Year: 2024
Author: Larissa McLean Davies, Sarah E. Truman, Melitta Hogarth
Type of paper: Individual Paper
Abstract:
This paper draws from current research as part of the Literary Education Lab at the University of Melbourne on a project called ‘Reading Climate.’ The broader project includes collaborations with Australian Indigenous authors and publishers, climate researchers, English teachers, secondary English students, and industry partners to address the imperative for climate education in schools through a focus on Indigenous writing. A long-term goal of the project is to foreground climate and racial justice within English literary education’s core curriculum in Australia. This paper speaks to just some of the findings from the first stage of this fuller project. Intersecting areas of context are relevant to this paper:
1) the role of literature: specifically Indigenous knowledges, literatures and stories in education in the Anthropocene;
2) the more specific place of Indigenous knowledges in contemporary iterations of school English, a space defined by historical and specific knowledges on what constitutes text and reading, simply put presumptions on what text is for.
In the first stage of project, we were specifically concerned with gauging what resources and knowledges teachers draw on to read: that is, their existing intertextual networks surrounding Indigenous climate fiction within an Australian context. We aimed to explore how reading groups or book clubs might facilitate reflection on expanding, complicating, and building new intertextual networks to support the teaching of Indigenous fiction in the context of sustainability imperatives.
The work is grounded in the premise that racial justice is a precondition of climate justice, and that Indigenous stories offer different readings of ecology and land to many euro-western threads in school English. These premises relate to understandings of what constitutes knowledge in the English curriculum area.i For the purposes of this essay, we focus on the theoretical framing for the project before turning to some data from a pilot study of a national book group conducted with Secondary English teachers in late 2022. Through this discussion, we suggest that for the possibilities and potentialities of Indigenous literature and climate education to be realised for students in the land commonly referred to as Australia, more is required than only the setting of Indigenous texts for study. Rather, the teaching of Indigenous climate literature ultimately requires an unsettling of the work, authority, and role-identity of settler English teachers, and a recalibration of the discipline of English.
1) the role of literature: specifically Indigenous knowledges, literatures and stories in education in the Anthropocene;
2) the more specific place of Indigenous knowledges in contemporary iterations of school English, a space defined by historical and specific knowledges on what constitutes text and reading, simply put presumptions on what text is for.
In the first stage of project, we were specifically concerned with gauging what resources and knowledges teachers draw on to read: that is, their existing intertextual networks surrounding Indigenous climate fiction within an Australian context. We aimed to explore how reading groups or book clubs might facilitate reflection on expanding, complicating, and building new intertextual networks to support the teaching of Indigenous fiction in the context of sustainability imperatives.
The work is grounded in the premise that racial justice is a precondition of climate justice, and that Indigenous stories offer different readings of ecology and land to many euro-western threads in school English. These premises relate to understandings of what constitutes knowledge in the English curriculum area.i For the purposes of this essay, we focus on the theoretical framing for the project before turning to some data from a pilot study of a national book group conducted with Secondary English teachers in late 2022. Through this discussion, we suggest that for the possibilities and potentialities of Indigenous literature and climate education to be realised for students in the land commonly referred to as Australia, more is required than only the setting of Indigenous texts for study. Rather, the teaching of Indigenous climate literature ultimately requires an unsettling of the work, authority, and role-identity of settler English teachers, and a recalibration of the discipline of English.