Introduction: literacy, place, environment.

Unsworth, Len ; Baxter, David ; Buckland, Corinne 等

Literacy studies have increasingly been drawn in recent times to the concept of place as a new organising principle for practice and for pedagogy. This has been linked to what has been variously formulated as 'place-based education' and 'place-conscious education', by education scholars such as David Gruenewald and others. This in turn is part of an important new development across a broad spectrum of fields of enquiry, embracing the humanities and social sciences and indeed reaching into the sciences. 'Place', Gruenewald (2003a, p. 622) writes, 'has recently become a focus for enquiry across a variety of disciplines, from architecture, ecology, geography and anthropology, to philosophy, sociology, literary theory, psychology, and cultural studies.' This is because, as the geographer Tim Cresswell (2004, p. 11) has written, place is 'a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world'. It seems only appropriate then, that place should become of specific interest and concern in the field of education.

The keyword here is place. Place matters, we want to hereby affirm. Places matter. They matter in literacy education and literacy studies, and in the ongoing challenge of developing a literate population, and of drawing children into the many-splendoured worlds of literacy. Of course it is not simply literacy per se that is our concern--rather, we agree with Barton and Hamilton (2000, p. 12) that 'whilst some reading and writing is carried out as an end in itself, typically literacy is a means to some other end'. Literacy that matters is addressed to the World, and is about making a difference in some fashion or another. This is the territory and more generally the claim that is now customarily associated with the New Literacy Studies, and within this, with notions such as 'critical literacy', 'multiliteracies' and 'situated literacies'--fields typically associated with broad social justice agendas and socially critical curricula, but not necessarily connected to place or the environment.

This Special Issue of AJLL does something that is, as far as we are aware, quite unique in the literature: it brings together the fields of literacy education and environmental education, all too often two quite distinct enterprises in curriculum and schooling. In particular, it seeks to encourage literacy educators to engage with the challenges facing all of us today and tomorrow with regard to the question of the environment, the eco-systemic context for living and learning alike. Although its point of origin and its stepping-off point remain literacy studies in education and beyond, it nonetheless pushes at the boundaries of the field as it has been constituted to date, in seeking to extend the field's attention to what has been called the 'more-than-human world'. In so doing, it opens up new possibilities for literacy education and literacy studies.

In similar fashion, the Special Issue seeks to contribute to environmental education and environmental studies. To date, that field has been notably lacking in explicit or systematic attention to literacy, and more generally to textuality and textual practice, as crucial resources in and for environmental learning. An important exception here is the work of Andrew Stables (e.g., Stables & Bishop, 2001). Where literacy has been addressed at all, it has been almost exclusively within the frame of reference of particular notions of 'environmental literacy' or more broadly 'scientific literacy', which in fact we have come to see as intensely problematical concepts. Here, we attempt to present a more explicit, systematic engagement between scholarly and professional work in literacy with the emerging mega-problem of 'nature' and the environment. That is, our concern here is with the environment as an object of literacy. What are the literacy challenges associated with developing what has been called 'environmental agency' (Lane et al., 2005), particularly in children and young people, and in building environmental knowledge that is personally and socially meaningful? Moreover, places matter too in environmental education and environmental studies, we suggest, although to what extent the concept of place has been significant or influential in curriculum-theoretical and practical-professional developments in this area remains debatable. Nonetheless, bringing together 'place-conscious education' --and even what has been called 'a critical pedagogy of place' (Gruenewald, 2003b)--and environmental studies per se may well be an important step forward in developing eco-ethical consciousness in our children and an informed eco-critical citizenry.

The immediate context for the essays that follow is an extraordinary long-term initiative of the Primary English Teachers Association (PETA), working in collaboration with the Murray-Darling Basin Commission (MDBC). Since 1993, PETA and the MDBC have been co-producing a program directed at primary-aged children and their teachers located in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB), consisting of a range of materials from annual anthologies of student writing and artwork to teachers' guidelines and units of work, under the title Special Forever: An Environmental Communications Program. Each year, primary students and their teachers in schools all across the Basin work on specific classroom, school and community projects, with the aim being to develop and enhance both literacy and environmental learning in rich and productive ways.

