Literacy, places and identity: the complexity of teaching environmental communications.

Kerkham, Lyn ; Comber, Barbara

In this article we explore the relationship between literacy, place, and teacher identity as they intersect around Special Forever, a professional learning program with a focus on environmental communications and place based education. Teachers participating in Special Forever speak from different positions, histories, and alliances as local landowners, farmers, users of Murray-Darling Basin resources, and environmental activists; they teach in places to which they are connected in multiple ways and in which they have particular investments that shape the design of their environmental communications curriculum.

We draw on an analysis of the Special Forever Guidelines for schools to discern how the Murray-Darling Basin is represented within the program, and read this alongside interview data in which teachers speak about the complex relationships they have with 'their place' in the Murray-Darling Basin. We suggest that the interrelationships between the politics of places, the politics of literacy pedagogy, and the multiple subject positions that teachers negotiate deserve closer attention if we are to develop more grounded approaches to critical literacy and place-based pedagogies. Furthermore, we argue that an important element for making literacy critical is attending to the politics of the places that are important to children and their teachers.

Introduction

In a period where literacy education has come under serious and continued public scrutiny and where critical educators are enduring a backlash (see Doecke, Howie & Sawyer, 2006) against versions of literacy which purport to deal with justice, equity or anything remotely political, it is important to consider how much room to move teachers have in designing their curriculum (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001). Literacy teaching, whether governments acknowledge it or wish it otherwise, has always been political. Literacy is always about something; it is not simply a process; people don't communicate about nothing. How teachers orient themselves towards the objects of study, where they are located, and the ways in which teachers' out-of-school lives and histories impact upon the design and delivery of their curriculum, however, receive too little attention. When the object of study is itself a focus of debate, such as is the case with 'the state of the environment', the political nature of teacher decision-making may be more obvious.

At the heart of this paper is our desire to explore the relationships between literacy teaching, place and teacher identity. We are interested in what difference, if any, place makes to teaching--where teachers are located, their relationships with that place, in and out of school, and their identification with particular places. This paper represents our preliminary exploration into these areas. (1) Our involvement in researching the fifteen-year-long Special Forever environmental communications program presents us with an extraordinary opportunity to hear how participating teachers understand their work as situated in their particular communities, in specific places across the MDB, and their accounts of perceived changes over time. (2) Rarely in educational research, or in literacy studies specifically, are teachers' decision-making and pedagogical practices considered across time and space and as placed within a wider socio-political and material ecology.

As part of the larger River Literacies research project (3) we interviewed the Special Forever coordinators about their involvement in the program, their environmental autobiographies, their histories as literacy educators, and their takes on environmental communications. We asked them to provide us with a retrospective account of how and why they had come into Special Forever, to discuss an artefact which represented their work in the program, and to give us a sense of how the program had evolved during their period of involvement. We also considered the rich archival data developed throughout the program's history.

We begin with a brief discussion of selected literature concerned with teachers' professional identities to indicate our interest in teachers' stories as located in different discourses, as narrating multiple selves. We then consider how Special Forever represents itself, and the Murray-Darling Basin, in the published Guidelines for Schools; we focus on the Special Forever Murray-Darling Basin writing project guidelines for schools, published in 1993, which established the aims and purposes of the program, and comment in general terms on the Guidelines published from 1993-2003. In the third section we turn to teachers' different entry points into the Special Forever program and illustrate how their different histories and localities relate to their reported approaches to teaching environmental communications. We conclude that place is a significant dimension of these teachers' professional and personal identities and suggest that this raises further questions for literacy studies.

Teacher identity--a place-free zone?

Over the past two decades, a number of qualitative studies of teachers' professional identities have produced detailed understandings about teaching and teachers' professional selves (e.g. Clandinin & Connelly, 1995, 1996; Goodson & Cole, 1993; Nias & Aspinwall, 1995). In these studies, narratives of teaching experience tend to interweave the personal and professional lives of teachers to produce a unified and stable teacher self. Also alluded to is the interplay of social, cultural and personal relations that impact on teachers' sense of professional self, yet without an explicit focus on place as constitutive in those relations.

