Writing place in English: how a school subject constitutes children's relations to the environment.

Cormack, Phillip ; Green, Bill

This paper considers the discourses inscribed by children when they write and communicate about the environment, as exemplified in the anthology of students' writing and artwork produced annually by Special Forever. The paper begins by presenting a brief historical account of primary English teaching, emphasising the legacy of Romanticism, and then outlines our discourse-analytic approach to analysing students' work. The analysis shows that children's representations of place are constituted within a range of often contradictory discourses, including those of Tourism and Recreation, Agriculture, Conservation and Indigenous knowledges. However, the dominant discourse is that of the school-subject English, which tends to emphasise particular genres for representation of places, and certain relations with places and the environment. The paper illustrates how the discursive practices involved in the discourse of subject English serve to constitute children's ways of seeing places, and the kinds of interactions, practices and ideals that are valorised. It argues that children's responses to, as well as their representations of, place and the environment are dependent on the discourses to which they have access, and further, that there are genuine possibilities in the relationship between English teaching and environmental studies, perhaps especially evident in the primary school context.

Introduction

In this paper we consider the discourses inscribed in children's texts when they write and communicate about the environment, as exemplified in the anthologies of students' writing that are produced annually from Special Forever. (1) We begin with a brief account of the curriculum history of primary English teaching, as the overall authorising context for the program. We then outline our discourse-analytic approach (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997; Foucault, 1981; Gee, 2004) to analysing the students' work. Our work to date indicates that children's representations of place are constituted within a range of often contradictory discourses, including those associated with Tourism and Recreation, Agriculture, Conservation, and Indigenous knowledges. However, the dominant discourse over the thirteen-year period in question is that of the school-subject English, or what we call Literary-English discourse, which tends to emphasise particular genres for representing place, and certain relations with places and the environment.

Writing about place has long featured in English teaching. Whether or not English teaching has been, in any distinctive way, environmentally oriented or sensitive is another issue altogether. It is significant however that, in Special Forever, a key and recurring theme is 'my place', or indeed 'my special place'. This is a familiar notion for many English teachers, certainly in primary and early secondary contexts. Writing about one's 'place' is a common activity in English lessons, as is what has been called 'nature writing'--writing that seeks, in some fashion, to represent and evoke the natural world. However this is always discursively shaped, in various ways, something that has not always been acknowledged, or recognised. We illustrate how the discursive practices involved in subject English serve to constitute children's ways of seeing places, and the kinds of interactions, practices and ideals that are valorised. What the analysis shows is that children's responses to, as well as their representations of, place and the environment are dependent on the discourses to which they have access, leading us to ask: What are the possibilities and problematics in such forms of literacy practice? Is there potential in English for 'learning to listen to what place is telling us' and 'respond[ing] as informed, engaged citizens' (Gruenewald, 2003, p. 645).

Primary English teaching and the Romantic tradition

'The Child is father to the Man'--this well known, though now arguably politically incorrect, line from Wordsworth appears in a justly famous poem first published in 1789. The sentiment is especially pertinent here. It bespeaks firstly the significance of Wordsworth, and Romanticism more generally, in the history and imagination of English studies in education. However, it is even more pointedly apposite to our focus in this paper: the question of 'English' in the primary school, with specific reference to Special Forever and its 'environmental communications' program. Special Forever began as an initiative focused on literacy and art in the context of primary schooling, and children's creative writing and artwork have remained a central part of the enterprise since its inception, in 1993. The primary-aged child is seen as the 'seed' out of which the future citizen grows, hopefully one for whom the state of the environment is a first-order and pressing issue of concern. In this way it is hoped that a predisposition to eco-citizenship is inculcated in the work of primary schooling, with literacy as a key means of capacity-building to that end.

