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Abstract
This article explores the possible relationships between geography, literacy, pedagogy, and poverty. It characterizes poverty as a wicked problem, which sees economic inequality escalating in a number of neoliberal democracies. Key insights from theorists of economic inequality are summarized. The enduring nature of poverty in particular places is noted, and the associated risks of “fickle literacies” are considered. A case study of one child growing up and attending school in a location with intergenerational unemployment is discussed as an example of the risks associated with literacy policy and pedagogy in an era of global educational reform. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Massey, it is argued that despite the discourses of standardization, teachers can continue to educate culturally diverse young people in ways that help them to negotiate and imagine positive and productive ways of learning together. The possibilities for working against deficit views of people in poverty are explored through three classroom examples of place-conscious pedagogies which position young people as critically literate cosmopolitan citizens. The article concludes by advocating the need for translocal research alliances to work explicitly for social justice through place-conscious pedagogies and critical literacy education.
Places…pose a challenge…. They require in one way or another we confront the challenge of the negotiation of multiplicity.
Massey (2005, p. 141)Literacy educators may well be thinking what’s geography got to do with it? A number of years ago now, in my inquiries into schools located in high poverty locations, I realized that geography—the social, economic, demographic, environmental, and political aspects of place—was integrally related to how education played out for different groups of students. In other words, literacy outcomes from schooling differed in ways related to class, location, and race. Further, pedagogy and curriculum were frequently contingent upon educators’ understandings of, and expectations for, their students. Sometimes young people growing up in poverty were thought of in deficit ways. Fortunately that is not always the case, and I believe we stand to learn a lot from educators in schools where they accomplish significant education against the odds because they contest deficit discourses and remake schooling as a site of imagination, inquiry, design, and action. Making place the object of study can help us think about how to bring inclusivity, citizenship, and critical literacy together, a goal that David Gruenewald (2003) articulated over a decade ago. If we think about schools and classrooms as rich dynamic sites of negotiation and about such negotiation as unavoidable, the question becomes how to make it productive?
Often we think of who is within the school wall, but where do they come from? The teachers, the leaders, the office and grounds staff, and the students—what histories do they bring? How is the school situated in a locale and in relationship to the wider world? How is the work of school leaders, teachers, and students contingent upon the ways in which relations of ruling are organized beyond the school gates (Smith, 2005)? That is, how are people’s everyday activities regulated and coordinated translocally (Griffith & Smith, 2014) by policy, publishers, test makers, the media, and so on? How are unequal educational outcomes related to wealth and poverty? In what ways, do schools function in the everyday lives of families and communities? These complex questions highlight the spatial and political organization of education within which literacy lessons are designed and enacted, hence my deployment of a geographical lens to better understand perennial questions concerning literacy, pedagogy, and poverty.
Schools are central to the social geographies of everyday life: they are one of the few institutions that can be found in almost every urban and suburban neighbourhood, and with which almost every individual has meaningful, sustained contact at one point or more in their lives. (Collins & Coleman, 2008, p. 281)
Perhaps because in the “developed world” schools are such taken-for-granted institutions, their central role in organizing the everyday lives of families and their wider communities goes unquestioned. Yet, in the “developing world,” the location of schools, and the work involved for children and educators to be there, is still very much an issue.
On school days, Norisa would need to walk for around half an hour from her home to take the motorised banca to cross the river, which takes another 30 minutes, after which she would need to walk another 20 minutes or so to reach school. Norisa is the head teacher in the multigrade Bagahan Jr. Elementary School. (Pe Symaco, 2016, p. 364)
Pe Symaco stresses that this school is less remote than many others in the Philippines. She elaborates on the level of disadvantage experienced at the school, including lack of clean and regular water, lack of information and communication technologies and Internet, lack of teaching resources, and the frequency of natural disasters such as typhoons. Furthermore, mining and logging have triggered tribal and ethnic conflict which impact on the community’s natural and social resources. As this example demonstrates, schools are located in places within wider social, political, and economic geographies. Currently, many girls remain excluded from schooling internationally. The question, “why geography, literacy, and pedagogy” relates to children’s fundamental rights to a proper education, wherever they are born and grow up. The current dominance of deficit, dismissal, and denial discourses in the public and political realm is deeply troubling. Internationally, we see the combined threat of globalization and neoliberalism playing out in political and media discourses in ways that suggest the demise of democracy as we have understood it. We are inundated with discourses of deficit, dismissal, and denial, along with intimidation, cruelty, and terror. Currently, around one in five children in the United Kingdom and the United States lives in poverty (Forbes & Sime, 2016). In Australia, almost 40% of children growing up in single parent households live in poverty. The significance of place is highlighted by reports that, in many first world countries such as the United States,
A child’s well-being, school quality, postsecondary education access and completion, and life course developmental trajectory can be predicted in part by the delivery codes used by the nation’s postal system. (Lawson, 2016, p. 2)
In this article, I outline some of the “wicked problems” that are impacting on how education is designed and enacted in schools and how it might be otherwise. Firstly, I present what I see as a particularly dangerous set of circumstances—inequalities gone mad—and secondly, I illustrate some modest redesigns of school education—critical literacies in places of cultural diversity and poverty—that offer some hope. Finally, I argue that we need to reimagine our research alliances translocally to take action for educational justice. Ways of taking action are no longer obvious, as so much (in terms of information, money, and politics) is organized beyond the nation. The 21st-century changes wrought by neoliberalism and globalization have challenged 20th-century optimism about what schools can do (Lawson, 2016). Among these wicked problems which impact on schools are the following:
location of wealth in small percentage of the population,
increasing gaps between rich and poor,
intergenerational poverty in wealthy nations,
the increase of the working poor,
the connections between wealth and political leadership,
the fragility of democracy and the environment, and
the production of refugees.