Rejecting the notion of a unified self, recent studies informed by feminist poststructuralism argue that teacher selves are always in process, produced and reproduced through social interactions and daily negotiations in classrooms and schools (e.g., Britzman, 1994; Marsh, 2002a, 2002b). Such studies locate teachers in their professional contexts and describe their struggles to negotiate boundaries between competing discourses about what and how a teacher should be. Identities are represented as multiple and shifting, neither singular nor fixed. This theorising of the self as a site of disunity and tension generates more complex understandings of the ongoing identity work that teachers do; later in the paper, we hear Special Forever coordinators speak from shifting subject positions in their narratives of complex and uneasy relations around difficult environmental questions in particular places.

Our own work in critical literacy has considered the complex identity work that teachers do and how their work engages with the locale in which they are situated (Comber, 2006; Comber, Thomson & Wells, 2001; Comber & Nixon, 2005), without, however, fully analysing their complex place histories. Place remains a relatively unexplored dimension of teacher identity and professional practice. The few exceptions include studies of immigrant teachers (Elbaz-Luwisch, 2004), newly graduated teachers (Santoro, Kamler & Reid, 2001), and Maguire's (2001, 2005) studies of working-class women teachers. Maguire asks 'How do they place themselves--as women, as teachers, as working class women who teach?' She explores the 'contingency, historical specificity and ongoing-ness' of teacher identity formation, illustrating how identity is marked by class and place, and manifested in language, speech and appearance: the women she interviewed 'are placing and being placed by embodied factors as well as by cultural artefacts--and these are points of distinction that separate out groups of people' (Maguire, 2005, p. 10). Maguire's notion that identity is placed and positioned in a culture and a history is a move towards taking account of place as deeply implicated in identity formation and teachers' work.

Elbaz-Luwisch (2004, p. 388) writes that what is missing in the research literature is 'a sense of the teacher teaching in a place--a given location that is not only specific, describable and distinct from other locations, but that holds meaning, that matters to the persons who inhabit it'. This argument resonates with Lefebvre's conceptualisation of the inherent spatiality of human life (Soja, 1996, p. 2); place can neither be separated from our experience of social relations, nor relegated to the periphery of explanations of historical or social events. As McDowell (1999, p. 7) argues:

 social practices, including the wide range of social interactions
 at a variety of sites and places ... and ways of thinking about and
 representing place are interconnected and mutually constituted. We
 all act in relation to our intentions and beliefs, which are always
 culturally shaped and historically and spatially positioned.

And literacy as a social practice, as identity work, is always situated. Gruenewald (2003b) argues that 'places make us', and moreover, that place is 'profoundly pedagogical' and that our ways of knowing and being are deeply related to lived experiences of place. 'Places produce and teach particular ways of thinking about and being in the world. They tell us the way things are, even when they operate pedagogically beneath a conscious level' (Gruenewald, 2003b, p. 627). Further, he suggests that places 'teach us about how the world works and how our lives fit into the spaces we occupy ... places make us: as occupants of particular places with particular attributes, our identity, our possibilities are shaped' (2003b, p. 621).

We tentatively explore this notion of ontology of place as it connects to teacher identity and literacy pedagogy as we consider the ways in which teachers who are multiply situated undertake environmental communications work with their students in different locations in the Murray-Darling Basin. Before turning to the teachers' accounts of their environmental communications work, we briefly consider how the Murray-Darling Basin is represented and the stances towards place and the environment that are evident in the Special Forever Guidelines. We consider these texts as examples of an authorised standpoint with which teachers had to negotiate and relate to both their sense of place and their priorities for literacy.

Special Forever Murray-Darling Basin Writing Project Guidelines for Schools: Competing discourses about the Murray-Darling Basin

The Guidelines, sent to all 1600 primary schools in the Basin up until 2003, provide themes and planning ideas for integrating Special Forever into the primary curriculum. They include information about the Basin, 'largely as background for teachers' to develop '[children's] understanding of how their locality fits into the larger picture of the Murray-Darling catchment area' (The Primary English Teaching Association & The Murray-Darling Basin Commission 1993, p. 9). The Special Forever Guidelines then are intended for a specifically-located teacher audience who work within the Murray-Darling Basin; thus to some extent these curriculum materials are situated. Unlike other similar materials for teachers, their distribution depends on where the school is located within the bio-region, rather than within political jurisdictions.