For much of the past century English teachers in high school have taught 'literature', or literary studies, as their curriculum focus, while those in primary schools--primary teachers in their English lessons--have taught children to read, often using children's literature ('stories'). Of course, whether primary or secondary, English teachers have also taught writing and also language work ('grammar', etc.). However, the point remains that for most of the past century English has had a strong literature base. This literary tradition with its various mutations and morphings is characteristically defined by its aesthetic and personal(ist) orientations, emphases and investments. Post-60s forms of subject English--the 'New English', as it is often described--have long exhibited a contradictory identity, torn between allegiance to the literary emphasis of the Cambridge and London Schools on the one hand and on the other what has been called elsewhere the Birmingham School, or 'English as Cultural Studies'; and even more recently, to a so-called Sydney School, for whom language and literacy is fore-grounded, as is linguistics and genre pedagogy (Green, 1995). This latter version is sometimes described as a 'Critical Literacy' model of English teaching, although that is by no means uncontested or even quite appropriate.

An important strand in the history of English teaching, especially in its literary forms, is indicative of the field's links with Romanticism. Ian Reid (2004) argues that Romanticism was directly formative of the field of English studies, citing Wordsworth (as contrasted with Matthew Arnold) as the field's iconic organising figure and among other things re-reading the 1921 Newbolt Report accordingly, long a standard reference in English curriculum history. As he writes: 'Romanticism, a powerful and pervasive discursive formation, shaped the main features of modern education systems in the English-speaking world, and especially of literary studies' (Reid, 2004, p. 11). What needs to be emphasised here is that these developments led directly to the formation of English studies, as a distinctive subject-discipline -'English'. Other writers point similarly to the significance of Romanticism in this regard, including Alan Richardson (1994), who refers to the notion 'that imaginative experience is important if not essential to proper development,' and also 'that childhood constitutes the 'magic years', a period crucial for psychic development, an Edenic time to be treasured and, later, nostalgically regretted' (p. 11). John Willinsky's (1990a) work on the New Literacy is clearly Romanticist in both its framing and its argument, and elsewhere he explicitly takes up the educational significance of Romanticism (Willinsky, 1987, 1990b). Although Reid's principal focus is on the university, he takes quite extensive account of school-based education, and among other things makes clear connections with English curriculum work done at the London Institute of Education over the twentieth century, and what he calls 'the gospel of growth' (Reid, 2004, p. 106). The relevance of this last point is the close association between so-called 'Growth pedagogy' and post-Plowden 'progressivism' in British primary schooling. The British influence on primary schooling in Australia is a matter of historical record. The point to stress, however, is that such developments are best understood as strongly influenced by Romanticism.

There are various aspects of Romanticism that should be noted here. One is certainly the emphasis on feeling, on 'emotion recollected in tranquillity,' and hence on memory and reflection, on standing back from the world's hurly-burly in order to make sense of it--as Wordsworth demonstrates so powerfully in 'Tintern Abbey'. Another is the notion of 'self-fashioning', of the exploration and staging of the self, and hence of 'inwardness'. This is often a point of criticism for some commentators on the New English, although Reid (2004, p. 39) is surely right to point out that many of the key Romantic writers were social activists in one way or another, or at different times in their careers. A further feature, of particular importance here, is the notion of hope and of the utopian imagination, characteristically associated with Romanticism, as Halpin (2006) argues. He links these, in turn, with what for him are the signature Romantic qualities of love and creativity, and with notions of heroism and imagination--all of which might well be seen as desirable and eminently suitable in developing the social and ecological subjectivity in children and others that is appropriate here, in terms of thinking pro-actively about the environment. It should be noted, further, that the Romantic version of the Child is distinctively gendered male (Halpin, 2006, p. 343), and while this point is clearly relevant to our considerations here, we do not elaborate on it in this context.

