The Swan Nyungar Sports Education Program: best practice strategies used by staff in building respectful relationships between staff and students
Rob Simons
The Smith Family
Contact Email:   Rob.Simonssmithfamily.com.au

The Swan Nyungar Sports Education Program (SNSEP) is a five-year demonstration project commenced in 2002 to supplement school capacity to meet the special learning needs of Nyungar high school students in WA. This paper builds on two previous ASPC Workshop Papers on SNSEP that highlighted the importance of social enterprise in forging partnerships with stakeholders for sustainable change (2001) and the focus of the program as the development of a working relation among students, teachers, and parents (2003). This year’s paper focuses on best practice strategies used by staff in building respectful relationships between staff and students. Selective ethnographic data collection by the Institute for Service Professions at Edith Cowan University was completed on key issues that make SNSEP effective in relation to:
-·Acknowledgment by staff of students’ language, history and cultural markers
-·Increased levels of student choice and responsibility
- Promotion of positive Nyungar identities
- Application of team spirit lessons learned on the sports field to classroom settings
- Encouragement of parental involvement.

Selective ethnography also identified learning, adolescent identity, indigenous identity, attendance, retention and respect as parts of the program that needed to be investigated for a deeper understanding of the systems and processes at work. The paper reports on data collected at both the classroom pedagogy and program levels with synopses of best practice, and recommendations for challenges facing SNSEP in the remaining two years of the project. Developments made to SNSEP to address challenges identified in previous evaluations will also be noted.

Paper Download Information (if available):

Paper135.doc

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