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While the disruptive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to unfold around the world, one of its most immediate effects -- beyond significant loss of life and livelihood -- has been the exposure of existing weaknesses in various sectors and systems. This is especially evident in higher education, with its growing overreliance on the (hyper)mobile student body. In this paper we explore critically the challenges and possibilities behind the options of "reframing" and "hospicing" current understandings of student mobility, particularly with respect to the simultaneously romanticized and commodified development of intercultural (communicative) competence. We treat reframing and hospicing as concurrent, co-existing approaches and spaces in which we may dwell as we rethink what it means to engage meaningfully and equitably with difference at both global and local levels. We also explore how "hospicing" may help us to disinvest ourselves from the promises of mobility, letting go of our attachment to it, not simply because of its current impossibility, but rather because of its many ideological and ethical problems. We conclude with a set of critical, reflective questions intended as provocations that may stimulate ongoing dialogue in our shared journeys of knowing, being and relating to ourselves and the Other in the world.

When an endangered or minority language is spoken by children and taught in schools, both oral and literacy skills are crucial for continued language maintenance. In school settings, literacy skills are often prioritised to support the transition to second language literacy, and rich oral language development is overlooked. This paper presents a transdisciplinary collaboration between a language researcher, curriculum support staff and educators in Warlpiri schools, designed to address this. In the project, language documentation research was re-purposed to support professional learning for oral first language development. Educators increased their metalinguistic knowledge and understandings of children's oral language development. They planned programs to meet the learning needs identified from children's data and mapped these to curriculum documents. They enhanced their capacity to develop the Warlpiri language skills of their students and promote children's bilingual, and potentially biliterate, language development. The process and practice described are transferable to other minority, Indigenous and endangered language teaching and learning contexts.

The 2014 Wilson review of Indigenous Education in the Northern Territory recommended boarding school models as the preferred secondary education option for very remote Aboriginal students. This study considers boarding uptake by Aboriginal students from the Central Land Council region of the Northern Territory. An examination of boarding programs available to Aboriginal students in this region found that scholarship access is largely determined by socioeducational advantage and the perceived social stability of the family and student. To increase access and participation in boarding, more flexible funding assistance programs are needed. An expanded role for brokering could also increase retention and completion rates. Ultimately, more investment is also required in remote community schools, and in the development of 'both ways' capital if the social and educational aspirations of young Aboriginal students and their families in this region are to be realised through a boarding school model.

Bilingual and Indigenous language and culture programmes have run in remote Australian schools with significant and continuing local support. Developments such as the new national Indigenous languages curriculum offer a further opportunity to broaden and sustain Indigenous language teaching and learning activities in these schools. However, over the last two decades, increasing government attention to poor outcomes on national standardised literacy and numeracy assessments has markedly restricted the scope for Indigenous languages. This paper draws on a model of ideological and implementational spaces to discuss competing discourses in top-down and bottom-up policy. Data from an ethnographic study on education stakeholders in remote locations in Australia's Northern Territory revealed incongruities between local discourses that emphasise bi- and multilingualism, local identity and knowledge and community language maintenance and institutional discourses, which foreground a uniform model of education, with English literacy the dominant measure of educational success. The study also revealed that principals, teachers, and community members in some schools work together to develop vibrant, though often fragile, programmes. In addition to this, community members outside school systems are increasingly finding and taking up the spaces that allow innovative Indigenous language and cultural teaching and learning.

The Remote Education Systems (RES) project within the Cooperative Research Centre for Remote Economic Participation (CRC-REP) has, over the last four years, gathered and analysed qualitative data directly from over 230 remote education stakeholders and from more than 700 others through surveys. The research was designed to answer four questions: (1) What is education for in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities?; (2) What defines "successful" educational outcomes from the remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander standpoint?; (3) How does teaching need to change in order to achieve "success" as defined by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander standpoint?; and (4) What would an effective education system in remote Australia look like? Based on this data, the paper reveals how perceptions differ for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from remote communities compared with people who come from elsewhere. The analysis points to the need for some alternative indicators of "success" to match the aspirations of local people living in remote communities. It also points to the need for school and system responses that resonate with community expectations of education, and to develop narratives of aspiration and success alongside community views.

Texts in Aboriginal English (AE) and creole varieties have been created by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers for a range of purposes. In this paper, we focus on materials created in and for five educational contexts, and investigate the orthographic or spelling systems developed in each setting. Choices about orthography are guided by linguistic and non-linguistic considerations. They are sensitive to matters of prestige and identity, and new orthographic conventions are subject to comparison with "correct", "standard" spellings. We explore the processes, motivations and rationale that drive choices for the orthographic conventions and the diverse outcomes in the five settings.

The development of narrative skill has been investigated extensively in a wide range of languages, cross-linguistically and in multilingual settings (Berman and Slobin, 1994b; Severing and Verhoeven, 2001; Hickmann, 2004; Strömqvist and Verhoeven, 2004). The present study investigates the development of reference realization in narrative among Indigenous children in a remote urban township in Central Australia. The children, aged between 5 and 14 years, are speakers of a contact language, Wumpurrarni English. Language development is rarely investigated among speakers of minority languages, whose language development is often appraised in the majority language, with little attention to language performance in the speaker's home variety. The present study addresses this gap through a fine-grained qualitative analysis of the development of reference in narrative, drawing on a complex stimulus and a model of discourse strategy. The results show (a) a developmental trajectory similar to that found in other languages, with children aged eight and under producing simpler and less globally organized narratives than older speaker groups, and (b) vulnerability to the changing demands of the stimulus among these younger speakers. In addition, a subset of narrations were produced in "school variety," a style more like Standard Australian English. The results for this set showed that the narrative content and global organization of the productions by 10- and 12-year-olds were more similar to the productions of younger children, than like-aged speakers, who narrated in their home variety. Analysis of speaker responses to two factors of complexity, the stimulus and code choice, illuminated mechanisms for discourse production and development, and suggest that constructing discourse requires co-ordination of an underlying schema and on-line construction of a particular story, through the deployment of linguistic devices in a particular narrative context. The analysis showed that these two skills are tightly interdependent, and indeed co-constructing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study in two remote multilingual Indigenous Australian communities: Yakanarra in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and Tennant Creek in the Barkly region of the Northern Territory. In both communities, processes of language shift are underway from a traditional language (Walmajarri and Warumungu, respectively) to a local creole variety (Fitzroy Valley Kriol and Wumpurrarni English, respectively). The study focuses on language input from primary caregivers to a group of preschool children, and on the children's productive language. The study further highlights child-caregiver interactions as a site of importance in understanding the broader processes of language shift. We use longitudinal data from two time-points, approximately 2 years apart, to explore changes in adult input over time and developmental patterns in the children's speech. At both time points, the local creole varieties are the preferred codes of communication for the dyads in this study, although there is some use of the traditional language in both communities. Results show that for measures of turn length (MLT), there are notable differences between the two communities for both the focus children and their caregivers. In Tennant Creek, children and caregivers use longer turns at Time 2, while in Yakanarra the picture is more variable. The two communities also show differing trends in terms of conversational load (MLT ratio). For measures of morphosyntactic complexity (MLU), children and caregivers in Tennant Creek use more complex utterances at Time 2, while caregivers in Yakanarra show less complexity in their language at that time point. The study's findings contribute to providing a more detailed picture of the multilingual practices at Yakanarra and Tennant Creek, with implications for understanding broader processes of language shift. They also elucidate how children's language and linguistic input varies diachronically across time. As such, we contribute to understandings of normative language development for non-Western, non middle-class children in multilingual contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]