With specific regard to primary English teaching in Australia, and in light of the history traced here, a number of points can be made. Murray's (1988) account is perhaps the last one that provides this kind of historical overview. He notes a shift from the early 1960s away from 'English' as such, as the accepted term, partly under the pressure of a new 'skills' curriculum and new emphases on the 'creative individual' learner and partly influenced by new 'process'-oriented pedagogies in both reading and writing. Subsequently, during the 1970s and early to mid 1980s, there was a noticeable movement from the 'New English' to the 'Language Arts' (Murray, 1988, p. 13)--what some would describe as a 'Whole Language' perspective. In NSW this development--in many ways central to the Primary English Teaching Association's (PETA) general project--was interrupted and perhaps arrested by the emergence of social-linguistic models of literacy and learning, from the late 1970s on, in the specific form of systemic-functional linguistics (SFL). There was ongoing struggle over the 1980s decade, culminating in the NSW English K-6 Syllabus (Board of Studies New South Wales, 1998), a document that, although re-claiming the term 'English', also orients the subject-area strongly towards a literacy agenda and asserts a focus on text-types ('genres'). This is a specific manifestation, at the primary level, of a broad shift in emphasis and value from 'literature' to 'language and literacy' as the organising principle for English teaching, and moreover the effective conflation of 'English' and 'literacy'--something that persists to this day (Sawyer, 2005). One of the casualties here was literary studies in the context of the primary school, at least from the point of view of policy, with children's literature arguably becoming more or less marginalised (Croker, 2001). That is still a matter of considerable debate.

At this point, we want to offer here some observations on the significance in and for English teaching of what has been described as literary ideology. The first point to make is that literary versions of English have been extensively critiqued over the past three decades, and rightly so. What was clearly needed was, on the one hand, a broadening of the repertoire of textual practices and their associated pedagogies, beyond 'literature' as such, and on the other, due attention in the English curriculum at all levels to issues of cultural politics, including new forms of social diversity, technology and theory. The field has indeed expanded in recent times. Related to this is the view increasingly articulated that English was too characteristically 'intransitive'--about everything, and nothing--and unworldly, even irrelevant (Eagleton, 1985; Medway, 1988), and indeed a matter of 'cherishing private souls' (Barnes & Barnes, 1983). The rise of theme-work for instance was heralded as opening up new realms of curriculum possibility, but all too often it seemed to encourage 'fine writing' and nothing else--a renewed form of belle lettres. The same might be said for journal writing, or personal narrative, or autobiography. Hence, for some, the attraction of looking more recently to rhetoric as a new organising, energising principle for the subject (Andrews, 1994; Green, 2006).

Another recent development, however, has been a turn back to literature, and to the literary-aesthetic dimensions of literacy and learning. This has involved, at times, a quite radical reconceptualisation of the concept of the literary. That development needs to be seen therefore as not so much a matter of return as of renewal, and of seeking a more robust, flexible and dynamic view of literary practices, taking due account of paradigmatic media shifts and the emergence of digital-electronic culture. The notion of 'literary literacy' has become increasingly of interest, accordingly, to refer to the potentially rich literary dimensions and opportunities of a truly generative literacy (Green, 2002). What is it in literary practice that opens up a world of difference and possibility for literacy learners?

The connection with environmental studies, and with Special Forever, is readily made. The program was designed to promote on the part of primary-aged children literacy work specifically addressed to the environment, to the spaces and places of the Murray-Darling Basin. Moreover, this was to be, right from the outset, in the form of so-called 'creative writing' (and artwork). Hence, from the very beginning, there has been a marked literary framing of the environmental communications work that these children have been engaged in. It is not so much that they themselves have taken such a stance, albeit sometimes by default; rather, it has been in the anthology form itself, in the selection and presentation process, the institutionalisation, and in the kinds of classroom production, the pedagogy, that this framing has been realised.

It is always important to think appropriately, and critically, about the relationship between 'text' and 'context', practice and ideology. It is also important however not to assume that this literary framing has a necessarily negative meaning, at least exclusively so, or is something to be necessarily critical of, or overly wary about. On the contrary, there are indeed insights to be gained here and new knowledges, capabilities and dispositions to be produced. In taking up the Murray-Darling Basin as an object of literacy, then, a focus for literacy work in the classroom, what risks are there in simply making of it just another 'theme', even a 'rich task'? Or is it, rather, that such work might well become a matter of reading and writing the World?

We turn now to the Special Forever archive, to see what has indeed happened over the thirteen years of the program.

