At Canteen Creek School (Owairtilla School), former principal Natalie Law and teacher Bridget McMeel have found that actively engaging with the local community has been instrumental in fostering both personal and professional growth. Their involvement has strengthened relationships that underpin a supportive learning environment.
Located on Alyawarr Country, approximately 275 km southeast of Tennant Creek, Canteen Creek School is a T-12 government school that values collaboration with families and community to support culturally responsive education for First Nations students.
In remote Northern Territory schools like Canteen Creek, educators often are not from Community themselves. They therefore rely heavily on community connections to address the unique challenges of distance, limited services, and to provide opportunities to learn about cultural diversity. This necessitates the development of culturally responsive teaching strategies, which require time, training, and expertise as resources are not always readily available in remote areas.
For teachers in this type of setting, building strong community ties is not just beneficial, it is essential for the holistic development of students and the overall success of the learning community.
“Ensure you have a lot of positive interactions with Community.”
Natalie and Bridget have built relationships with Community by:
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developing and nurturing strong relationships
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incorporating Aboriginal culture and language within curriculum supported, by an alliance with NAIDOC
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including the student and Community voice
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collaborating with students and Community to build a common language around mental health and wellbeing
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embedding a consistent language and approach to support mental health and wellbeing.
These elements and activities have been incorporated into their school improvement plan.
Respecting culture
To incorporate local language and cultural considerations, Bridget collaborated with students and the community to develop a shared understanding of social and emotional wellbeing.
They introduced the Zones of Regulation framework, a community led resource which uses colours and animals to help guide students to identify how they are feeling.
Bridget worked with the students to identify the colours and animals.
The students chose the colours and animals to represent how they are feeling. Next to the colours and animals are actions to support the student to regulate their emotions.
“The most notable observation in the classroom is how students have been able to normalise discussions on how they are feeling, like, ‘Miss, I’m feeling a bit yellow… I’m going outside to calm down for 5 minutes”
“Accessing Be You and having Brian as a sounding board has been invaluable—keeping mental health as a priority, offering space for reflection, and helping us recognise when progress stalls”
How Be You has provided support
As a registered Be You school, Canteen Creek receives support from Brian Morgan, Northern Territory Manager, who has worked closely with Natalie and Bridget to help them map out their school's wellbeing journey.
Having articulated their goals working alongside Brian, the Be You Action Plan was used to develop the next steps required to support their goals. Next steps don’t need to be complicated.
For Natalie and Bridget, one of their priority actions was approaching the appropriate community members and gaining community support before collaborative work on translation and production of the resources commenced.
Regular meetings helped school-based staff to remain focused on the project, manage challenges along the way, and to simply maintain momentum and motivation.
Not sure where to start? Be You Consultants support all learning communities around Australia. Contact us.
Reflective questions
- If you are in a remote school, consider how you can support learning about mental health and wellbeing in your school?
- How can you engage with your local community? What does successful engagement look like?
- Have you considered how Be You can support your school setting?
- If you work in metropolitan school setting consider how can local knowledge, community, and language support inclusion?
Be You would like to acknowledge and thank Natalie Law and Bridget McMeel for their contribution to this implementation article and work, and thank David Oke, present Principal of Owairtilla School for his ongoing work with Be You and supporting this article being published.