SOM07443 Becoming-Frog

SOM07443 Becoming-frog: a primary school place pedagogy Margaret Somerville, Monash University Abstract In Becoming-frog a university researcher and a school teacher/researcher will analyse the productions of primary school children who have participated in an integrated educational program involving a local wetlands. In one of these productions the children performed frogs to music made of frog calls in an apparently perfect example of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘becoming- animal’ (1987:274). In this paper we will explore the post-industrial origins of the wetlands, the origins of the integrated educational curricula associated with the wetlands, and the children’s representations in response. These representations use digital technologies to link Morwell children with children in the US, using blogging and other web technologies. The paper will argue that the wetlands itself, the integrated program, and the children’s representations, constitute a place pedagogy of the in-between, and generate a concept of place as both natural and constructed, rural and urban, cyber and real, global and local. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of ‘becoming-animal’, ‘assemblages’ and ‘practical geophilosophy’ offer explanatory power in relation to these representations. Introduction This paper is part of a symposium about space and place in education and several papers in this symposium are part of an ARC Discovery project, Enabling place pedagogies in rural and urban Australia1. The project uses the framework of place pedagogies to explore how we learn about place and form community, across the curriculum from early childhood, to primary and secondary school, and adult and community education. The focus of this paper is an integrated wetlands program in a primary school. Commercial Rd Primary School, Morwell, is located in the heart of Latrobe Valley, a location you are probably more familiar than most of you are aware. When the problem of climate change is presented on the daily news, the iconic towers of the coal fired power stations of Latrobe Valley are flashed on your television screens. Long before climate change was elevated to the status of global crisis, however, Latrobe Valley was regarded as a problem. Stretching from Yallourn in the west of the Valley to Bairnsdale in east Gippsland, Australia’s heel, lies a massive bed of fossilised forests laid down 500 millions years ago. These fossilised forests formed brown coal which has been burned to produce electricity since Yallourn power station was built in the 1920s. The ‘Valley’ is now home to three major power stations, each with its own huge open cut brown coal mine. Massive power lines, transformer stations and puffing chimneys of large and small power stations construct the landscape of the Valley. Generating electricity from brown coal fired power stations is a dirty business. In the Valley air quality is poor, pollution levels high and when the wind blows from particular directions everything is covered in a gritty layer of brown coal dust. There used to be a heroic story of working class labour and honourable hardship but this story is now only available to a privileged few since the privatisation and automation of the power industry. The Valley is now characterised by unemployment and socio-economic disadvantage. The story I was most often told when I moved to the Valley a year ago was the Jaden Leskie story: ‘Don’t live in Moe’, people told me, ‘they are all mad there. They kill little children and throw pigs heads onto your front lawn’. It is a particular sort 1 Somerville, M. Davies, B. Power, K. and Gannon, S. 2006-2008, Enabling place pedagogies in rural and urban Australia, ARC Discovery, DPxx. of story of socio-economic disadvantage, a story of abjectification. Latrobe Valley supplies 85% of Melbourne’s electricity. It is Melbourne’s abject, it is what allows the metropolis to achieve the ‘cultured’, the clean and proper body. So, in this context of abjectification of people and environment, it was a surprise to come across an innovative and longstanding integrated wetlands program running in Commercial Rd Primary School, Morwell. The Morwell River Wetlands Program It was on a prac. visit that I entered the world of frogs. I had visited the crowded portable classroom earlier in the day and watched the children navigate desks, chairs, boxes, hanging artworks, and other objects that make up this decidedly classed school classroom. I thought about Lefebvre’s contention that the whole of social space proceeds from the body (Lefebvre, 1991). The social space of this classroom is produced by these movements, bodies and objects, producing, in turn, the subjectivities of the children there. My attention was especially drawn to Mary, a child with Downes syndrome, moving awkwardly in this crowded space accompanied by an integration aide. When I returned after school the teacher and the integration aide, still working in the well-worn classroom, invited me to watch a short DVD of the rehearsal for the Christmas concert. There on the interactive screen, larger than lifesize, the children came to life as frogs, dancing their frog dance to music made entirely of frog calls. In the wetlands the children get to know the frogs from their calls. Each frog has its own distinctive call and each species of frog calls in unison to attract the female by the measure of their voice. The classroom, cleared of debris, becomes the space of the wetlands. Children dance to frog calls moving frog limbs, fingers splayed, jumping, leap frog, becoming-frog to frog music. Mary, in particular, loves the performance, moving freely in this frog collective, unaccompanied by her integration aide. In one brief sequence towards the end she smiles pure pleasure at the camera, her body liberated in her frog dance. I learn that this is just a very small part of an integrated program involving visits to the local Morwell River wetlands. The Morwell River itself is an interesting phenomena. Over fifty years ago it was diverted into a pipe for the open cut coal mine. Aboriginal artefacts on display in the reception area of the power station tell another story of a time when people sang, danced, camped and ate by the river. The open cut will be extended again. In this move, reported in the local paper, we will have an ‘improved river and an improved road’, the river will once again be diverted to expand the coal mine. This time it will be liberated from its pipe and returned, according to the planning map, to a river’s meandering curves. I learn that the Morwell River Wetlands is an artificial wetlands, constructed by International Power, the British Company who now own Hazelwood Power Station. The school has a special relationship to the wetlands and has plotted its evolution through the frogs, native trees, shrubs and grasses, and other creatures large and small who have come to inhabit this place. Shortly after the wetlands was developed, three local schools applied for a science grant and received $20,000 to set up a study of the wetlands and develop a curriculum model. Regular visits to the Morwell River wetlands are a key feature of this curriculum for Commercial Rd Primary School in Morwell. The Morwell River wetlands program is integrated across all grades in the school and across all subject areas. In the early grades the children study the needs and life cycles of frogs, rearing tadpoles in the classroom. The middle grades are involved in monitoring the wetlands through frogs and other animals that live there, and the upper grades conduct scientific analysis of the wetlands through monitoring water quality. The school draws on two key community resources to sustain this program: Waterwatch and Frog Census: Waterwatch is one of the key things that will keep this project in focus in the long term. I see Waterwatch as the hub of the wheel, things revolve around them, because they’ve got their macro surveys, the Waterwatch lessons they do in schools … Waterwatch gives focussed ongoing training for the skills, the bigger picture of things, what we do with the data, photopoint monitoring (Interview, Max Sargent, 2007). The schools worked with the Amphibian Research Centre to develop the Frog Census program based on the belief that frogs are the gateway to understanding the wetlands. With the Amphibian Research Centre they developed family science nights: He would come down for three days at a time and involve the communities and I think that’s been one of the key factors in setting the scene, with each of the school communities, that wetlands are a good thing to preserve and frogs are the gateway to study the wetlands. … he has his slide show and we do family science activities based on frogs and on those nights he trains the teachers, you have tea after school and he says here’s the range of activities you’ll be running tonight and he gives the background to each of those activities and the science behind those activities (Max Sargent, 2007). These community education nights involved hundreds of families over the time of the grant: ‘their response was so huge our multi purpose room was like a can of sardines, people outside the doors and windows’ and they now have an ongoing community Frog Census Program funded by a partnership between Yallourn Energy (the owner of another power station in Latrobe Valley) and the Amphibian Research Centre. Once a month children and their parents meet at the wetlands to record frog calls: ‘I think of one particular girl, in her family there’s about nine kids and she’s getting towards the end of all the kids, but Dad still finds time to come with her every month’.

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