Analysing children's writing in the Special Forever anthologies

The thirteen anthologies produced annually from Special Forever since 1993 provide a remarkable slice of Australian curriculum history, representing a selected set of children's writing about the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) from the English and Environmental Studies curriculum fields. The River Literacies project researchers (2) analysed the children's writing from the anthologies in terms of the discourses within which these representations of the environment are constituted. The concept of discourse, in the Foucaultian sense, refers to the 'controlling, positioning, and productive capacities of signifying practices' (Threadgold, 1997, p. 58). In this sense, a discourse is a 'group of statements which provide a language for talking about--a way of representing the knowledge about--a particular topic at a particular historical moment' (Hall, 2001, p. 72). Our 'particular topic' was children's sense of the environment in their place within the larger context of the Murray-Darling Basin. Each anthology has, on average, 284 items of students' work consisting of 103 works of art, 172 pieces of writing, and six mixed-mode texts (e.g. posters, diagrams). In this section we concentrate on the written and mixed-mode texts. A total of 2,311 written and mixed-mode texts was analysed across the thirteen anthologies. Each of these texts was considered for the dominant discourse that shaped its perspective on the environment and place.

Discourses were identified on the basis of a range of criteria. Broadly, we were looking for language in the children's texts which consistently referred to a common or related set of social or institutional practices (the controlling capacities of discourses) or signalled membership of particular social groupings and highlighted common or related ideals for social practices and/or social relations connected to those groupings (the productive capacities of discourses). We also looked for any patterns of textual production, consumption or distribution related to those positions and patterns in the use of categories for naming objects, representing their actions and relating them to each other (the signifying practices of discourses).

Using these criteria, we identified nine major discourses or discourse groups that shaped how place was represented by the children. Some discourses were obvious from the start--for example, a discourse of Conservation was represented strongly across all anthologies, which placed students in a position of custodian of the environment and valued practices of preservation and 'care'. In practice, however, not all texts in the anthologies were easily attributed to a single discourse but, rather, they were related to discursive groups. For example, there were some texts that deployed aspects of scientific thinking about the environment, while others utilised concepts connected to geography--these were grouped for the sake of convenience under a label of 'geo-scientific', because they represented the use by the children of specific disciplinary techniques for constituting the environment. 'Geo-scientific' is not a single discourse, but a hold-all category for related discourses. The categories of discourses/discourse groups were generated from the data corpus, rather than imposed on them. The categories we developed were designed to be descriptive of the typical ways of understanding and representing the environment that we observed in the children's writing rather than being pre-existent categories. The discourses and discourse groups we identified, in descending order of frequency (with percentages of texts attributed to each discourse across the corpus shown in brackets) were:

* Literary-English--strongly connected to the English curriculum field, and emphasising literary forms and modes of observation and reflection (31%)

* Conservation--connected with concepts of preservation, custodianship and care for the environment (21%)

* Tourism and Recreation--connected with concepts of play, rest and travel, and the treating the environment as a resource for these activities (11%)

* Historical--associated with reviving or describing the connections of the environment with the past (9%)

* Family--connected to membership of families and family activities in the environment (8%)

* Industry-agricultural--connected to earning a living from the land and/or water, usually farming (5%)

* Geo-scientific--a focus on representing/understanding the environment through scientific or geographical ways of knowing and representing (5%)

* Indigenous--a focus on the connection of Aboriginal Australians with the environment and associated forms of representation (3%)

* Industry-other--connected to industries other than agriculture (2%).

It is clear from this analysis of the texts selected for the anthologies that representations of the Murray-Darling valorised by Special Forever were strongly informed by perspectives offered by school-subject English, particularly its literary elements. On average, nearly a third of the written and mixed-media texts across the anthologies were constituted by this perspective, and often, more than 40% of an anthology contained texts categorised in this way.

Features of texts categorised as Literary-English

The texts that were categorised as constituted by Literary-English discourse tended to be dominated by forms of description. The very first self-generated writing that children will often experience in school focuses on a basic description of their experience--a recount genre--and 10% of the texts in this group were of this kind. However, the major kind of writing was a straight description which did not attempt to relay a sequence of events or a story--two thirds were categorised as literary descriptions, and another 8% as factual descriptions. Indeed, narrative was a relatively minor occurrence in the anthologies, with around 6% of texts in the Literary-English group. The other main text type noted was the 'observation', which usually consisted of a description but with the addition of a brief evaluative comment.