One of the biggest issues increasingly identified by economists, sociologists, and geographers is the persistence of poverty’s location across and within nations. My fear is that geographies of poverty might map to pedagogies of poverty, a return to deficit discourses and limited literacy. But that is jumping ahead. Let’s first consider what is known about inequality internationally.
What We Know About Inequality
Internationally, scholars across the disciplines have been wrestling with the wicked problem of inequality in both “developed” and developing economies. The following statistics on wealth distribution stir our consciousness:
The top 1 per cent have 53 per cent of the total personal tradable wealth…the next 4 per cent have 10 per cent of the wealth and the next 45 percent have 31 per cent. (Dorling, 2014, p. 21)
One average investment banker receives as much pay per year as eleven average care workers. (Dorling, 2016, p. 112)
Today we know that “the American way of life”—the model that the rest of the world is meant to aspire toward—has resulted in four hundred people owning the wealth of half the population of the United States…. As a result of twenty years of the Free Market economy, today one hundred of India’s richest people own assets worth one-fourth of the country’s GDP while more than 80 percent of the people live on less than fifty cents a day. (Roy, 2014, p. 94)
Similarly, French Economist Thomas Piketty has made a splash internationally with his historical analysis of wealth and argues that social scientists need to understand how extreme wealth is produced.
Those who have a lot of it never fail to defend their interests. Refusing to deal with numbers rarely serves the interests of the least well-off. (Piketty, 2014, p. 577)
The inescapable reality is this: wealth is so concentrated that a large segment of society is virtually unaware of its existence. (Piketty, 2014, p. 259)
In Australia, the gaps between the wealthy and the poor are similar, with a recent nongovernment organization report noting:
A person in the top 20% wealth group has around 70 times more wealth than a person in the bottom 20%. (Australian Council of Social Services, 2015, p. 5)
Sociologists such as Tony Vinson increasingly point to the predictability of poverty in particular places:
In every jurisdiction there is a marked degree of spatial concentration of disadvantage. (Vinson, Rawsthorne, Beavis, & Ericson, 2015, p. 9)
In producing poverty maps, sociologists note its enduring nature:
The cohesive structure of disadvantage that has persisted in a comparatively small number of localities…constitutes fertile ground for the development of an attitude of resignation to seemingly insurmountable deprivations. (Vinson et al., 2015, p. 115)
These researchers summarize their findings in the following way: “Four waves of research over a 15 year period (1999–2014) have served to confirm the enduring cumulative social disadvantage of a relatively small number of localities across Australia” (2015, p. 10). This trend was particularly the case in South Australia where I live: “These results are another installment in the unfolding story of the consistency of extreme disadvantage rankings of localities across Australia’s states and territories” (Vinson et al., 2015, p. 116). As Australia morphs into another affluent country with high levels of poverty, it is more important than ever to remember the promise of education offering a better life for all and the place of literacies in that. Students will need more than basic literacy to flourish in the future. At the same time, there is a relentless focus in political speak about the lack of money, the nation’s deficit, and who will pay, as if people aren’t paying already. Despite the fact that funding per Australian student varies considerably, with more funding invested in more affluent students, neoliberals claim that more money does not improve education.
Given the reality of rising poverty in affluent nations, and given that some neoliberal democracies fail to acknowledge this phenomenon, several urgent questions about the future of literacy education arise:
To what extent do geographies of poverty map onto pedagogies of poverty and recycled, domesticated literacies?
Who has access to learning, which literate practices can they access, and to what ends?
To what extent has new public management and the global educational reform movement (GERM) resulted in the reduction of schooled literacy and the deskilling of teachers?
