The Four Resources Model, Aboriginal Students and Cultural and School Literacies

In this chapter, the authors, Jean Phillips and Annah Healy, discuss a scenario involving Freda, a seven-year-old Aboriginal girl in a multicultural urban Year Three classroom. freda seems to be at odds with the literacy education practices in her classroom. Despite Freda being a bright and popular student who is 'verbally' willing to share a wealth of experience, she appears to resist traditional literacy based activities. Freda's life-world is a mix of holidays spent in far-north Queensland and school terms in Brisbane, where she interacts with her Aboriginal family and people from Western culture, in and out of the classroom. Here we discuss the ease with which Freda takes up the four resources in contexts that she understands and manages, and conversely, her unwillingness to do so in contexts where she struggles to make sense of the literacy goals set for her by the teacher.