Re-thinking literacy as a process of translation.

Somerville, Margaret

Introduction

I have been involved in various aspects of literacy teaching and research for over twenty years. This included workplace literacies, literacy teaching with Australian Indigenous adults, collaborative research and production of digital educational resources with Indigenous communities, and most recently, school teachers' literacy practices. This paper draws on all of these experiences, and associated ethnographic research, to propose a new way of thinking about literacy teaching. It is not intended to provide definitive answers but to raise questions and think differently about seemingly intransigent problems for literacy educators working with socially marginalised learners.

I will present this paper in an inductive mode as a series of four case studies, or vignettes, from which I draw inferences. In this way I hope to lead the reader through the process of my thinking about how socially marginalised learners move between different modes of literacy. Through understanding the translations involved in this movement, I suggest that we can better understand what we mean by literacy. This has important implications for literacy pedagogies. I begin with the concept of multiliteracies, as proposed by the New London Group (2000).

Multiliteracies

The New London Group (2000) proposed that a new understanding of literacy is required because of two main features of contemporary life: changing literacy practices as a result of computer technologies, and increasing cultural and linguistic diversity in a globalised world. They argued that 'Literacy pedagogy ... has been a carefully restricted project--restricted to monolingual, monocultural, and rule-governed forms of language' (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 9). As an alternative they suggested a 'pedagogy of multiliteracies': 'One in which other modes of meaning are dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes' (The New London Group, 1996, p. 64). The most helpful explanation for illuminating the ideas I am tracking through the vignettes I am offering, however, is encapsulated in the following:

the most important skill students need to learn is to negotiate regional, ethnic, or class-based dialects; variations in register that occur according to social context; hybrid cross-cultural discourses; the code switching often to be found within a text among different languages, dialects or registers; different visual and iconic meanings; and variations in the gestural relationships among people, language and material objects. Indeed, this is the only hope for averting the catastrophic conflicts about identities and spaces that now seem ever ready to flare up. (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 14).

The question which I am asking in this paper concerns the ways students learn these complex multiliteracies and how we facilitate that learning. I want to explore the implications of these ideas in practice with reference to the situation of a range of marginalised communities with which I have worked.

Mills (2006) conducted an empirical research study into the application of multiliteracies as pedagogy in a typical low socio-economic Australian classroom with twenty-five nationalities and 8% Indigenous children. In her study of this upper primary class with a teacher identified as trained in multiliteracies, Mills found that 'dominant students, who were familiar with the discourses of Western schooling, gained greater access to multiliteracies that their marginalised counterparts' (Mills, 2006, p. 146). Mills (2006, p. 132) frames the findings in terms of the degree to which culturally non-dominant students drew from their existing cultural resources and conditions on the use of home discourses. She suggests that: 'The successful enactment of multiliteracies must begin with a very different set of assumptions about meaning making and culture ... Students need opportunities to recombine the many layers of their identities, experiences and discourses' (Mills, 2006, p. 147).

The literature on biliteracy also contributes some insights. In biliteracy students learn to be literate in two languages, moving between them for different social and cultural purposes. In two recent case studies of 'biliteracy', the English language was dominant and the challenge was to include local (non-dominant) literacy practices. Piedra (2006, p. 338) proposes this could be done through 'the use of oral Quechua in order to make meaning of written text'. Martinez-Roldan and Sayer (2006) suggest re-valuing 'Spanglish', the hybrid language that Latino students use in everyday cultural practice. This is a complex political act, however, because, like Aboriginal English, 'Spanglish as a linguistic borderland is not located at the most powerful end of the monolingualbilingual continuum' (Martinez-Roldan & Sayer, 2006, p. 316). Both case studies draw on Hornberger's (2005) continua of languages to emphasise the importance of hybrid literacy practices for connecting sociocultural worlds for academic development (Piedra, 2006, p. 402; Martinez-Roldan & Sayer, 2006, p. 315).

The literature of biliteracy adds to an understanding of multiliteracies as it is enacted in a bicultural classroom and focuses on particular aspects of moving between different modes of language--oral, written, non-English and hybrid English language use. The literature of multiliteracy adds the dimension of visual and other multimedia texts, including 'gestural relationships among people, language and material objects'. These gestural relationships I understand as significant in the workplace where the body of the worker, the physical environment and the objects of the work are in a relationship with each other. This also applies to other physical activities of the body such as dance.