The Basin, an extensive catchment area that spans most of inland southeastern Australia, is mapped across state borders. The description of the Basin invokes it as a 'special' geographical location, listing its natural heritage features, climatic zones, fauna and flora. But it is also a social space in which uneasy histories and post-colonial economies and politics criss-cross within and beyond its (imagined) boundaries. The Basin is both a 'precious resource' and a damaged place; there are hints of tensions around different priorities for, and investments in, management and conservation of the Basin's scarce resources.

These competing representations of the Basin and its 'environmental challenges' have implications for what teachers attend to in their environmental communications curriculum, as well as the kinds of texts that teachers and students produce for Special Forever. The Guidelines, read as multi-vocal or heteroglossic (Bakhtin, 1981) texts, suggest the ongoing struggle over meaning, politics and responsibility, and at the same time open up spaces for teachers to design curriculum that invites students to explore 'their own important slice of the Basin' in a variety of ways. This becomes particularly salient when considering the ways in which teachers name and frame 'special places' and 'environmental problems' in their environmental communications curriculum, as well as the different potentials for teaching in, about and for the environment (Bishop, Reid, Stables, Lencastre, Stoer & Soetaert, 2000; King, 2000), as we discuss later.

Special Forever constructs the Basin as an object of study, and an object of literacy, particularly the literary (see Cormack & Green this volume). From the outset Special Forever described itself as 'a major writing project' (e.g., The Primary English Teaching Association & The Murray-Darling Basin Commission 1993, p. 5), with an emphasis on communicating beyond the classroom and the school. Providing students with 'real purposes' and 'real audiences' for their writing, and 'education of the present and future custodians of the Murray and Darling Rivers and their tributaries [which] is crucial to the Basin's future' (The Primary English Teaching Association & The Murray-Darling Basin Commission 1993, p. 6) are two principles that continue to shape Special Forever and the work that Special Forever teachers and coordinators undertake 15 years on.

In the first years of the program priority was given to writing in a range of genres, both expressive and factual. Teachers were encouraged to have children 'not only think but write' about their 'pride in and concern for their own important slice of the Basin, (The Primary English Teaching Association & The Murray-Darling Basin Commission 1993, p. 6). The imagined teacher reader was positioned predominantly as one who facilitated children's personal response and expressive writing in the early years of the program, although factual writing was included. In 1993 a discourse of 'specialness' and a somewhat romantic view of childhood and the environment dominated, but discursive shifts over the history of the program have influenced, and been influenced by, a stronger and more overt orientation to active eco-citizenship. Knobel and Lankshear in their introduction to the Changing Landscapes (The Primary English Teaching Association, 2003), for example, foreground 'active citizenship' as key to sustainable futures, both environmental and social, in the Murray-Darling Basin. They write that 'active citizenship':

 is supported by experiences that teach students to live
 productively, responsibly and sustainably within a range of
 environments. It also takes seriously the need to provide spaces
 within the curriculum for students to explore what it means to be a
 committed and participatory citizen--not one necessarily bound by
 regional or national borders. (The Primary English Teaching
 Association, 2003, p. 3)

Our detailed critical discourse analysis of the fifteen years of Special Forever corpus of anthologies and guidelines indicates that over the course of the program thus far there has been a significant discursive shift away from an unproblematically conservationist construction of a 'special' place towards an emphasis on environmental sustainability. It is important to understand that teachers volunteered to be coordinators of Special Forever and that teachers around the Basin have submitted children's art and drawings (and other artefacts) under the auspices of a changing view of the Murray-Darling Basin with implications for their teaching of literacy and environmental communications. Here we have simply summarised the major trends and shifts in order to provide some context for the teachers' accounts of their engagements with Special Forever. We now consider their multiple motivations for being involved, their experiences of the program and the complexity of teaching environmental communications in their sites, noting that teachers living and working in different parts of the Murray-Darling Basin are differently positioned with respect to curriculum opportunities and constraints.

Different entry points into Special Forever

Many of the Special Forever coordinators were initially attracted to the Special Forever program because it promoted the publication of children's writing and artworks in the annual anthology. It was the literacy, or at least the representational, component of the environmental communications curriculum, the opportunity for children to produce what they saw as 'real writing', that originally engaged them.