To what extent has this opened up education to colonization by publishers and other political vested interests?
Educational researchers and literacy researchers have, of course, been asking these questions for some time, but the threats to democratic public schooling and safe healthy educational environments are possibly more extreme now than ever. In the UK context, Jackie Marsh (2016) writes about her concern with what she describes as an “austerity literacy model.” She highlights these alarming figures from Clark (2014):
Over £24 million was spent on approved synthetic phonics programs, with over £4 million of government money being spent on “Read Write Inc.” (Clark, 2014, as cited in Marsh, 2016, p. 21)
Increasingly, we see evidence of what feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith (2005) has described as translocal ruling relations. So-called experts aligned with multinational publishers and—in some cases—politicians have seen the production of new “truths” about THE way to teach literacy. We can trace the ways in which various regulatory texts have reorganized the work of literacy teachers. The invasion of noneducative practices through private providers, publishers, and one-size-fits-all research entrepreneurs has impacted all layers of education.
“Fickle Literacies” for Children in Poverty: Losing Learners
In Australia, one effect of neoliberal “reforms” and discourses of standardization is the faith placed in whole-school literacy agreements, whereby district and school leaders see the construction of such documents as fundamental to improving measurable outcomes in student literacy. This is particularly the case in schools located in areas of high socioeconomic disadvantage, where student performance on standardized tests is low. One school leader explains the logic:
So what we’ve been working on for the past few years with staff is developing a common conversation or common language that we use in classrooms. It’s so important for kids that they’re not having to change every year to a different way of teaching and learning, so that it’s very consistent, so that’s really made a huge difference. An important aspect of that is we’ve made up whole school agreements, for instance, on using word knowledge, and teaching phonological awareness. Another aspect of our shared understanding focuses on our expectations for teachers, and for their professional learning (Hayes et al., 2017).
Solutions such as these are ubiquitous, as though the production of such documents could in and of themselves ensure improvements in teaching and learning. Such faith may inadvertently result in the prevalence of pedagogies which assume a universal “standard” child, despite differences in the circumstances of their everyday lives.
In this context, the risks of removing room for teachers to weave and design imaginative literacy curriculum are manifold. In the past four years, I have witnessed increasing numbers of lessons which I have described as offering fickle literacies—literacies that look like productive work, but limited learning is accomplished. While there is the surface appearance of working with text and technologies of literacy, many tasks, when closely observed, prove to be practices of compliance—such as copying, cutting and pasting, recitation, and so on. I do recognize that there are increasing challenges in managing young people in schools and learning to teach in an ever-changing policy environment, including intergenerational unemployment and inequality, league tables publicly displaying school performance on standardized tests, national curriculum, and measures of teacher performance.
My purpose here is not to argue that policy imperatives are all bad but to interrogate the impact of this ensemble. The risk of “fickleness” here is in the translation of the literacy pedagogy to an empty set of practices, distilled as routines, rather than to meaning-making practices. Sometimes such practices are done in the name of proper pedagogies such as differentiation. Hence we need to interrogate what such policies add up to in practice and the consequences for different students. Here, I outline one particular child’s early experience with school literacy—Gus (pseudonym), a White boy growing up in a poor neighborhood where there are many families who have suffered three generations of under and unemployment. Gus’ story indicates that much more than having a shared literacy agreement is required to make a positive difference in students’ school literacy learning. I was one of the two researchers working on a longitudinal ethnographic study at Sandford. All quotations that follow are taken from my field notes or those my colleague, Lyn Kerkham (see Hayes et al., 2017).
In her account of Gus’ early experiences at Sandford, in interview with the research team, Natalie, his preschool and reception teacher, was very negative. Natalie wrote of 5-year-old Gus,
He’s a task avoider. He has had significant emotional issues at preschool. He did not cope with school transition…. He will not look at readers or sight words. He cannot find an activity when he’s asked to, or pack up.
As well as the litany of things Gus couldn’t or wouldn’t do, Natalie hinted that she suspected there were issues with drugs in his home and that perhaps his mother was anorexic and that he suffered from anxiety issues. Other teachers suggested that he stayed up late at night watching inappropriate videos and playing computer games with an older uncle. The implied demonization of the family signaled a return of pervasive discourses of deficit and profound and dangerous assumptions associated with a “culture of poverty” (Payne, 2012).