Literacy in practice

Vignette one

The first vignette is about my early literacy teaching in Adult and Basic Education with Aboriginal adults returning to education. I write about this in order to think about how I developed my early understandings of working with Aboriginal learners in literacy. I taught 'Communications' in the General Skills and Tertiary Preparation courses designed to prepare adults returning to study at School Certificate and Higher School Certificate levels. The curriculum was an open one. I was required to teach speaking, writing, reading and listening through whatever means worked. We studied films, poetry and novels written by Aboriginal people about their experiences.

In these classes we learned together. The students learned to read and write. I learned about the colonial history of Australia. Their experiences had been silenced by white prohibitions on story, language, and culture. My learning was rich and traumatic and there was much emotional work for me to do. I remember watching the film Lousy Little Sixpence (Morgan & Bostok, c. 1990) and listening to the sounds of a mother sobbing as her children were taken from her. I thought of my own babies and could not hold back my tears. Experiences like this were common for my students. They were the experiences that never featured in any of the textbooks of our education systems.

Our literacy work was organised around self directed 'learning contracts' (Knowles, 1984) and the production of regular newsletters. It was highly significant for these literacy learners to see their stories represented in written text and communicated to the broader community. In learning contracts students studied topics of interest such as the last initiation of their grandparents' generation, or the local Aboriginal footy team. We visited special Aboriginal story places and wrote about these experiences. It is interesting to reflect now on what these learners were writing about and how radical it was in 1983, before the Stolen Generations report, before the report on Black Deaths in Custody, before Native Title. They wrote about how their children had been taken away, about the lack of education in mission schools, and about their continuing links with the land. Their newsletters gave them a venue for publishing these stories in text and images.

As literacy learners they learned to read and write about subjects in which they were vitally interested. In the Newsletters they wrote and published their stories and artworks.

They learned that their stories were powerful and important. They learned through carefully chosen texts by Indigenous authors that others shared similar experiences and expressed them in such literary forms as film, drama, novels, poetry, and art. They learned that the way they spoke could be translated into written forms and that through this process they could change their writing to suit different genres.

My background for this teaching was that I had lived and worked in desert communities in the Northern Territory. I didn't have the framework of being a teacher. I learned that in Aboriginal cultural knowledge and experience I was the not knower, and that it was important in relation to their knowledge to adopt a pedagogy of unknowing as a teacher. I learned that it was often uncomfortable to hear these stories from the contact zone of our shared colonial history. I learned that acquiring literacy skills was less important to these learners than participating in processes of identity work and cultural memory and renewal. Adult learning was a powerful tool to enable these processes, and literacy skills were acquired in order to achieve cultural ends.

These classes appeared to be highly successful. Of all the subjects only this one had more than full attendance and no attrition, with students coming extra times to complete newsletter production. They were successful in teaching print literacy. Grandmothers and mothers learned to help their children became print literate. Younger students went on to employment or university. Their learning provided a bridge through which they could translate their experiences into other domains. Years later when I was employed to undertake a consultancy about cultural heritage of a particular site, these people, unannounced and completely unexpectedly, stood up and gave testimonials about their trust in me as a researcher. They talked about their literacy experiences many years earlier and how they had been listened to, and how their stories became powerful. I have continued to work in research collaborations with different Aboriginal communities on the production and publication of their stories through the processes I learned from these students.

Vignette two

The second vignette is about how underground coal miners learn safety (Somerville, 2005). This study revealed an entirely different set of literacies and issues of translation. The study was carried out in collaboration with a workplace literacy educator who was employed to improve workers' print literacies in relation to teaching and learning safety. Twenty mine workers were interviewed in semi structured interviews about learning and practising safety in underground mining. A site visit, and further interviews and cross checking with the literacy educator, were also carried out as part of the ethnographic research.