 Real challenges, real opportunities, real person, real audience,
 yeah, I think that's the important thing--purpose, audience, the
 challenge, and the cooperation and collaboration, and it's
 inclusive--everyone has got something to offer, and I think that's
 important, it's inclusive.

 Special Forever was providing an avenue for the ... kids, to use
 their end product so that they'd have an audience for it, and a
 purpose for it ... Special Forever was something they enjoyed, and
 they enjoyed seeing their work in the book.

The coordinators reported that the anthologies of children's published work were very popular with parents and the broader local community. Clearly for teachers it was consistent with the 'conference' approach to writing, dominant at that time, which emphasised authentic publication of children's writing as a goal.

Confirming the discursive shifts we had noticed in the Guidelines, teachers also talked about the different 'sides' of Special Forever--the 'literacy side', the 'scientific side', the 'environmental side'--as having prominence at different times, with a stronger environmental focus emerging gradually:

 when it first started, it was very much just in favour of the kids
 appreciating their environment, and what were the good things about
 their environment, what made it special, and then it went on to the
 special people, and then it's moved on to the environmental focus
 ... Initially if you'd said it was an environmental project in
 1993, you wouldn't have got many people on board, so making it a
 writing one and then bringing it more round to an environmental
 focus I think sort of got people on board.

The initial appeal of the program for many teachers arose less from the politics of the environment and more from a romantic and aesthetic tradition, sometimes invoking unproblematised approaches to conservation. Yet in other cases, teachers had been recruited as coordinators because they had a reputation for their knowledge about the environment and their commitment to environmental action:

 I was asked ... if I would take on the role of Special Forever
 coordinator ... because of the work I was doing in my classroom, a
 lot of integrated curriculum work, involved in Special Forever, and
 it always ended in some sort of action--community action was the end
 result, so it wasn't just the writing, it was the action that
 became important. Yes, and it's important, it's always been
 important to me. So with the PhosWatch, we went through the process
 of making alternatives to dishwashing detergents and that sort of
 thing, and go back to using things like bicarb to clean windows,
 without the chemicals, so changing practice, and from that the
 message got home.

We note that teachers read the Guidelines and activated the text in different ways; this teacher, already a committed environmentalist, emphasised environmental action from the first year of the program, even though our analysis of the Guidelines suggests that this was understated at the time. From the start this teacher saw the potential of Special Forever as action-oriented and as attending to specific identified environmental issues. She was able to bring together her approach to the explicit teaching of literacy with her critical orientation to the environment. Her resultant curriculum design and associated literacy and communication tasks were developed with the discursive resources of environmental science. Her students were making, advertising and selling bio-degradable cleaning agents, and bartering their compost and worm castings.

Special Forever provided different entry points for different teachers and different kinds of curriculum spaces for the emergence of various pedagogies under the name of environmental communications, and indeed over time teachers' positions changed, became more complicated or were maintained, shifts which are also evident in the official guidelines.

Teacher identities in place

Teachers who live and work in the Murray-Darling Basin and who take on the role of Special Forever coordinators in their region grapple with complex relationships with the pedagogies of place and indeed the politics of the pedagogies of places. Their own politics and practices are inextricably related to their histories as indeed they are to their current ways of life in and out of school. In addition, they take into account the authorised approaches as indicated in curriculum documents and in guidelines for programs such as Special Forever in assembling pedagogical resources for environmental education and literacy. In the following quotes, two of the long-term coordinators reflect on these dilemmas and work towards a standpoint:

 Trying to influence other teachers in our region to be involved in
 Special Forever, and be involved in environmental education--a lot
 of people think you're just a greenie. Yeah, I am a greenie but I'm
 not a radical greenie, I'm dead against radical greenies, because
 my family have been making their living off the land for
 generations. To see the importance of looking after the environment
 and planting more trees, and what have you, and having a good
 balance ...

 I guess I was always a bit of a greenie, perhaps, myself, but now I
 guess I can understand more fully the balance that we need to
 create, and that there's not a clear answer to any of these
 problems. I'm also very aware that this ... more aware about
 decision making, the political decision making, and that sort of
 thing, and how people are very concerned about themselves, rather
 than being able to see the whole picture, and particularly when it
 comes to their living.