However, in Year 2, researchers observed Gus in Heather’s classroom where, despite his earlier difficulties, he seemed to be making progress, especially in reading. While Heather was concerned about his literacy, she recognized what he could do and tried to set him achievable challenges. Gus’ end-of-year report appeared perceptive and encouraging. Heather wrote:
[You] read aloud in guided reading and participate in class shared reading experiences, you confidently make connections to your life, school, to other books which shows engagement with the text and a higher level of thinking. (Year 2, end-of-year report)
We returned to Sandford the following year expecting to observe Gus and his peers in Lara’s class. Lara was a recently appointed experienced teacher with a strong reputation for literacy pedagogy. However, we discovered that Gus had been excluded and was now at another local primary school, Easton. Australia is one of a number of affluent nations with high levels of student exclusion and expulsion. For example, referring to the UK, Dorling (2016, p. 116) observes, “It is possible that more children are permanently excluded from primary schools in the UK each year than are expelled from all the other primary schools in Europe.” According to Gus’ behavior management record, there had been an escalation in frequency and intensity of verbal and physical outbursts, resulting in several disciplinary consequences and, ultimately, a 10-week exclusion. Given that Gus’ behavior had been unproblematic in Heather’s class, we were surprised at this development.
The point to note here is that literacy difficulties, behavior problems, and ill-health can be mapped all too predictably with geographies of poverty. Over and again, we see multiple layers of disadvantage, with children and their families becoming lost in the education process.
By chance, we were also researching at Easton, where Gus had been reassigned during the 10-week exclusion from Stanford. Andrea, his “temporary teacher,” reported to the researcher that Gus was not disruptive in class or in the schoolyard. However, Andrea was worried about his “lack of self-esteem and not trying because he was worried about failing, about failure.” Nevertheless, Andrea felt that overall he “thrived,” and she recalled times where his mother “had tears of happiness from some of the things that he was doing in class.” As we listed to Andrea, a different Gus appeared to emerge in this context.
Upon his return to Sandford the following term, Lara spoke to Gus and his classmates about a “fresh start” for Gus. While these sentiments are laudable, they require more than just rhetoric. Children’s school lives, their peer relationships, and their learner identities are complex and perhaps enduring (Compton-Lilly, 2011; Nuthall, 2007; Wortham, 2006). After following Gus and his peers for the remainder of the year, we observed that his academic and social accomplishments at school remained tenuous. Toward the end of the year, Lara’s opinion of Gus had not really shifted. The fresh start was evidently Gus’ responsibility alone. Indeed, in interview with the researchers, Lara claimed that Gus did not have “the intellectual capacity to delve into a text at such a deep level.”
I mean we don’t know what negative concept he’s getting at home…maybe if family members are insecure, and they hear their parents doubting themselves, well, you know, your environment is very significant in your life.
Lara’s assessment of Gus and his homelife also played out during everyday classroom literacy events. Lara enjoyed teaching literacy; her program included sharing children’s literature, frequent opportunities for writing, and, on occasion, engagement with popular culture such as videos and YouTube clips. On this occasion, the curriculum was related to Halloween. While Gus was often reluctant to write, this theme motivated him. There is insufficient space here to discuss the entire episode (but see Comber & Kerkham, 2016). In brief, Gus shared with Lara his design and text about a fair ride called The Fly Train. Gus attributed the words “I killed a man” to an evil monster in his text, but Lara suggested this was “a bit too scary, too harsh” for her. She crossed out “killed” and wrote “scared” above it. Unsurprisingly, Lara’s feedback disappointed Gus. He returned to his table and slammed down his book. Even his highly motivated best effort could not match his teacher’s expectations.
Lara’s efforts to open the curriculum to popular culture had limits which Gus didn’t predict. His inability to “read” what counts as “appropriate” in the school context interrupted the pedagogical relationship he sought to establish with Lara. While he clearly had difficulties with the demands of school life and literacy learning, Gus did not stand out as a child with significant behavior problems. Moreover, neither the school literacy policy nor the school behavior agreements reconnected him with learning. Rather, these school policies—which emphasized consistency of teacher practices—accentuated Gus’ perceived noncompliance with school norms and led teachers to label his practices as aberrant. The problem with Gus’ story is that it is so common.
Before leaving the question of student writing, I summarize my concern with a developing trend exemplified in Gus’ story. We had followed Gus partly because we found so little writing in his workbooks at the end of Year 2. If Deborah Brandt is correct that what counts as literacy is now the capacity to write—to produce meaningful texts in a range of media and genres—then the absence of writing from children’s early literacy curriculum should concern us. Brandt (2015, p. 3) speculates that:
For perhaps the first time in the history of mass literacy, writing seems to be eclipsing reading as the literate experience of consequence.