The mine workers described the mine as an uncaring and unpredictable place where just turning up for work puts the worker in danger. They said 'just to turn up for work, you were taking a risk, just by the nature of the work 'cause you're dealing with forces beyond your control'. Even under conditions of new technologies in mining, the mine remains dangerous for human bodies. Under these conditions their motivation to learn safety is extremely high. They described how they learned safety initially from experienced mine workers and then from their own experience over time. They trust the knowledge that they learn from their embodied experience of the mine. One aspect of learning safety that was particularly relevant in relation to the educator's role to teach workplace literacy was what the mine workers described as 'pit sense'.

For an experienced mine worker knowledge about safety is so embedded in one's work practice that it becomes 'instinctive'. They called this instinctive knowledge 'pit sense'. Of all mining knowledge and learning, pit sense is the most complex, embodied and tacit. It is something that all miners develop because of the inherent life-threatening nature of the mine as a workplace. They talked about pit sense as a heightened sensory awareness of all of the senses, even senses they don't have a name for:

 ... all the blokes have got pit sense. They know that the roof's
 bad, they know by hearing it, they know by smell, they know by the
 sense of just being there and being uncomfortable, the heaviness of
 the air, that you're in a place where you shouldn't be, lack of
 oxygen or gas. You'll feel the hairs move up on your legs, y'know,
 with black damp or something there.

Another worker touched the skin on the top of his ears as he described sensing subtle changes in air pressure:

 when the fan stops, and everything's very still, and even if you're
 in an area where it's not a main airway where there's not a lot of
 air coming through, you still realise that, I guess that little bit
 of air on your ears you can feel and when that stops it just
 changes. I think that's a sort of an indication of a little bit of
 difference you can pick up.

In pit sense all the senses are employed in a complex interconnected way to provide information about whether the body-in-place is safe. It is instinctive in the sense that it must be so embodied for experienced mine workers that they can react instantaneously without thinking. And yet, pit sense is entirely learned and it can be seen as a highly developed form of literacy in a Freierian sense of reading and writing the world. It is a sophisticated ability to read the signs that are learned from experienced mine workers and from a worker's own experience of the mine over many years. Mine workers work in teams and communicate this complex knowledge to others. It also has an important relationship to print literacy through changes to occupational health and safety legislation and increasing costs of safety breaches.

In the move to mandated occupational health and safety training and legislated requirements about mine safety, the company introduced written training packages and written safety instructions in the mine. They employed a literacy educator because most of the mine workers could not read and write. The literacy educator established strong relationships with the workers who asked for help with all sorts of literacy activities from writing letters to their girlfriends to writing stories about their experiences of the mine. It was these stories that I initially analysed to discover that there was a highly gendered culture of masculine risk taking and aggression that on the one hand was necessary to work in such a workplace, but on the other was resistant to new ideas about learning safety.

For these mine workers there was a profound conflict between what they described as 'paper knowledge' in mining instructions and training packages, and their knowledge, acquired from experience, of working safely. They said 'on the paper it might look great. Down there, that's no good, if I stand there he's gunna bloody run into me or he's gunna drive into me. I'm not standing there'. They could see by the nature of the written instructions that the places that were being defined as safe were not. In translating the codified knowledge of written instructions into their bodily knowledge of how the mine works, they had to interpret the words as interpreters who translate a foreign language. Where personal safety was concerned, the mine workers trusted their body-in-place knowledge rather than paper knowledge. They criticised mandated safety training practices that failed to acknowledge the complex literacies involved in learning safety:

 that seems to be the big downfall of all the training I've had, in
 safety. We can go through the accident procedures, the different
 procedures, whatever procedures they like to go through, or read
 through 'em or talk about 'em, and we'll say, 'We don't think this
 is right', but nothing's ever said about what could happen if you
 don't follow [pit sense] and what will happen, it's not put over to
 the blokes like that.

In their training they feel powerless because the knowledge that they bring is not recognised or valued. In the move towards training packages and mandated safety training, a limited print literacy regime has been imposed on these workers. This limited print literacy erases critical body and spatial literacies that underpin these miners' working knowledge. Their perception is that the middle class bosses and trainers who are well educated in reading and writing lack critical knowledge about underground mine work in relation to working safely. Literacy practices are marked by race, class, and gender, and this is played out in literacy teaching and learning.