How teachers name themselves in relation to the environment, the orientations that they openly adhere to and those they handle with care are complex matters. Above we see two different teachers explore the 'greenie' label with reference to their own environmental politics. As people who make their living off the land, they argue for 'balance' and against 'radical greenies'. They claim 'greenie' status tentatively. Teachers repeatedly pointed out that ways of making a living in regional areas made them rethink their stance on a given environmental issue. Hence teachers report that their own histories and present locations play a part in what they tackle in the curriculum and how they approach it. 'Balance' was a keyword when they described their curriculum, often designing tasks (debates, talk-back radio, written discussions) to ensure that students were required to consider different points of view about an issue, including economic, environmental and social.

Given our interest in critical literacy, we note the way that teachers' location in specific places and history of relationships with those places relates to the standpoint they take towards environmental issues. Here one teacher articulates the impossibility of being a 'radical greenie' when one's life is so deeply connected with the land; the other, a teacher who was married to a farmer who ran stock in an area in the Murray-Darling Basin affected by drought and the closure of the town's major industry, juggles her 'greenie' perspective with an awareness of the economic realities of her local peers. Working on environmental communications for these teachers meant helping students to understand competing perspectives on environmental problems and to aim for balance. Thus taking a critical environmental perspective is not easy when one lives within the Murray-Darling Basin and when one's livelihood depends on it. Yet, as we discuss below, developing a more complex ecological understanding about their place in relation to others allowed teachers to design complex and challenging environmental studies.

Other teachers believe that some issues are just too hot to handle in terms of the potential of local backlash and also in terms of their identification with 'the farming community':

 a few years ago, yeah, the water issue would be a big issue, but
 I'm also from a farming background, so I take the farmers' side....
 And from a rice farming area too, so, you know, the water issues,
 you know, I wouldn't be rocking the boat in our area, I'd be
 agreeing with the farmers in our area, so ...

In the statement above, the teacher points to the importance of the 'water issue', as she describes it, before observing that she wouldn't be 'rocking the boat'. She does not ignore her farming history, or her current situatedness in a 'rice farming area too.' In this instance her affinity with the farming community results in her taking the farmers' side. It matters who the teacher is, how she is known in the community and where she is as she decides to avoid the central topic of water rights. Places are sites of discursive intersections and contestations. Her particular place in a rice-growing farming community offers some affordances for place-based pedagogies but her reading of the politics of her situation means that this particular option is not explored. The issues that teachers believe that they can properly tackle pedagogically are at the heart of an environmental communications curriculum. It is difficult to imagine how teachers could ignore their own identities and situatedness, yet some approaches to critical literacy do downplay teachers' histories, standpoints and positions. The extent to which teachers can approach an issue as the object of pedagogical study without the intrusion of their own placed histories and investments remains an open question.

How teachers name and frame themselves (as greenies, farmers, activists) and the environment (in terms of making a living, issues, problems) is significant in understanding how teacher identity impacts on curriculum and pedagogical design:

 They've also seen me as advocate for environment issues where two
 years ago--we live on a property right on the ... river, and
 upstream from us there was an issue where the local football club
 wanted to change the sporting ground to a full-blown football field
 where they were going to have to remove a huge number of trees, and
 I fought that, up against local members and a lot of local big-wigs
 that thought that they would win, but it showed the children that
 one little lone voice, and that you could then get other people on
 side and get them to see the issue rather than just going 'Oh well,
 I don't think I'll even go and bother to have a look as to what's
 going to happen'.... so I think the children see that, that they've
 got a teacher that's not only teaching them about issues, but
 someone that actually stands up for local issues as well.

The environment is an integral part of this teacher's curriculum and central to her personal and professional identities. She is prepared to go public about a decision impacting on her own environment; indeed she sees it as part of her pedagogical role to take up an activist stance on this matter and involves herself in visible local political action. We see here, too, traces of her environmental autobiography as a riverside-dweller. In the process of participating in her environmental communications curriculum, young people are inducted into particular relationships with places--particular environments--with which their teacher identifies. Environmental psychologists stress the importance of childhood environmental biographies in adults taking up activist positions with respect to environmental sustainability (see Heft & Chawla, 2006 for a review), that is they argue that actual physical connections with the environment in childhood are crucial in forming activist subjectivities.