In the early years of schooling, reading is still typically privileged over writing. Yet, in the Australian context, children perform less well on standardized measures of writing than they do in reading, and average performance declines with more years of schooling, especially for students from low socioeconomic communities. In an ongoing study in two different poor communities in Australia, we are looking at the ways in which young children are learning to write. As part of our project, we have surveyed all the teachers and over 200 children in one-on-one “interviews,” where children were invited to tell us where, when, with whom, with what, and how they were learning to write. The teachers tell us that in their classrooms, writing is still usually done with pencils and paper and usually as an individual activity. The children tell us the same. Digital technologies are rarely used as part of learning to write or produce texts. In addition, the children tell us that the people who help them most are parents and siblings, which was a big surprise to the teachers! My fear is that we have a return to pedagogies of poverty which Haberman (1991) first named in the 1990s and which echoes the work of earlier scholars who explained how dominant cultural narratives about the poor prevent school reform (Rappaport, 2000). This is important because if children growing up in poverty are only offered the “old basics,” their literacy repertoires will remain limited and their potential for making texts work in their own interests reduced.
In the remainder of this article, I present and discuss several counterstories of rich critical literacy curriculum and enabling pedagogies which I have coinvestigated and coconstructed with teacher–researchers and colleagues over an extended period. I will not repeat detailed accounts of the work of these teacher–researchers (but see Comber, 2016a; Nixon, Comber, Grant, & Wells, 2012), but I highlight, invoking both Foucault and Massey, that we as educators are “freer than we feel” (Foucault, 1988, p. 10) and that places, because they must be negotiated, always have “the potential for something new” (Massey, 2005). Kostogriz and Tsolidis (2008, pp. 128–129) concur with Massey and point out:
While places have been very often romanticised as “safe” and “homely” locations for those who belong to them, such representations also embody the politics of identity, often leading to the acts of racial exclusion, gender domination and other forms of discrimination.
The teachers whose work I discuss here understand the politics of diverse students negotiating belonging at school; they also understand the importance of all students having access to literacies with currency—more than the basics—to be able to represent themselves and their communities and interrogate the ways in which texts work to position different people in different ways. I provide three counterstories of teachers at work in two highly multicultural and diverse schools catering for students with a range of geographic histories and socioeconomic circumstances. Many of their students speak English as a second language or dialect, some are Aboriginal Australians, while other are recent refugees from places of extreme conflict and deprivation. While such work is not easy and does not solve wider inequities, it shows that something can be done when teachers recognize the potential of young people to negotiate learning together, to constitute the school as a meeting place, and to assemble literate practices for research and representation (Massey, 2005).
Critical Cosmopolitan Literate Citizens: Reimagining Global “Good Neighborhoods”
In areas of high poverty, teachers may avoid engaging with local matters or even going out in the neighborhood. Alternatively, the neighborhood can become a shared site for exploration and research. In times of terror and exclusion, teachers may opt for safe topics; alternatively, they might explore how and why particular interests and practices dominate and how these might be contested. Brave teachers need researchers to assist in documenting what they accomplish and why it matters, and how making available an ethical and inclusive curriculum can simultaneously produce high academic achievement. In what follows, I draw on examples from the collective oeuvre of three teacher–researchers to examine how their pedagogies of place constitute their students as critical cosmopolitan literate citizens. In particular, I consider how teachers discursively position students as researchers, journalists, designers, and event managers and explicitly inducted them into the communicative practices necessary to conduct such work. Such practices include interviewing, audio recording, transcribing, observing, data analysis, photographing, filming, budgeting, and task management. Similarly, these student inquiries and projects were planned to have substantive meaningful public consequences—such as reports and presentations to peers, parents, school leaders, and wider community members.
The teachers and a small research team undertook these inquiries 2014–2016. Fellow researchers, including Annette Woods and Lyn Kerkham, and I were becoming increasingly anxious about the impact of standardization on teachers’ work and the resultant minimalist approaches to literacy. In 2014, I was invited to speak at a conference in South Africa, entitled “Imagination and Literacy: Theory and Practice.” In talking with colleagues and the teacher–researchers who had become my friends during many collaborations, we decided to address this theme in 2015 in four different classrooms in two Australian states initially and then to share the work with colleagues in South Africa and the UK. Here, I provide just a taste of what the teacher–researchers did, and indeed, as I write, the project continues for two of the teachers. In a modest way, we wanted to leave a legacy of the critical literacy and place-conscious pedagogy oeuvre they had codeveloped over an extended period not only for the South African educators but also for early career teachers who had not felt free to experiment and imagine in their classrooms.