Two points are worth noting. Firstly, while the program began as a writing, art and literacy project, over time it has become increasingly oriented toward a more overtly and actively environmentalist agenda. Secondly, the decision was taken at the outset to locate the program within 'English' rather than 'science'. The rationale for this was a recognition that the traditional emphasis in environmental studies on the sciences was proving inadequate in terms of encouraging community engagement and developing public communication capacities:

 Changing the vehicle for the discussion of sustainability from
 science to English classes ... enabled it to be discussed as a
 sociocultural issue and to be considered holistically, rather than
 a series of isolated technical problems. Significant emotional and
 values issues related to quality of life, the degradation of
 natural and cultural resources, and the future can be discussed.
 (Eastburn, 2001, p. 10)

The program has been remarkably successful. Fourteen annual anthologies of children's writing and artwork have been produced, along with a host of other material, with extensive involvement of primary schools located across the Basin. More directly to the point here: this has been a literacy-educational initiative, involving primary teaching, integrated curriculum and environmental learning.

Recognising the program's success and also its curriculum-historical importance, a consortium of researchers from the University of South Australia and Charles Sturt University has been engaged since 2004 in an Australian Research Council project with PETA, designed to respond to challenges that have been identified in the conduct of Special Forever to date. Key among these has been the need to engage students in literacy practices that move beyond observation and celebration of the environment towards a critical engagement with the social and environmental challenges facing the Basin. How might young people in schools today be empowered and enabled to act on and in the environment to improve the Basin's sustainability? Even more specifically: What literacies and pedagogies would best support this? The purpose of the River Literacies project, as it has come to be called, has been to add an explicit research component to the work of Special Forever, with the aim of thereby extending and improving the quality and range of literacy and environmental teaching that occurs in primary schools.

The Project has had two principal strands, one a discourse-analytic study of the children's writing and artwork in the total archive of the anthologies, along with various other material and indeed 'multimodal' forms of production and representation, and the other an action-research study of teachers' work and classroom/curriculum practice. Various aspects of this work overall are explored in this Special Issue, in effect constituting an interim report on the Project to date. We firmly believe that there is much in the combination of Special Forever and the River Literacies project that is of direct interest to AJLL's constituency and its readership.

The essays gathered together here share a common concern: they all have as their principal point of focus the Murray Darling Basin (MDB), as a distinctive bio-region occupying a vast expanse of land and water and associated forms of settlement and industry extending across four Australian States and one Territory. In recent times the MDB has become a matter of explicit national attention and debate, although it needs to be said that it has long been acknowledged as being of major economic, cultural and environmental importance. For all of the essays, focusing on the MDB is part of a more specific concern with the relationship between literacy and the environment, or between literacy education and environmental studies--with bringing literacy-educational scholarship to bear on the environmental challenge that looms large in all our lives, as Australians and as citizens more generally of a now thoroughly globalised world. With a fundamental concern for place, for places, at the heart of all of them, and hence of the Special Issue as a whole, these essays are hopefully frontline indicators of a new professional and academic interest in the nexus between literacy work and environmental learning, and more broadly with what we now want to describe as ecosocial sustainability.

Four of the following papers are drawn directly from the River Literacies project. They engage different aspects of its work to date, are variously cross-referenced, and should be read as explorations and 'essays' rather than as any kind of definitive statement, or 'finding'. As much as anything else, they aim to open up discussion and debate, as well as report on some of the rich complexities of the literacy-environmental work of the teachers and children engaged in Special Forever. The other paper published here, by Margaret Somerville, is not part of the River Literacies project, at least formally. An adult educator, Margaret brings to this forum a fascinating history of work addressed to environmental, Indigenous and women's studies, and a quite specific research interest in the MDB. We see her as very much part of our own 'place literacy' network, moreover, and we are very pleased that she accepted our invitation to participate in this Special (Forever) issue.

References

Barton, D. & Hamilton, M. (2000). Literacy practices. In D. Barton, M. Hamilton, & R. Ivanic (Eds.), Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context (pp. 7-15). London & New York: Routledge.

Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: A Short Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.

Eastburn, D. (2001). Salt and Vinegar: Education for Sustainability in the Murray-Darling Basin 1983-1998. Occasional Paper No.8, Canberra: Nature and Society Forum.

Gruenewald, D. (2003a). Foundations of place: A multidisciplinary framework for place-conscious education. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3), 619-654.

Gruenewald, D. (2003b). The best of two worlds: A critical pedagogy of place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), 3-12.

Lane, R., Lucas, D., Vanclay, F., Henry, S. Wills, J. & Coates, I. (2005). 'Committing to Place' at the local scale: The potential of youth programs for promoting community participation in regional natural resource management. Australian Geographer, 36(3), 351-367.

Stables, A. & Bishop, K. (2001). Weak and strong conceptions of environmental literacy: Implications for environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 7(1), 89-97.