Talking Teaching: Season 04 Episode 01 Transcript

Genevieve: Hello. I'm Genevieve Costigan, and thank you for joining us for our fourth season of Talking Teaching.

Sandra: Things don't change if we don't change. We have to change not just the decisions we make, but change out the lens through which we are understanding all of these contemporary challenges.

Genevieve: In this episode, we ask the University of Melbourne's Larissa McLean Davies, an associate professor in languages and literacies education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, to host a panel discussion on the importance of reading in our lives and how to make the teaching of English more inclusive, particularly in terms of decolonizing the curriculum. Joining Larissa in this discussion is associate professor Sandra Phillips, who is a member of the Wakka Wakka and Goreng Goreng nations of Queensland. She is the associate dean Indigenous engagement in the faculty of humanities and social sciences at the University of Queensland. Joining Sandra is Seri Renkin, who has worked extensively in the philanthropic sector and who chairs the Stella Prize, the major literary award celebrating women's writing, and Amy Brown, who is a teacher and writer, having published four children's novels and three poetry collections. So over to you, Larissa.

Larissa: Thanks so much, Genevieve, and thank you, everybody, for joining us today on Talking Teaching. Today we're talking about literature. Can you remember the books you studied at school? What impact, I wonder, have these stories, this literature had on your life beyond the walls of the secondary classroom? Often when we talk about reading, we think mainly about reading acquisition, reading and the development of literacy in young children. While that's very, very important, today we're taking a different path. We're expanding the reading conversation. We're interested in asking what kind of reading publics are we producing in Australia? So I'm really fortunate to be joined by our three panelists to discuss these questions and raise these issues. So we're going to begin with just asking what is the importance of literature to them? Sandra, I'm going to go to you first.

Sandra: So I was born in 1968. So prior to that, various jurisdictions had us being counted as part of the flora and fauna, us being Aboriginal peoples, in my case, and also the other Indigenous group of Australia, Torres Strait Islanders. So in that context, it's quite surprising that we had several generations of literacy in English written language in our family. So our grandmother could read in English. Our mother was an avid reader of largely historical romances that she borrowed every week from the council library, and we all would trot faithfully down on a Friday afternoon to the council library. So we were a little crew of very big reading habits, and there wasn't a great deal of diversity in the choices we made. But we were nonetheless avid readers.

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Sandra: In our childhood, it was the days of door-to-door salespeople, and our mother bought a set of books from a door-to-door sales person. One of the books in the set was a book of antonyms and synonyms. So Mother really wanted us to master, if you like, the English language. That antonyms and synonyms book is when I think of when I'm asked to refer to a book from my childhood that made a big impact on me.

Larissa: Amy, in terms of you as a writer, have you felt that the reading and writing nexus for you has been important? So what you read has really influenced the way you've been thinking about being a writer?

Amy: Certainly. Yeah. At the moment, given that I'm spending all my time writing at the moment when I'm not caring for my son and doing other things, I think my reading's a lot more tactical and sort of prescriptive at the moment, my own prescription, I suppose. I'm thinking very carefully about what I need in reading. I'm setting my own sort of reading list, I suppose, to try and teach myself what I would like to write. So it's a lot more conscious than it has been in the past, but I think there's always that nexus, as you put it, between what you're reading and what you're writing. I'm also conscious of that when I'm teaching texts to high school students as well, when I'm setting texts for them to study and tasks for them to write in response to the text. It's a privilege and a power to do that, because you are shaping the way that they think about, well, everything, really.

Larissa: Seri, tell us about your literary connection.

Seri: I think like the other two, Sandra and Amy, I come from a family that has placed a high value on reading and writing and storytelling. I have always had a huge love for this country, and I've always been interested in how we define ourselves, how I define myself as an Australian. What are my beliefs, where do I fit, and what stories shape our beliefs and cultural norms that then actually play into our politics, into the way that we create social solutions, in the way that we engage with different communities or not? So I feel reading has really helped me enter different worlds, understand different people. So I do think reading is a form of activism, but I feel it's a way of being actively engaged.

Larissa: To build on that then, we've been talking about the teaching, I guess, of English in this country, and we know that historically, the teaching of English was primarily intended for colonization and for colonial purposes. It was to bring students as British subjects closer to the empire. So we still have and value ... We've all discussed here our valuing of reading and speaking English and reading texts. But I'm interested in us thinking about now what does this need to look like in terms of decolonizing the curriculum, in terms of thinking about the kind of reading practices that we might need to be reshaping? Sandra, do you think it's possible to decolonize the English curriculum?

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Sandra: Well, if we start with the reflection shared by Bridget Magna from her research that from 1900 to the Second World War, 25% of the books exported from Great Britain came to Australia. We have a history that through the coloniality ensured that the dominant society was infused with British colonial concepts, including, as you have framed it here today, the English curriculum that we study. Post Second World War, we see a revolution. We see Australian society going, "Who are we? Who are we fighting for? What are we fighting for when we enter global theaters of war? What stories are important to us?" There's an increase in migration from non-English- speaking backgrounds. Before that, we had the white Australia policy, of course, and it didn't officially end until the 1970s.