The first step in addressing issues of safety learning in this company was to value these bodily and spatial literacies, which are an integral part of the identity of these workers. The next step is to articulate these spatial literacies through conversations such as we had in the interviews. Only then was it possible to understand the translations required to move between the spatial literacies of the mine workers and standard print literacy. The question then became how can the literacy educator help the mine workers learn to move between the different modes of literacy required for their work in a way that each is relevant and meaningful. The written signs and written instructions in training packages must be meaningful in terms of the mine workers and the mine workers must be able to translate their experience of the world into reading and writing for standard print literacy to be meaningful to them.

Vignette three

The third vignette is about a children's book produced by Daphne Wallace, a Gamaroi/Ullaroi woman who grew up in Lightning Ridge in western NSW. The Yurri yurri book is a children's story about the little hairy people who live in Gamaroi country. It is also a story about literacy. The book is made up of photographs of Daphne's paintings produced to illustrate this childhood story, and Daphne's written text. Daphne constructed the book using a laptop, a digital camera and the iBook computer software program provided to her as part of a project we were working on about alternative stories of water in the Murray-Darling Basin.

The cover page shows three children heading off into red earth country in a style of 'naive realism', influenced by European visual practices. The frame painted around the painting, however, shows Gamaroi iconography, from the symbols that Gamaroi people used in designs on carved trees and body paintings. Even more deeply symbolic and hidden in meaning to the casual observer, are the stars in the sky in the shape of an emu. This symbol has both traditional and contemporary significance for Daphne. Emu eggs are an important food for Gamaroi people. Emus nest at a certain time of the year, and the time for collecting eggs is very precise because they must be collected before the young chick begins to grow and blood is present in the egg. There is a prohibition for Daphne's people on eating the emu itself and once the egg is fertilised it is recognised as an emu. The time to collect emu eggs is marked by the appearance of a formation of stars in the Milky Way in the shape of an emu. At this time, Daphne's mother calls her in Armidale and Daphne makes the thousand kilometre trip to Lightning Ridge to join in the gathering of emu eggs.

Lightning Ridge is also home. So the image of three figures heading to the red dirt country with the emu in the sky is a picture of going home. All of the Yurri yurri story is embedded in this particular place, the place where Daphne was born and grew up--her home place, her country. This image and its story is a metaphor, it is the sign that calls Daphne back to country and to the home-place of her language. The word Yurri yurri is a Gamaroi language word that describes the small hairy people that inhabit the country, the spirit world, and the imagination of Gamaroi people, especially children. The text in the book replicates the oral story, represented in the sounds of Aboriginal English in which the story was told. It also uses standard English to make the meaning accessible for a non-Aboriginal audience.

The final product of the Yurri yurri book is a standard artefact of print literacy. To analyse the complex translations involved in the story and its images is to understand literacy differently. The Yurri yurri characters appear in each of the images. The images and the text chart the changes in literacy practices over the generations from ancestors to grandparents, to parents, to children to grandchildren. It begins with an image of a group of people sitting around a campfire and the little hairy people in the trees around them. The text above says: 'yerp dar hout dhere eberywair, watching ya'. Below, the text in standard English says, 'Our ancestor sat around fire telling the yurri yurri women story which was passed down from generation to generation from time immemorial'. The next page shows a group of people of her grandparents' generation sitting outside a tin humpy, then the next a tin shack with an old time car of her parent's generation. The final page of the story shows Daphne in her contemporary home sitting at a computer with her daughter Alpena, telling her the story. The text above the image reads: 'First time I am telling my daughter Alpena Yuntjai Bronwyn at the computer, she can also past onto her children's and so on' and on the bottom of the painting: 'See Alpena, that how our ancestor, old people, and our families, past on the old stories around the fire at night before sleep time'.

Daphne represents the translations of literacies embedded in this book as changes in the practices of storytelling and of home. To do this she combines a range of visual images and iconography, storytelling language, and print literacy. She uses a mixture of Gamaroi language words, Aboriginal English, and standard English to tell the story. Production of the book was made possible by contemporary computer technologies which can facilitate the work of translation, of moving between visual symbols and images, oral storytelling, and written text. Daphne, however, regards herself as 'illiterate' and finds this an enormous challenge in negotiating her way as a contemporary Indigenous artist in a world of English print literacy. I wonder why successive education systems have failed her and how it is that she has such a sophisticated understanding of the modes through which her cultural knowledge can be translated for a broader Australian audience.

