (right) and Anna Dempsey (in background)

RNLD trainer Emma Murphy working with Children’s Ground staff members Neville Namarnyilk (centre) and Enoch Nango

(right)

On the 14th February, RNLD ran the first of a series of one day Master-Apprentice workshops that DRIL trainer Emma Murphy will be holding each month with Children’s Ground in Jabiru, NT. It was a great start to working with the staff and with children from the community who participate in the exciting programs being developed by Children’s Ground.

Mak Mak Marranunggu speaker Margie Daiyi is watched by her granddaughter Chelsea as she runs an alien drawing session

with her son Billy, daughter-in-law Nikki, and DRIL trainer Emma Murphy

Mak Mak Marranunggu speaker Margie Daiyi is working with her son Billy and daughter-in-law Nikki, with support from DRIL

trainer Emma Murphy

Jabiru, Northern Territory

Batchelor, Northern TerritoryThe next day, the trainers made their way to Batchelor, NT to work with the three generation Mak Mak Marranunggu family group who are also practising their Master-Apprentice methods. This time, they are focusing on language to use with and about the babies and small children in the family.

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In February RNLD ran its first workshop at Irra Wangga Language Centre in Geraldton, WA. Margaret Florey led two lively days of training in which four Masters and seven Apprentices dived into language learning and teaching, as well as building skills in linguistics and digital recording. The group is already planning follow up sessions.

Apprentice Danielle McDonald and Master Rosalie Jones practice an immersion exercise using the Potatoheads as

Nadine Taylor looks on

Masters Wendy Merry (left) and Edie Maher (right) using a doll in an exercise to combine family terms (baby, mum, dad) with

verbs (stand, sit)

Geraldton, Western Australia

The group takes part in a TPR session practising verbs and second person pronouns

Apprentice Mea Chong-Wee dances Gangnam style as part of the ‘Get someone to do something’ exercise

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New staff members

Emma Murphy is a DRIL trainer based in Darwin, in the Northern Territory. She has worked with Western Desert communities, and more recently in Arnhem Land. While living in the desert, Emma was involved in recording oral histories and working on many cultural heritage projects. In Arnhem Land, she worked as a community educator on topics ranging from health, economics and legal issues. Emma grew up in the bush in central Victoria and has lived in five different states.

Emma holds a Bachelor of Arts, with majors in Linguistics and Spanish, and is currently studying a Master of Applied Linguistics.

Emma Murphy

Paola Fischer - Training Support Officer

Emma Murphy - DRIL Trainer

Paola Fischer

Paola Fischer is RNLD’s Training Support Officer. In this role, she provides support to the DRIL training team around the country, liaises with DRIL participants and with people wanting to join the training program, and organises DRIL workshops. Paola is leading the accreditation of DRIL Certificate III and Certificate IV.

Paola studied cultural anthropology, ethnology and linguistics with a focus on multiculturalism and sociolinguistics and received her Master’s in these three majors in Frankfurt in 2007. She moved to Australia in 2009 to pursue an interest in Aboriginal cultures and languages and this soon became a passion. Paola worked as a Research Assistant for Professor Kim Scott at Curtin University, took up Noongar language and cultural classes and worked as a field anthropologist, conducting heritage surveys in Wongatha and Ngadju country. She holds a strong belief that language is much more than a tool and is indeed an integral part of individual and community wellbeing and identity.

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RNLD Advisory PanelNew members

Fay Stewart-Muir (Victoria)Fay works at the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages in Melbourne. She works

with the community linguist at VACL to present language related workshops to community members who are reclaiming their languages, as well as at universities and TAFEs that are interested in understanding the many and challenging aspects of language reclamation. Fay also goes out to schools to educate the students about language and culture and teach language, and she teaches language in the justice system.

Fay is working with her own Boon wurrung language, recording and putting language into the database for future and present generations.

Fay has a Bachelor of Arts in Education (Primary) and is also a nurse, which she still has time to work at.

Joy Bonner (Queensland)Joy is a descendant of the Butchulla people from K’gari (Fraser Island). She works as a

Community Linguist at Korrawinga Aboriginal Corporation with responsibility to oversee and manage all aspects of the Butchulla language program.

Joy worked on the Chronicle series, Let’s Learn Butchulla: Hands in Time Journeying Together, which won the Promotion of Aboriginal Reconciliation award at the United Nations Media Peace Awards in 2008 and 2009.

Joy has a Diploma of Education and serves on two Aboriginal organisations within her community, Kal’ang Respite Care Centre and K’gari Educational and Culture Inc.

Payi Linda Ford (Northern Territory)Payi Linda Ford is Rak Mak Mak Marranunggu from the Northern Territory. Her country

is Kurrindju in the Finniss River and Reynold River regions of the Northern Territory. She is educated in Tyikim knowledge, languages and culture.

Dr Ford’s research method includes transdisciplinary research and Indigenous knowledge systems approaches. The methodologies take seriously divergent knowledge practices that are critically important to her work with people, policy and place.

Dr Ford received her PhD in Education from Deakin University in 2006, and is currently a Senior Research Fellow at The Northern Institute in the Transdisciplinary Research and Indigenous Knowledge Systems team at Charles Darwin University, in the Northern Territory.

Susan Penfield (USA)Susan Penfield has been actively involved in research on language documentation,

language revitalization, Indigenous languages and technology and community-based language/linguistic training for over thirty years.

She received her Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1980. In 2011, she was appointed as one of twelve members of the Advisory Committee for Google’s newly founded Alliance for Linguistic Diversity and has been appointed as a Research Associate for a three-year term (2012-2015) for the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Dr. Penfield is currently serving as a research coordinator for the Title VI Language Resource Center (the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy) and the Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry at the University of Arizona.

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RNLD is funded under the Indigenous Languages Support program.

How did you first become involved with language work?It was something I always wanted to do but didn’t get the opportunity until about eight or nine years ago when my cousin asked if I was interested in doing it and I said yes. Our parents had passed on and we were the two oldest in the family and it was up to us to keep the knowledge in the family.

We would go to meetings and listen to the Elders. Some would be talking in language and they were reminiscing about speaking the language when they were younger and what happened when they couldn’t, as it was more or less denied them when they were growing up.

RNLD Volunteers

Advisory Panel focus - Fay Stewart-Muir

What work are you currently doing?I’m currently a Project Officer at VACL and I’m working on a language project which involves finding Aboriginal words for organisations like Corrections Victoria and the Department of Education.

I’m also in the prisons teaching language to the Aboriginal men, and out with the kids teaching language in schools, kindergartens and playgroups. In the schools it is mainly Boonwurrung, but I teach several language groups in the prisons.

RNLD has a new volunteer in the office this month.

Jessica Solla has recently completed her Bachelor of Arts at Monash University, with a double major in Australian Indigenous Studies and Anthropology. She has also completed a Diploma in Liberal Arts (Linguistics) and is currently studying a combined Honours in Linguistics and Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash, focusing on the linguistic ecology of Yanyuwa.

Jessica will be working at RNLD on Fridays and will be creating a number of digital media resources for the DRIL Resource Room.

Jessica Solla

rnld newsletter newsletter summer 2014.pdf · rnld newsletter resource network for ... and is...

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