In Other People’s Shoes
One key pedagogical principle shared by these teachers was to look within and beyond the school, to become close observers and analysts of patterns and change, and to invite their students to join them in these processes. Rather than pedagogies based on fear and maintenance of the status quo, these teachers recognized that young people’s lives have already been full of changes and challenges associated variously with war, conflict, migration, poverty, housing, family changes, and so on. Hence, they started with the dynamics of what is going on in the world as the object of study. They might begin within the school or the neighborhood and lead to a range of places and sites for study. For example in 2015, Ruth Trimboli worked with her Year 6 class to investigate the experience of migrants and/or “asylum seekers.” The students themselves were extremely diverse and their parents mostly spoke English as a second or third language. Their cultural heritages included several African countries (Guinea, Sudan, and Somalia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Russia, India, Greece, China, and the Philippines).
Social geographer Doreen Massey (2005) argues that when we think of places, “There can be no assumption of pre-given coherence, or a community or collective identity”; rather, place demands “negotiation” and “invention” (141). School and classroom spaces, as a microcosm of the wider society, are increasingly heterogeneous, where different people are “thrown together” and where power relations and a sense of belonging must be constantly negotiated.
As part of the study of migration and asylum seekers, Trimboli asked her students to interview a neighbor or relative who had come to Australia from a different country. Students asked their informants about their country of origin, their culture and language(s), when they arrived, their memories of their homelands, their reasons for coming to Australia, and their sense of belonging in Australia. Back at school, the students pooled their data and began to look for patterns and differences in the stories they had heard. Interviewees had talked about war; deaths; poverty; safety; human rights; and lack of freedom, employment and amenities, and their desire to unite their families and to explore other parts of the world. Overwhelmingly, the message was that these people came seeking a better life for themselves and their families.
Some of these young people knew about these experiences firsthand because they have lived them, and others had not. The classroom thus became a meeting place where information—similarities and differences—were shared and conversations initiated. Importantly, students were learning to conduct an interview and to record responses. Sometimes the informants’ responses were complex and provided the impetus for discussion, such as the meaning of “human rights.” Of course, students can study such topics from a textbook, but learning from neighbors, cousins, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and others was quite different, as was the realization that others have suffered and survived in a range of traumatic situations. Trimboli wanted her students to walk “in other people’s shoes” and to consider whether there is “such a thing as a belonging neighborhood.” She invited her students, either individually or in pairs, to design and represent their version of what makes a good neighborhood and then to label and explain their illustrations. Students video-recorded each other’s presentations, so they could be shared with young people in other classes in the school and also with young people in a class in Queensland who were doing related research.
What’s Happening in the Neighborhood?
Also working on questions of neighborhood and belonging, Trimboli’s colleague Marg Wells designed a two-term geography curriculum for her culturally diverse Year 5 class around two main inquiry questions:
How do people and environment influence one another?
How do people influence the human characteristics of places and the management of spaces within them?
It is important to note that the school was situated in a very poor area which was part of a wider urban renewal project. Wells began by showing her students aerial photos and video footage of the neighborhood, noting different types of housing, boarded up empty houses and empty blocks of land. Next, during a neighborhood walk together, the class photographed a range of local houses and other sites of interest to them. Back at school, using the library and Internet, they investigated housing designed for different climates. They considered the features of houses using the vocabularies of architecture and town planning. As Wells helped students to build new knowledge, she deliberately moved from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the local to the distant, from the visual to the verbal, and from everyday language to the technical terms. They investigated the meaning and design of “sustainable housing.” Together, they explored the built environment not only housing but also storm water flows and streetscapes.
Next, students selected a vacant block in the neighborhood as a location where they would like to live. They wrote a rationale for this selection (such as safety, quietness, space, and proximity to family and friends). After bidding for their preferred site in a class auction, students designed and built a labeled model of their desired home starting with an empty milk carton as their basic building block. The models were then arranged together to form an ideal neighborhood.
For more than a decade, Wells made the neighborhood the object of study in her classroom, exploiting the affordances of what was (or was not) occurring at the time, getting students involved in designing new parks and playgrounds, conducting oral histories with former teachers and graduates of the school that was to be demolished, and providing feedback to the new school design. She made the local urban renewal project the focus of many inquiries and explicitly drew students’ attention to the construction of built environments and the social consequences.
Wells always avoided positioning students and their families as victims; rather, she educated them in observation, questioning, and taking action. The politics of places and spaces were always on her agenda. She sought out opportunities to “get out” with her class, in the neighborhood, to the university, to exhibitions, to parks, and even to IKEA®! In studying the “local,” she was always aware of place as relational, as produced, and as changing. In addition, she worked across the curriculum areas and beyond including the arts, design and technology, geography, and architecture. She invited architects, town planners, housing authorities, and building project managers into the classroom and modeled how to communicate effectively with these professionals. In other words, she inducted young people into ways of communicating with those authorized to know, design, and manage places and spaces, those who conceptualize space and thereby organize and regulate people’s occupation of various spaces (Lefebvre, 1974). She took students’ agency seriously and understood she needed to build their knowledge in order for them to be able to represent their points of view. Yet, she also made these activities, imaginative, playful, and aesthetic.