Sandra: So we had a diversifying population and community. We therefore had a diversifying collective of stories and languages and vocabularies and vernaculars and et cetera, et cetera. So the Australian publishing industry saw opportunity in this spearheaded by women like Hilary McPhee and her collaborator in the 1960s, '70s, saying, "There are new voices to be heard here." So their work was phenomenal and foundational to shifting it up a little bit, to changing that proportion of books that we read as coming from here rather than from Great Britain. In 1964, we acknowledged the poetry collection We Are Going written by the late Kath Walker, who changed her name to Oodgeroo Noonuccal as the first book published by an Indigenous writer, by an Aboriginal writer.

Sandra: Beyond that, though, the more numerous works authored by Indigenous people started coming through in the 1980s and 1990s and then even more now. 2020 saw one Indigenous writer, the Wiradjuri woman , take out the , the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, three categories of the New South Wales Premier's Award. Before that, of course, won the Stella Prize for her collective memoir, Tracker. 2019, won the Miles Franklin Award. So we're now in a really incredible purple patch of Indigenous writers winning critical awards, but to return to your question of can we decolonize, well, we already have from Great Britain, and I think we can do even more to decolonize the traces of a dominance that still exists.

Larissa: Certainly in my experience, as an English teacher and working with curriculum, some of that stickiness of colonization remains strong in the curriculum, but just thinking about this issue of decolonizing, Amy, and hearing that fantastic account of the last decades in terms of Indigenous publishing, what's what are your reflections on that and this issue of decolonizing the English curriculum?

Amy: Lots of thoughts. I think the first that comes to mind is it takes me back to a job interview I had, actually, for the school that I was at most recently, where they asked, "If a student asked you, 'Why are we studying Shakespeare?,' what would you say to them?" I said, "Well, firstly, I'd congratulate them on an excellent question, and then we would talk about where that question had come from and the ways in which you can study a text that you might think anachronistic or unnecessary or irrelevant to your particular social or geographical context." So I think it's the way that you

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approach a text as much as the texts that you're studying that has the power to decolonize the curriculum, but that argument can also be used a bit cynically to continue to make the same mistakes or rest upon the same kind of patterns that have been so damaging in the curriculum sort of historically. So I think that while you must interrogate colonial canonical texts and ways that fit the context in which you're studying them, you should also be adding more into the mix.

Larissa: Seri, in your work with the Stella Prize, particularly in the schools program, what's been your experience?

Seri: What we're starting to really ask ourselves as an organization is this question about what is our relationship as a white feminist organization. Well, actually, it started ... It's not the intention to be that, but that's where it started. It was founded by a group of fabulous white feminist writers, Stellas, publishers, and it's evolved now to a place of really asking, "Well, what's our relationship to First Nations writers and storytellers and particularly women and nonbinary First Nations writers and storytellers? What's our history as a literary organization, and how do we start to be more inclusive and open up discussions about what it might look like in the future, how it might change to be more open to different conversations about what is the prize? What is best literature? How do we unsettle this notion of being a part of colonial literature in Australia? How do we as the settlers, if you like, unsettle some of that?"

Seri: There's no answers. There's no clear answers. But it does take this process of asking the question, but then venturing forth and including more diverse voices, in particular First Nations writers and storytellers initially to help us work through that. So I think in our schools program, that's one of the questions we're asking, too, is, "How can you with authority and legitimacy unsettle English, because that's the context for our Stella Schools program, within the school educational platform, and who's got the right to do it?"

Seri: So this content expertise, this context expertise all becomes very relevant. Do English teachers all need to be trained? Well, can they be, or do we need partners? Particularly around the unsettling, do we need to have relationships at schools with Indigenous people, teachers or elders or storytellers? I'm asking all these things really as questions in this particular conversation, because I don't have clear answers. Actually, maybe it's a bit of everything. But that's where we've started to move, and it's rippling right through our whole organization, because we're actually also asking, "How do we unsettle our own governance?" We're an all-white board of an organization that's promoting an equitable culture for all women writers and non-binary writers in this country, but we're an all-female board. So what does that say about our story?

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Larissa: I think what you're really bringing to the fore, Seri, is the importance of reflecting and deeply committing to action in terms of those kind of often challenging questions for organizations. When I guess we talk about unsettling the secondary curriculum, then what you're suggesting is it's got to be more than just selecting certain kinds of texts. Sandra, in the work that I've been fortunate to be doing with you, I've been learning about this, the notion of the way you've been talking about standpoint and the work you've done with some of your pre-service teachers. So as we turn our attention to teachers now, I wonder if you wouldn't mind sharing just some of that work.

