Fred talks about the importance of taking time to get to know the learners (2:32)

I found allowing time for discussions on anything is really important.  So for example, you can do up a training session plan and again in mainstream school or VET training, you would go out and just do the session plan, tell the students in an introduction – this is what we’ll be doing – and go from there.  I found in Indigenous communities, they’d like to know and be a part of that decision process of what they’re doing.  So the first – usually the first two days of any training session I do is spent getting to know the student, and in that you can start making your own assessments of the students and their abilities and what assistance they need. But it gives you two days or one day – it gives you time to let them tell you how the class will work.  You can put input into that but they feel they’ve all had a chance to discuss that, so for example if you’re doing a practical and a theory, and it’s workplace training, they – I feel if they’re already working in the workplace, they know the best time to have the theory training, because it won’t upset their work routine.  And you find when you sit down and talk with a group of Indigenous people, a simple discussion can take a long time because they all each have something to say, then they think about it and they talk about it and then they come up with an answer. 

So I think again, a lot of people are really pressed for time and you know try to stick to their timetable because that’s I guess a white man thing to do, whereas in Indigenous communities, time is kind of not so relevant and it’s more that everyone is happy with what we’re doing, then we can move ahead – we all move ahead together.  So...  Our class that takes one week might normally take two on community.

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