It is easy to forget the relative poverty of the students’ neighborhood or prior homelands. There is no sense of “pedagogies of poverty” in this curriculum. It is ambitious, thought-provoking sustained, and collective learning in which the teacher and students are collectively engaged. In Massey’s terms, Wells orchestrates the negotiation of “something new” as a necessary and dynamic element of culturally diverse young people coming to belong and thrive in a shared learning ecology. This accomplishment is in stark contrast to the fickle literacies we have recently witnessed in numerous other schools located in geographies of poverty (Comber & Woods, 2016), where teachers have been unable to break out of perceived constraints to deliver “the basics.” Wells’ oeuvre is emblematic of education “at its best.”
Education is at its best when it creates those spaces, opportunities and encounters where a next generation are helped to ask the kinds of questions and engage in the kinds of politics that will make a positive difference to their lives and the lives around them. An education system committed to social justice and not market justice would have a radical effect on politics. (Robertson, 2016, p. 834)
When Wells reflected on her place-based pedagogy, she repeatedly expressed her amazement that other teachers seemed to shy away from it, for example, turning down opportunities to work on streetscapes. She reported that her colleagues did not see how it could be done in an already crowded curriculum. For Wells, however, such an approach allowed her to be “freer than we feel” (following Foucault, 1979, 1988), in the sense that her critical and creative reading, interpretation, and operationalization of the curriculum created spaces to do something different while still “ticking all the boxes” in terms of outcomes. Her strong understandings of critical literacy, social justice, and place-conscious pedagogy provided alternative discourses in which to reconstitute educational opportunities and align and customize them for her context and her class.
Teachers’ educational imaginations and capital are crucial to what they are able to offer students. The profession’s capability for curriculum design (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) is integral to the quality of education, especially in schools located in poor communities. Like Trimboli, Wells’ research was also motivated by her desire to share with educators nationally and internationally. She had previously worked with Hilary Janks (Janks & Comber, 2006) and with Pat Thomson (Comber, Thomson, & Wells, 2001), and she was eager to make available her curriculum design, activities and tasks, and the children’s resultant artifacts. In this sense, a teacher–researcher’s oeuvre has the potential to inform not only local practice but also theorizations and practices elsewhere.
The back story to Trimboli’s and Wells’ work is that it was undertaken in the context of two decades of “urban renewal,” under a government intervention intended both to improve the quality of housing and other resources and also to diversify the area to avoid pockets of poverty. However, as is the case internationally, urban renewal rarely works in the interests of the most disadvantaged (Oakley & Fraser, 2016).
Imagining Action
Helen Grant, like Wells and Trimboli and many teacher–researchers internationally, is sustained in her inquiries by her involvement in research communities which connected her with the world of theory (Luke, Comber, & Grant, 2003; Nixon et al., 2012). Grant deliberately builds her understandings of systemic functional linguistics, critical literacy, multiliteracies, and place-conscious pedagogy as well as her capacity as a filmmaker, constantly looking for ways to enhance her practice to better teach her cohorts of recently arrived students—both immigrants and asylum seekers—who speak English as an additional language. She is a lover of world music and travel and has previously been a media studies teacher. This productive mix of theories, cultural and artistic repertoires, and dispositions infiltrates her dynamic pedagogy, where she seeks to capture young people’s imaginations and energies. Rather than being bounded by the school, Grant, like Wells, hunts for opportunities to research both local and international phenomena.
Elsewhere, I have discussed Grant’s contribution to the literacy and imagination project, including her work with the student representative council to host a pop-up café to raise money for survivors of the Nepal earthquake and to design and run an imagination station to welcome students and families to the beginning of the school year (Comber, 2016b; Comber, Woods, & Grant, 2017). Her capacity to contest the usual power relations in schools by positioning students, especially recently arrived refugee students, as filmmakers, guides, and coresearchers, was evident in the materiality of her practices. For example, students appeared with clipboards and microphones when highly ranked visitors came to the school for a media event or when researchers arrived at the gate. Students were there to greet parents and peers on Day 1 of the year. Recently arrived students from Sudan were seated in the teacher’s chair or holding the microphone to interview the school principal. Role reversal and surprise are just two ways of disrupting school as a predictable place and students as being expected to be in particular places and play particular roles. Like Wells, Grant positioned her students as having agency with respect to their communications with adults.
