International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts Australia Issue 2

Learning Communities International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts Australia Issue 2, 2010 TEACHING FROM COUNTRY ISSN 1329-1440 Learning Communities: International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts Issue 2 2010 Teaching from Country Contents Editorial 1 Michael Christie and Helen Verran Teaching From Country, Learning From Country �� 6 Michael Christie with the assistance of Yiŋiya Guyula, Dhäŋgal Gurruwiwi, John Greatorex, Joanne Garŋgulkpuy, Kathy Guthadjaka The Story Comes Along, and the Children are Taught �� 18 Yiŋiya Guyula Teaching Students to Know Themselves �� 23 Dhäŋgal Gurruwiwi Teaching When Nothing is Lying Around �� 25 Kathy Guthadjaka talking with Michael Christie In Darwin, 25 Oct 2008 The Yolŋu Child’s Pathway �� 32 Joanne Garŋgulkpuy. Translated by Garŋgulkpuy and Michael Christie, 23 September 2008 Garmak Gularriwuy �� 38 Timothy Buthimaŋ, talking to his daughter Garŋgulkpuy and his sister Lisa Walpulay, at the Dingu garden, Galiwin’ku, February 2008 Bundurrpuy: What Does Bundurr Mean? �� 48 Wapiriny Gurruwiwi Intellectual Properties �� 50 Yiŋiya Guyula and Dhäŋgal Gurruwiwi, interviewed by Trevor van Weeren with introduction by Michael Christie, October 2009 Money Matters: Payment for the Participation of Aboriginal Knowledge Authorities in Academic Teaching and Research Work �� 60 Michael Christie The Task of the Translator �� 67 Michael Christie Teaching From Country Student Forum �� 75 Christian Clark On Being a ‘Language and Culture’ Learner in a Yolŋu World �� 84 Helen Verran ‘Computational Thinking’ and the Postcolonial in the Teaching From Country Programme �� 91 Paul Dourish Teaching Environmental Scientists From Country: Integral Wisdom For A New Australia�� 102 Keith Douglass Warner What is an Innovation Learning Community? �� 115 Margaret Ayre Creating the Ngan’gi Seasons Calendar: Reflections on Engaging Indigenous Knowledge Authorities in Research �� 125 Emma L Woodward All Knowledge is Local �� 138 Geoffrey C. Bowker When Shadows Become Complex: Weaving the Ŋanmarra �� 150 Susan Leigh Star About the Contributors �� 159 Dedicated to the memory of Susan Leigh Star The papers collected together in this edition of the learning Communities Journal were all contributions to the Teaching from Country programme (www�cdu�edu�au/tfc) in 2009� The collection was refereed as a whole and the papers published here are those that were accepted through that reviewing process. The decision to review the papers as a collection rather than as individual texts, reflects the editors’ conviction that it is the collection that is the salient unit of academic excellence here. EDITORIAL Reflections on the ‘Teaching from Country’ Programme as a Situated Learning Community: Media, Place, Pedagogy Michael Christie and Helen Verran Is learning something that individuals do? Is it is the result of teaching’? Does place matter? In this edition of Learning Communities our focus transforms answers that might conventionally be given to those questions by taking seriously Yolŋu Aboriginal accounts of ‘the individual’, ‘place’, and ‘teaching’. Some of the contributors to this edition have known each other their whole lives. They are elders and knowledge authorities from various Yolŋu groups in North East Arnhem Land. Each has a strong background in the particular theories and practices of their distinct ancestral lineages. Each has connected in various ways with the nonIndigenous contributors to this volume. The Teaching from Country program, funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, provided us all with an opportunity to experiment with remote teaching using digital technologies, and to reflect upon interactions between Yolŋu and academic epistemologies and knowledge practices. We begin a short explanation of what Teaching from Country might mean by picking up on the learning theory developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (Lave & Wenger 1991). Central to their re-vision was the idea of situated learning as involving a process of engagement in a ‘community of practice’. As they see it communities of practice are everywhere and that we are all involved in a number of them. Communities of practice, particularly learning communities, are formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour: this might be something as formal as a group of students meeting as a seminar group, or more informal as a group of Aboriginal health workers determined to incorporate collective learning in their practice as they use their discretion in policy implementation. Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do together as they interact regularly (Wenger 2006). 1 This comforting, even utopian, vision of learning that goes along with the notion of ‘situated practice’ seems to emphasise embodiment and emplacement. It is thoroughly materialist in the traditional sense of that term. Many readers might wonder at our invoking it to frame a series of articles presenting a programme that emphasised locational separation of teachers and learners, a learning community that had embodiment only in screens and reduced emplacement to the workings of cameras. In responding to this seeming contradiction we point to an emergent Australian tradition of theorising ‘situation’ that has been strongly influenced by Indigenous philosophical traditions, and to the emerging literature on postcolonial learning and pedagogy. In relation to the first we point to the work of Benterrak et al. (1984), Muecke (2004), Gelder (1998), Gelder and Jacobs (2005), Plumwood (2009) and the December 2005 edition of the Australian Journal of Anthropology, which argued for a unique Australian anthropology of environment developing under the influence of Indigenous philosophies (Mulcock, Pocock, and Toussaint 2005). In the second we include Ayre and Verran (2010), Christie (2006), Marika-Mununggiritj and Christie (1995), Nakata (2007) and Verran (2001). From these literatures we pick up on one particular aspect of what we take to be an Australian intellectual/cultural movement. It is an idea that our Yolŋu colleagues have taught us to take seriously: that there is no interesting ontological distinction between people and place. We suggest that this can be understood as a basis for reconstruing materiality so that it no longer means the opposite of ‘abstract’; it no longer mobilises the (usually implicit) modern figure of matter set in spacetime. As we set out with some easy assumptions about what we were doing together, we soon found ourselves working hard to make agreement about apparently obvious things like the learner, or the land, or the teacher, or the screen. We understood these as ‘boundary objects’ (Star & Griesemer 1989), which were both and neither concrete and/or abstract, which had different meanings in different worlds, but with work, held possibilities for becoming a recognizable means of translation and agreement. Situation and materiality are mediated through alternative figures, which here we see featuring in various ways in the texts of the Yolŋu contributors to this collection and the further papers which were contributed by our local and international friends at the International Teaching from Country Symposium held at Charles Darwin University in July 2009. Such a collaboration might be construed as a postcolonial approach to theorising the learning community. 2 References See www�cdu�edu�au/tfc Ayre, M & Verran, H 2010, ‘Managing ontological tensions in learning to be an Aboriginal ranger: inductions into a strategic cross-cultural knowledge community’, Learning Communities: International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts, Issue 1, pp. 2-18. Benterrak, K, Muecke, S & Roe, P; with Keogh, R, Joe, B (Nangan) & Lohe, EM 1984, Reading the country: introduction to nomadology, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, Western Australia� Christie, M 2006, ‘Transdisciplinary research and Aboriginal knowledge’, Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, vol. 35, pp. 1-12. Gelder, K & Jacobs, JM 1998, Uncanny Australia: sacredness and identity in a postcolonial nation, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria. Gelder, K 2005 ‘Reading Stephen Muecke’s ancient and modern: time, culture, and indigenous

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