History of Bilingual Education in the Northern Territory

Brian Devlin is an honorary professorial fellow at Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia. His research interests include the use of vernacular languages in educational programs, interactive e-learning for isolated communities and bilingual education policy in Australia's Northern Territory. He was a Visiting Professor and first holder of the Dr R Marika Chair in Australian and Indigenous Studies at Cologne University, Germany (October 2009-February 2010) and also Visiting Foreign Expert at Tsingua University in China.  For the last few years he has been a chief investigator in the Living Archive project, helping to create a digital archive of the texts produced in Literature Production Centres during the bilingual era of education in the Northern Territory.

Samantha Disbray is a Research Fellow at Charles Darwin University and the Australian National University, researching language in education and carrying out language documentation in the Northern Territory. She has worked as a community and research linguist in Central Australia and has carried out language documentation and resource development work with speakers of traditional and contemporary Aboriginal languages. While employed as regional linguist for the Northern Territory Department of Education, she supported schools with bilingual and Indigenous language and culture programs. From this experience she became fascinated with the history of the bilingual program, and its place in the history of education and languages policy in Australia.

Nancy Devlin is a lecturer at Charles Darwin University in the School of Education.  She works primarily with students in the professional teaching degree programs.  Her areas of interest are focused on providing an education for students that will enable them to have choices and feel good about themselves. She joined Charles Darwin in 2002 to help establish certification for students interested in education support due to her long association working with teaching assistants in bilingual and special education programs at government and non-government schools in Australia and the United States. She has also taught in China, Germany, and Papua New Guinea.