Vignette Four

The fourth vignette comes from a longitudinal study of how new teachers in rural and regional Australia learn to do their work, and how they learn about the places and communities in which they begin teaching. In an analysis of the data from the first year of the study, we found that the classroom was the fundamental place of learning for new teachers in their first year of full time work. Susan1 works in a school she described as being 'in a low socio-economic area and as much as I hate to say it, it's like our school takes all the rejects from everywhere else, the ones that get expelled. And it's a high Indigenous population too at the school'.

She spent her first few weeks of teaching establishing relationships with the children because she believed this was fundamental to their learning. Her main concern was that in her school there was very little relationship between the school and the parents, and programs that were initiated in the school were not carried over into the home. This was a two-way problem because it was difficult for some children to draw on their out of school experiences in their classroom learning. The problem was particularly relevant to her literacy teaching:

 I do base a lot of stuff on language experience where I'm getting
 the kids to actually talk to me and tell me about what they want to
 do and then I'm transferring that, whether that be into writing or
 however the lesson is going to go. But then again socially that's
 probably a weakness for a lot of them. Especially with the Koori2
 kids that is.

I was surprised at this response because Susan had just finished telling me how the Aboriginal children have lots of aunties and cousins and big social networks outside of school. I imagined they would have lots to talk and write about. She explained, however, that drawing on Koori children's experiences and stories is not possible in the school classroom because of the 'big separation between school and family and community and school'. To elaborate on this idea Susan told me the following story:

 I know one of my Koori students finds it really, really hard to
 speak out loud and write because she writes exactly how she would
 say it. So the language is very, very different. She's a pretty shy
 kid so getting her to talk you have to make sure you remind her,
 you need to look at me when you're talking to me, you need to put
 your head up, and I need to see your lips and your eyes so that I
 know you are focused on me and then you can tell me.... she's very
 reluctant, because the two previous years she's been at school
 she's always been told that, don't speak like that, or don't do
 this or don't do that, so she's become more and more withdrawn and
 reluctant to speak which is a shame because she's a fantastic
 little kid and her writing is excellent. Like the imagination on
 her is fantastic. But because she, the way the school system is
 they need the kids to conform to their way of doing things.

Susan believes that it is really hard for this student to speak out loud, and to write, because 'the language is very, very, different'. This language, however, is not an Indigenous language but the child's Aboriginal English. On the other hand the child is described as a fantastic little kid with excellent writing abilities. It is hard for this child to speak and write because she is different, and that difference is seen in a negative light by the teachers in the school. This language difference is further recognised as a difference in her body, in Cope and Kalantzis's terms, her 'gestures' are culturally different. Even this new teacher, with a sympathetic approach, attempts to manage the differences in the body of this young Indigenous learner as she takes up the challenge to teach her the proper learner's body in the space of the classroom.

Literacy practices in this school, as in all social contexts, are about much more than learning to read and write. The new teacher, the child, the school, the community, and the education system, are fixed in set of social relations premised on a separation between school and community that the new teacher believes cannot be bridged. The new teacher can see this because she is not yet completely socialised into the belief that it is the child who has failed rather than the complex and difficult set of social relations that confronts her. Ultimately, even in this enthusiastic new teacher's eyes, the Indigenous child must be forced to recognise her failure because 'the school system needs the kids to conform to their way of doing things'. She explained that the child's school report must identify that she has failed to achieve the benchmark in literacy standards: 'In many cases it may be the illiteracy of the classroom that is unable to read the world of a child whose culture and language exchange is not exactly that of the teacher' (Phillips & Healy, 2004, p. 96). If I imagine this story happening differently, according to Daphne's model of learning to move between multiple modes of literacy, the outcomes might have been different.

Discussion

The quote about the multiliteracies that students need to learn in a context of increasing cultural and linguistic diversity (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000, p. 14) encompasses all of the dimensions that I have observed as characteristic in the above vignettes. The only difference is that I would argue that it is teachers who need to learn multiliteracy pedagogies rather than the students. In order to understand what it is that teachers need to learn it is important to articulate what it is that the learners in these case studies teach.

