Relevance of the curriculum
Many of the community members and AEAs were able to provide ideas from their own experiences on what works for Indigenous students. One important point that came from community members was that Mathematics needs to be linked to the experiences of students out of school. In Coonabarabran, one parent spoke of a range of strategies she used with her own children when supporting their mathematical education. This included the strategy of cutting a cake so that everyone could have one piece and explaining that they were cutting it into fractions. She also shared several strategies she uses to assist student learning about multiplication.
Homework was a key issue for parents. Many expressed the view that the methods modelled at school were not the same that they had learnt and it was hard for them to support the methods and explain them to students, for example using decomposition in subtraction rather than 'borrow and pay back'.