Yet teacher identities are not fixed and many teachers report that their approach had changed over the time they had been involved with Special Forever. Learning more about the Murray-Darling Basin as an ecological system had complicated their views and their practice with colleagues, as two teachers comment:

 it's far more now than getting children's writing published. My own
 environmental knowledge has increased enormously and probably even
 some of my ideas have changed over the years, through my
 involvement. Where ... just going to visit Goolwa, and sort of
 seeing what happens there, being part of the Living Murray Debate
 and having to really question my ideas living on a farm, yeah, that
 was really challenging, and every time I learn more, I think my
 ideas are challenged further, yeah, lots of debate, lots of
 discussion.

 When Special Forever first came in people were saying 'We're not
 part of the Murray-Darling Basin.' But we're right on the edge of
 it, we get our water from it, our food from it, and so we then
 looked at how we impact, and what the impact is on us and the
 people up river, so that's really helped.

The environmental frame in these cases broadens as the teachers came to understand ecological relationships beyond the local, and debates about water at cross-state levels. How teachers frame the environment as an object of study affects how they design literacy activities within an environmental communications curriculum. The recognition of bio-diversity and the complex ecological system that is the Murray-Darling Basin, results in changed curriculum design where young people investigate not only local issues but the complex interdependent relationships between people and places. These teachers begin to contest the extent to which 'place-based politics are place-bound' (Harcourt & Escobar, 2002, as cited in Horelli, 2006) and to work with young people to think beyond the here and now.

As the teachers grappled with naming their own positions and stances with respect to the environment, they were also conscious of possible differences in students' orientations to the environment and believed them to be to some degree contingent on their parents' views, locations and occupations. Pedagogical relationships are formed in particular places with children whose lives are located in places, albeit with different histories of relationships to that place:

T: I've become probably more sensitive to other people's feelings and their opinions in the community, and particularly like having town children in my class, and the farmers' children.

R: So the different positioning of the children?

T: Yes, yes, and how much they're influenced by their parents' opinions, but also how they still have the ability to come up with their own opinions, and that was quite striking, but yeah, just trying to work out a balance. Whereas I think earlier I would have just said, 'This is what should happen'.

This teacher teases out her competing hypotheses. On the one hand she believes she needs to be sensitive to whether they are 'town' or 'farmers' children; on the other hand she is surprised that the children can develop their own opinions quite apart from those of their parents. The relationships are not straightforward here. For instance, the teacher cannot assume that farmers' children will take a particular stance, but she needs to be aware that they might. She perceives the need for 'a balance'--a keyword for the coordinators located in the Basin. We would like to explore further the notions of pedagogical 'balance'; here we simply note that the multiple and competing discourses evident in the Guidelines are echoed here. There are no clear-cut and simple responses to the 'environmental challenges' that confront local communities; as with other teachers who struggle over the politics of places, meaning and responsibility, this teacher broadens the scope of her teaching, and pushes the boundaries of what she does within the parameters of Special Forever. She avoids taking up a normative position about what should happen with respect to specific environmental issues where different community members may have opposing views. However, she is much clearer about the kinds of educational goals and long-term aspirations she has for her students:

 The most important one, I think, is getting them to think about the
 environment, and the future, and I really hope that, you know, we
 can make a difference and that these children will grow up to be
 much more aware of the environment, and hopefully some of them will
 go on to be politicians, members of water boards, on local
 councils, but just informed citizens, and I think we have a real,
 wonderful opportunity as teachers to make a difference.

It is clear that the teacher's objectives for her environmental communications curriculum are ambitious in the long term. She has taken up Special Forever's calls about the next generation being the custodians of the land. She is committed to 'making a difference' by enhancing children's awareness of the environment and ultimately to produce key decision-makers, or at least 'informed citizens'.

Teaching environmental communications: Looking ahead

In these classrooms at least, it appears that Special Forever has been the impetus for change within one generation in terms of practical action in caring for the environment. This goal was optimistically envisioned in the large-scale environmental communications strategy developed by the MDBC in the late 1980s. Eastburn (2001, p. 3), writing about 'a generation-long education strategy' that included Special Forever, notes that its aim was:

 to contribute significantly to the achievement of an informed,
 ecologically literate, empowered and active community with a Basin
 (holistic) ethic, in one generation (2015).