Learners needed to move between different language registers according to social context in all cases. In the Yurri yurri book Daphne made it apparent that in telling her story it was critical to attend to code switching between different languages that belonged in different social situations. The Indigenous child in the new teacher study needed to learn to move between different language registers. While Cope and Kalantzis acknowledge the importance of different iconic and visual meanings, Daphne locates these iconic and visual meanings in relation to both oral stories and written text; it is the relationships between these that matter. The 'variations in gestural relationships among people, language and material objects' is well exemplified by the mine workers' spatial literacies, developed in the relationship between worker, mine, body, and language. Safety trainers in the company need to learn from them.

In all of these cases it is the relationship between the different modes of literacy that is critical to understanding the process of meaning making and literacy learning. I would argue therefore, that the variations in languages, symbols, and gestures exemplified in these case studies are not multiliteracies, but are more usefully understood as modes of literacy. These modes of literacy are in an important relationship to each other and the most important element of literacy pedagogy is for teachers to learn to facilitate the processes of moving between them, the processes of translation. In a sense the concept of multiliteracy mitigates against this because it encourages teachers to think that they can add on all sorts of different literacies--eco-literacies, computer literacies, visual literacies, and so on. But, unless teachers can facilitate the movement between the different modes of literacy we will be fixed in the same set of social relations that are exemplified in the new teacher story.

For all of the learners in these vignettes there was a significant relationship between the different modes of literacy and standard literacy practices of reading and writing. All of the learners were interested in achieving the reading and writing competencies that were required in the different social contexts in which they were situated. For all of them, however, they were faced with the dilemma of what is lost and what is gained from learning to read and write in standard English. Literacy is fundamentally tied to identity and social and cultural practice and the different modes of cultural expression are a significant aspect of social and cultural identities.

Conclusions

The concept of multiliteracies is a useful beginning point for considering the particular literacy pedagogies and issues that the ethnographic stories in this paper raise. It provides a useful alternative to the traditional, print-based understandings of literacy that are enshrined in curriculum documents around Australia. The concept of multiliteracies, however, still hides the fundamental link between the way people make meaning in the world and the tools they use to communicate their meanings. I have proposed in this paper that by taking up the concept of multiliteracies, and exploring it in relation to socially marginalised learners, we can see how these learners already apply a concept of multiliteracies in practice, and that this provides a basis for dialogue with them. It is the relationships between the different literacies that are critical, including the relationship to standard print literacy. A pedagogy of multiliteracies, then, must facilitate the process of moving between the different literacies. I have identified this as a process of translation, a process that socially marginalised learners are well practised in.

In these case studies it was the teachers who needed to learn from the students rather than the students who needed to learn. For the new teacher in the case study, it is the policy and practices of literacy benchmarking that ultimately block this learning. The new teacher identifies an unbridgeable separation between the school and community and the school and the family. She is unable to recognise that the Koori child brings the community and its cultural practices into the school in the form of her literacy practices. Like Daphne, this child already performs complex code switching. She speaks her home language and practices her familiar body gestures. Unlike other Koori children who show more obvious signs of disengagement, she translates this into print literacy as a highly motivated, enthusiastic writer with a 'fantastic imagination'. She does this, however, in the language she speaks, so in the process of benchmarking, the child must be marked a failure.

If, as teachers and teacher educators, we think of literacy as always an act of translation, we can understand learning literacy as always about moving between the different modes and forms of meaning making and expression. This begins in early childhood when we move from inchoate sensory experience to forms of representation, expressed initially in gesture, then sounds, and finally marks on a page, later differentiated into drawing and writing. This is not a developmental pathway in which we lose all that precedes print literacy but we continue to move between all of these modalities, including embodied experience. To understand the meaning of acquiring standard print literacy we need to understand the multiple acts of translation that are required in the movements between the different literacies that are so well exemplified in Daphne's book. We need to understand the losses and the gains for individuals and cultural groups in relation to acquiring standard print literacy and we also need to provide technologies that facilitate those translations. We need to encourage teachers to take up a stance of unknowing and to provide them with the support for this learning once they begin full time teaching. We need to revise our literacy policies to bring them into line with the acts of translation required of literacy in a contemporary globalised society.

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Margaret Somerville

MONASH UNIVERSITY