“If you happen to look out at the right time, you can see the crocs lying on the river banks.” Yes, these are actual words spoken to me by a classroom teacher – and it was the truth. I had found myself inside a senior classroom at a remote school in the Northern Territory, some 220kms south from Darwin.

Standing at the front of the room, whiteboard behind us, my colleague pointed to his right, where out the window, the mighty Daly River ran it’s course. I looked hard but I didn’t see any crocodiles. Maybe tomorrow.

This was my first visit to the Top End and as it turned out, I was completely unprepared. The first thing I noticed when I arrived here was of course the heat. How could you not? Peeling myself away from the comfort of my air-conditioned transport vehicle, I had stepped out to my new surroundings and was immediately smashed in the face. The heat of the scorching sun was one thing but the humidity was something else and quite unlike anything I had experienced before. Every pore of my body was perspiring and my lungs felt as though they were working overtime to inhale the thicker air. It was the first time (but certainly not the last time) that I wondered how people lived in such weather conditions, day-in and day-out.

The kids start school with a lower literacy level because they have English as an additional language or dialect (EALD). So when they progress in leaps and bounds – which they do – it is an absolute delight to see! I sat in on a ‘buddy’ lesson in which the senior students had joined the junior class to do some shared reading.

The younger students listened to the Indigenous stories being read to them in English by their older peers. If there were any words or phrases that they didn’t understand, the bigger kids would translate it for them into their language. It was so lovely! And this is exactly what it’s about here – linking literacy to real-life.

For these kids, authentic and purposeful learning involves doing things like taking the schools’ Land Rover and driving out to collect bush tucker. The senior teacher took his class and I to the local billabong to go ‘Lilying.’ This basically involved me standing back on the edge of the billabong (sweltering in the 43.5 degree heat and about 1000% humidity) whilst the students bounded fearlessly barefoot towards the muddy beds, plucking at the water lilies in search of the green pods.

I watched transfixed, as they disappeared from view. Occasionally a head would pop up from somewhere and the giggles could still be heard. But this was all part of their learning. Later back at school, this experience could be turned into a writing task; a narrative perhaps or a procedural text. Today however, the teacher hoped that the girls would find inspiration from this session to use in their Indigenous artwork.