Talking Teaching: Season 04 Episode 01 Transcript 1

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. 1 Talking Teaching: Season 04 Episode 01 Transcript 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? 2 Talking Teaching: Season 04 Episode 01 Transcript 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 Tara June Winch, take out the Miles Franklin award, the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Fiction, three categories of the New South Wales Premier's Award. Before that, of course, Alexis Wright won the Stella Prize for her collective memoir, Tracker. 2019, Melissa Lucashenko 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 3 Talking Teaching: Season 04 Episode 01 Transcript 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.

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