Led by their teachers, these children are positioned as researchers, debaters, activists, and importantly as people who have a sense of global practices with local consequences, and local practices with global effects:

 children can debate that issue [selling dairy herds to Dubai], and
 perhaps when they get into a position where they're able to
 determine what's happening in their community, they can have an
 influence on the government to say 'Look, this is not what our
 community wants. We want our milk produced locally', and hopefully
 we're empowering the children of today to do that.

 I think that's what's helped me stay involved in Special Forever,
 because I could see that we can educate the children of those
 people in the local community. They're going to be going home and
 start talking about the issues. Yeah, and even methods of
 irrigation, I think it's important that the children are educated
 on ... why there is underground irrigation and I think that's a
 local community issue.

Once again we can hear echoes of the rhetoric of 'future custodian'. These teachers are consciously equipping young people to be the next generation of informed decision-makers, even as they induct them into researching habitats and endangered species, planting trees and indigenous plants, recycling, and so on. In terms of their literacy repertoires, these children were assembling purpose-driven, audience-aware and well-researched texts of various kinds--scripts for debates, powerpoint presentations and photostories on endangered plants, animals and habitats, letters to local groups and media, radio broadcasts, advertising for alternative cleaning products and worm castings, brochures on environmental trails and more. Hence, as the subjects of environmental communications pedagogies, they were practising and accomplishing quite specific situated literacy practices with specific communication goals.

As this research project has unfolded, we have become more attuned to the ways in which teachers and students are exploring the complicated relations between identities and places, belonging and knowing. Pinar (1991, p. 165) observes that 'place as a concept has largely been absent in the curriculum literature.' He goes on to explain that the tendency of the curriculum to be abstract and homogenised, rather than specific, is partly to blame, and makes a case for a curriculum that would 'recover memory and history in ways that psychologically allow individuals to re-enter politically the public sphere in meaningful and committed ways' (Pinar, 1991, p. 174). In this paper we have illustrated how Special Forever has provided an opportunity for some of the coordinators to foreground their place in curriculum.

We further suggest that teachers' multiple relationships with place(s) play a significant part in how they think about their work: how they frame an environmental communications curriculum, how they understand their students as located (geographically and politically), and ultimately in the kinds of literacy tasks they design. We have prioritised teachers' comments about how they tackle (or not) different environmental issues as they pertain to the Murray-Darling Basin and offered a glimpse of how those decisions are made. We see this research as raising further questions for literacy studies and in particular critical literacy. How do teachers' placed identities interact with their curriculum design? As teachers move towards more critical knowledges about the environment, how do their standpoints and histories make a difference to the ways they frame tasks and give feedback? How do their particular goals for the next generation filter into their everyday situated classroom practices in the present? As social and environmental sustainability become ever larger in the intellectual landscape, these are questions that deserve close attention.

References

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). Discourse in the novel (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). In M. Holquist (Ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bishop, K., Reid, A., Stables, A., Lencastre, M., Stoer, S. & Soetaert, R. (2000). Developing environmental awareness through literature and media education: Curriculum development in the context of teachers' practice. Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 5(Spring), 268-286.

Britzman, D. (1994). Is there a problem in knowing thyself? Toward a poststructuralist view of teacher identity. In T. Shanahan (Ed.), Teachers Thinking, Teachers Knowing: Reflections on Literacy and Language Education (pp. 53-75). Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English.

Clandinin, J. & Connelly, M. (1995). Teachers' professional knowledge landscapes: Secret, sacred and cover stories. In Teachers' Professional Knowledge Landscapes (pp. 1-15). New York & London: Teachers College Press.

Clandinin, J. & Connelly, M. (1996). Teachers' professional knowledge landscapes: Teacher stories--stories of teachers--school stories--stories of schools. Educational Researcher, 25(3), 24-30.

Comber, B. (2006). Critical literacy educators at work: Examining their dispositions, discursive resources and repertoires of practice. In R. White & K. Cooper (Eds.), Practical Critical Educator: Integrating Literacy, Learning and Leadership (pp. 51-65). The Netherlands: Springer.