Grant is attuned to emergent cultural trends and communication practices—continuously seeking out their potential for pedagogy. For example, in 2015, she organized students to conduct research into the arts at their primary school and to present their findings in a PechaKucha (a presentation style, in which 20 slides are shown for 20 seconds each) for the wider school community. Students selected an art form and captured images to give a sense of what was being done by students across the school. Their research was not restricted to the covers of a book or even a classroom PowerPoint presentation. Rather, they put their collective projects together into a joint PechaKucha that was shared publicly. Over the time, in which I have worked with Grant, she has introduced students to numerous genre, media, and modes including memes, PechaKucha, pop-ups, films (cooking Afghani style), spoofs (Kissing babies and pressing the flesh), documentaries (Sudan), class newspapers (Afghani Newsstand), and more. Like Wells and Trimboli, she assists young people to produce a range of texts collaboratively; so school literacy is not simply for the display of knowledge of “the basics” but to produce social and aesthetic artifacts with genuine communicative intent.
In many ways, Grant is a catalyst for cycles of student thinking, productions, and action. In so doing, she provides strong scaffolding for students, as they learn to plan ahead, anticipate contingencies, seek community support, and take responsibility. Learning to communicate is done in the service of social action and representation rather than as an academic exercise.
Transnational Research Alliances for Educational Justice: On Not Keeping Teachers in Their Place
As I conclude writing this article, refugees are being excluded from the right to live in many countries including Australia where I—as the child of an immigrant—am privileged to live without question. Indigenous peoples still have to fight for their own countries including in Australia. The politics of people in places is ubiquitous. There is nothing natural about the right to be a citizen. Who is allowed to be where? Who gets to stay? Who gets to have a say? Who is allowed to dump nuclear waste where? Who gets to decide? Who is allowed to become a teacher? and What are they allowed to teach? In so-called democracies, we desperately need to keep developing and actively spreading critical literacies translocally as an alternative to the global educational reform movement, which pretends that standardized approaches to the basics will fix poverty, housing shortages, and unemployment. They won’t. The geographies of poverty are not produced by poor literacy. However, children growing up in poverty need access to the most complex and salient forms of literate practices possible in order to contest the way things are and to work to represent their communities for justice.
There is important work in critical literacy studies being undertaken internationally including, for example, research focusing on positive discourse analysis (Luke, 1995; Rogers & Wetzel, 2013), design and redesign (Janks, 2010; Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), cosmopolitan translocal studies (Hull & Storniaulio, 2014), spatial relations (Comber, 2016a; Gutiérrez, 2008; Jones et al., 2016), and sociomaterial approaches (Burnett & Merchant, 2016; Leander & Sheehy, 2004). However, we urgently need to invent new ways of working together to support teachers in resisting moves to datafication and the tyranny of templates which normalize childhood. Working with cohorts of teacher–researchers and their students over time is just one way of debunking myths concerning the educability of the poor. Teacher–researchers like Wells, Trimboli, and Grant consistently demonstrate what is possible and have designed durable enabling pedagogies of place helping young people to assemble the literate practices to become cosmopolitan citizens while still attending elementary school. Yet, as the baby boomer generation of educators gradually exits the workplace, we need to advocate strongly for time and resources to build critical inquiry into the daily fabric of teachers’ work.
Notwithstanding the importance of those strong local and longitudinal collaborations, it seems that as an increasingly global and mobile educational research workforce, we need to invent something new that will allow us to build new alliances to speak back to the multinational interests that increasingly dominate education.
Literacy and the Imagination: Working With Place and Space as Resources for Children’s Learning
South Australian teacher–researchers include Marg Wells, Ruth Trimboli, and Helen Grant and university researchers Lyn Kerkham, Annette Woods, and Barbara Comber.
Educational Leadership and Turnaround Literacy Pedagogies is an Australian Research Council Linkage Project (No. LP120100714). The research team includes Robert Hattam, Deb Hayes, Lyn Kerkham, and Barbara Comber.
Learning to Write: A Socio-material Analysis of Text Production is an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (DP150101240). The research team, Annette Woods, Lisa Kervin, Aspa Baroutsis, and Barbara Comber, acknowledges the schools, leaders, teachers, children, and families in the communities where the project is situated.
Author's Note
This article draws from the above research projects with fellow researchers.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Becky Rogers and the LRA community for the opportunity to present and for the generative theme, “Mobilizing Literacy Research for Social Transformation,” which has provoked my thinking in putting these ideas together. I also thank my colleague Anne Morrison for her valuable editorial advice.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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Author Biography
Barbara Comber is a research professor in the School of Education at the University of South Australia. Her research interests include teachers’ work, critical literacy, social justice, and creative pedagogy. Two recent books reflect these interests and her long-term collaborations with frontline educators: Literacy, Place and Pedagogies of Possibility (Comber, 2016) and Literacy, Leading and Learning: Beyond Pedagogies of Poverty (Hayes et al., 2017).