Sandra: So I've taught pre-service teachers at two universities in Queensland. I no longer am in the classroom of higher ed. I'm now in a leadership role. So just to return to some of the concepts that were fundamental in that pre-service teacher education at those two universities in curriculum that I led are those issues of the student teacher, the student understanding that standpoint is relevant to their interpretation of literature. Okay? So that we're not looking for the master key in how to understand the work. We're actually looking for deeper critical thinking around their engagement as a student reader, as a future teacher reader, and setter of curriculum and assessment within, obviously, very limited and clear constraints. Getting criticality through that is a very complex thing. So that concept of standpoint is about recognizing that your own subjectivity will influence the way that you understand a text.

Sandra: Two things there, I think, Larissa, is the significance of standpoint and how we get students and student teachers and teachers and how we support them in understanding what that is and how it applies in the classroom. Secondly, how to manage space, where if we're going to say that's important, we therefore create a much more collaborative, co-creative, dynamic learning and teaching space. So we need to support teachers and students to be able to be in that space, setting the collaborative dynamic environment, actually training for that, and then assessing from it.

Larissa: In a high stakes, neoliberal environment that we have been in for some time, where assessment drives everything, Sandra, that is a particular challenge for us. Amy, what do you see would need to shift or change so that this kind of conversation ... To what extent, I should say, do you feel that our system would accommodate this kind of approach pedagogy that Sandra's suggesting and that Seri's suggesting through the work with the Stella Prize?

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Amy: One way of trying to distract from or take the sting out of assessment and make, I guess, the purpose of the English classroom broader is pedagogically, in every interaction in the classroom and in the language you use to try and, "Yes, we have this at the end of the year that is impending, and it's important to you, but it's not the be all and end all. What you are going to remember from your years of studying English is not in the end going to be the exam. I hope it's going to be the discussions you've had and the ideas that you've had surrounding the texts that you've studied and hopefully the things you've read willingly during that year as well, alongside the texts that you've studied." Choosing, having choice, I think student choice is immense important as student voice as well. I guess part of the way of addressing some of the concerns regarding the suitability or practicality of the text, one of the main ones is are we equipped to teach it? Do our students have contextual understanding?

Larissa: We'll begin to draw this to a close now. So I'm wondering about how we think about the importance of student engagement in texts and what we might think are the benefits of, I guess, revealing literature or experiencing literature in the ways that we've been talking about today. So Seri, I'll go to you in terms of student engagement. How important is it, do you think, and what's the work of it?

Seri: If you cannot engage the students in texts that resonate in some way with the way they are experiencing saying, "We want to understand the world," you're not going to have them engaged in English at all, and it doesn't matter how good the teacher is. Unless you've got an absolutely brilliant teacher who can somehow translate it into the modern context, you're not going to get student engagement.

Seri: I like the idea of student-driven selection of texts, and I know that the evidence that I've seen live with that through the Stella Schools program is that the Stella Schools actually gets kids to pick a book, read it, and then share their thinking around it to a small group, like a book club, but it's in schools, outside of the ... It's a voluntary, optional program, but it's incredible how many kids do start to sign up, and they're not always the students that are the top English students or considered to be the most broad readers. They're often the students who are looking to engage with the world and can see it happening through books, but in a way that makes them comfortable that there's a non-judgment to it and often in a way that allows them to respond creatively through their own writing practice as well.

Larissa: Just finally then, Sandra, your thinking around this issue of student engagement and taking this forward and perhaps a new way of thinking about assessment in this context? So over to you.

Sandra: So, I'll reflect momentarily on student engagement in higher education, the future teachers. So for five and a half years, I had set texts that the student teachers did not know about. So those texts were Dark Emu, Heat and Light, and Mullumbimby, respectively, Bruce Pascoe, Ellen van Neerven, and Melissa Lucashenko.

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Sandra: So my first point is that students don't know what they don't know, and it requires us as the big people to step up and take on the challenges. It doesn't start with the classroom teacher. The big people starts in systems that define what the classroom teacher does. Things don't change if we don't change. We have to change not just the decisions we make, but change out the lens through which we are understanding all of these contemporary challenges.

Sandra: Creating the space that students can actually enact their own agency is vital, using multiple forms of media, even though the text is the core, having audio and video and other kind of text-based commentary as well to get students to think about the text through these other perspectives that they're exposed to that use different senses. I think getting voices in the room, in the Zoom, in whatever, in the hands of the students is really important and a diversity of voices that they perhaps have never had the opportunity to witness, listen to, look at, think about before. So all of that kind of creates a richer learning environment as well that, from my experience, does lead to student engagement.

Larissa: Thank you, Sandra. That's a great place for us to finish today, just around thinking about leadership and what leadership looks like in this space, re-imagining or imagining and enacting a different kind of English curriculum in Australia in the 21st century, and really thinking about what it is to be engaged. Doesn't mean that we are going to be comfortable or familiar with something, but really to expand our sense of that. The question around assessment and how we move towards that and how curriculum change looks or how curriculum looks in this vision is something that we're going to need to continue to have a conversation about. But I thank you very much for joining Teaching Today to Sandra Phillips, to Seri Renkin, and to Amy Brown.

Genevieve: And thank you, Larissa, for hosting the panel today. Talking teaching is produced by Zane Kingi, Carl Smith, and myself. See you next time.

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