Comber, B. & Nixon, H. (2005). Children re-read and re-write their neighbourhoods: Critical literacies and identity work. In J. Evans (Ed.), Literacy Moves On: Using Popular Culture, New Technologies and Critical Literacy in the Primary Classroom (pp. 127-148). Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Comber, B., Nixon, H. & Reid, J. (Eds.). (2007, in press). Literacies in Place: Teaching Environmental Communications. Newtown: Primary English Teaching Association.

Comber, B., Thomson, P. & Wells, M. (2001). Critical literacy finds a 'place': Writing and social action in a neighborhood school. Elementary School Journal, 101(4), 451-464.

Doecke, B., Howie, M. & Sawyer, W. (Eds.). (2006). Only Connect: English Teaching Schooling and Community. Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press.

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. Retrieved September 7, 2005, from http://www.natsoc.org.au/html/publications/ occasionalpapers/salt.html

Elbaz-Luwisch, F. (2004). Immigrant teachers: Stories of self and place. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 17(3), 387-414.

Goodson, I. & Cole, A. (1993). Exploring the teacher's professional knowledge. In D. McLaughlin and W. Tierney (Eds.), Naming Silenced Lives: Personal Narratives and the Process of Educational Change (pp. 71-94). New York: Routledge.

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

Heft, H. & Chawla, L. (2006). Children as agents in sustainable development: An ecology of competence. In C. Spencer & M. Blades (Eds.), Children and Their Environments: Learning, Using and Designing Spaces (pp. 199-216) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Horelli, L. (2006). Urban planning with young people. In C. Spencer & M. Blades (Eds.), Children and Their Environments: Learning, Using and Designing Spaces (pp. 238-255). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

King, R. (2000). Defining literacy in a time of environmental crisis. Journal of Social Philosophy, 31(1), 68-81.

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.

Maguire, M. (2001). The cultural formation of teachers' class consciousness: Teachers in the inner city. Journal of Education Policy, 16(4), 315-331.

Maguire, M. (2005). 'Not footprints behind but footsteps forward': Working class women who teach. Gender and Education, 17(1), 3-18.

Marsh, M. (2002a). The influence of discourses on the precarious nature of mentoring. Reflective Practice 3(1), 103-115.

Marsh, M. (2002b). The shaping of Ms. Nicholi: The discursive fashioning of teacher identities. Qualitative Studies in Education, 15(3), 333-347.

McDowell, L. (1999). Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Nias, J. & Aspinwall, K. (1995). 'Composing a life': Women's stories of their careers. In D. Thomas (Ed.), Teachers' Stories. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Pinar, W. (1991). Curriculum as social psychoanalysis: On the significance of place. In J.L. Kincheloe & B. Pinar (Eds.), Curriculum as Social Psychoanalysis (pp. 165-186). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Primary English Teaching Association & The Murray-Darling Basin Commission. (1993). Special Forever Murray-Darling Basin Writing Project Guidelines for Schools. Newtown: Primary English Teaching Association & the Murray-Darling Basin Commission.

Primary English Teaching Association. (2003). Changing Landscapes: Integrated Teaching Units. Newtown: Primary English Teaching Association.

Santoro, N., Kamler, B. & Reid, J. (2001). Teachers talking difference: Teacher education and the poetics of anti-racism. Teaching Education, 12(2), 191-212.

Soja, E. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-imagined Places. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers.

(1) Lyn Kerkham is currently engaged in a doctoral study, 'Teachers in their place: teachers at work in an environmental communications project', which further explores the relationships between teacher identity, place and pedagogy.

(2) A book of teacher case-studies based on this work entitled Literacies in Place: Teaching Environmental Communications (Comber, Nixon & Reid, 2007, in press) is to be published by the Primary English Teaching Association.

(3) River Literacies is the plain language title for 'Literacy and the environment: A situated study of multi-mediated literacy, sustainability, local knowledges and educational change', an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage project (No. LP0455537) between the University of South Australia, Charles Sturt University, and The Primary English Teaching Association, as the Industry Partner. Chief researchers are Barbara Comber, Phil Cormack, Bill Green, Helen Nixon and Jo-Anne Reid.