Aboriginal Families and the School System

We grow up immersed in our own culture, our own experiences and our own language. Through these we construct our understandings of the world (Billett, 1996). Once we have established our models, we are more likely to interpret what we see and experience through this lens (Gelman, 1997). In developmental psychology, this is labelled assimilation (Piaget, 1950): an understanding of the world, which comes about through the addition of information to existing schema. When we experience new events that do not neatly fit our existing schema we find these difficult to interpret and assimilate and therefore feel discomfort (Roberts & Smith, 1999). Our usual response is to try and alleviate the discomfort through reframing the information to make it fit existing schema (Feldman, 1995). When we are sufficiently motivated, we change our models of the world. However, often we are likely to ignore the new information, or modify it slightly so that it does assimilate into existing schema.