An additional feature of many of these texts which connected them strongly to literary-aesthetic traditions was their presentation in poetic form. Across all the anthologies, just over a third (35%) of the writing was presented as poetry. Interestingly, even as the emphasis in Special Forever moved toward environmental management in more recent years, the proportion of poems actually tended to grow, with more than half the written texts appearing as poetry in 2002-4. Students could use poetic forms across a range of discourses to express conservation and other themes, but the majority were literary descriptions of place or event from a personal perspective. We focused in our analysis on the resources that Literary-English discourse made available to children for representing the MDB and their place in it. We also considered the kinds of relations to place these resources made possible.

The resources Literary-English made available to children

Perhaps the most obvious resource that Literary-English discourse makes available to students is the ability to concentrate on a single aspect of place--an event, a location, an activity, or a participant in that location. The following two poems illustrate how a focus on one event (fire) or participant (a snake) allows the student to isolate an aspect of their place: Fire, Fire, Fire Hot, burning, smoking fire Scorching, deadly, boiling fire Dangerous, bubbling, flaming fire Blistering, blazing, bright fire Fire, fire, fire (Acacia Isaacs-Wallace, 7, Living Landscapes, 2005, p. 48) Copperheads Near swamps and rivers Coppery brown, long, slippery, fast copperheads You will find Clumps of grass they rest in Sly as they are fast, Let them strike their prey quickly. (Michael Burdon, 12, Special Places, 1993, p. 42)

Such pieces capture an important element of the children's writing in the anthologies--intense description of a place of significance to the child. That intensity was often carried in figurative language that was rich in repetition and alliteration (as in the examples above), as well as onomatopoeia: Storm Time (extract) Now you know Augathella's dry life, You need to know how it is at rain time, Pitter-patter, Drip-drop, Storm time has come at last, The tired stock finally getting wet, Stuffy, boiling weather finally becoming cool, Bang-bang! Crash-boom! A large yellow strike of lightning lit up the sky, (Sarah Carmichael, 9, Living Landscapes, 2005, p. 57)

Such work captured a sense of immediacy in relation to place, and isolated particular, significant moments; for example, the arrival of rain, the impact of a fire, or an encounter with wildlife. Occasionally in such writing the impact of teachers' pedagogical strategies was hinted at. Near the 'Storm Time' piece, above, another poem from the same class featured very similar and even, in some cases, the same onomatopoeic devices. This suggests that teachers used the English classroom to provide students with strategies, frames and devices to try out. A common approach was the acrostic poem, often used by very young children to organise their ideas, and other poetic forms were used, such as haiku, or incorporating various rhyme structures.

A common use of language was for comparison or metaphorical work, which children tended to use to relate one place to another, or to describe various natural phenomena such as water flowing, the impact of colour or wind. Dominant in such descriptions were literary devices such as simile and metaphor: Sailing Rivers The river is like a sailing boat: The wrens streamlining the wind Like the crow's nest Shaking wildly out of control, The river red gum Standing high and Mighty like the ship's great masts, (Curtis Librino, 11, Where We Live, 1999, p. 54)

While there is an obvious awkwardness of the comparisons and metaphors drawn in much of the students' work--these are, after all, beginning writers--there was also evidence that children could use such descriptive language to make connections with place that were quite rich and complex. Sometimes it was the structure of the genre that made such complexity possible. The narrative form, for example, could be used by children to explain natural phenomena such as life cycles or, in the case of the following piece, metamorphosis: Dash the Dragonfly (extract) About one month later Dash woke up feeling very strange. He didn't feel comfortable under the water, so as if by instinct he felt himself rising to the surface. Almost immediately after he rose above the water his discomfort vanished, and he found himself floating on some lily pads cleverly disguised by some reeds. He lay there thawing his body under the warmth of the sun. After a while he began to realise that he could feel a muscle just below his shoulders. He soon discovered that these muscles controlled a pair of wings that could flap around. (Mitchell Hilton, 12, Living Landscapes, 2005, p. 78)

It is as if, in pieces such as this, the narrative form takes care of the way that information might be structured, allowing the child to place quite detailed information in proper relation to other pieces of information.

In summary, the resources made available to children by subject English allowed an aesthetic experience of place and environment to be fore-grounded, built around notions of beauty (or its lack), and personal and/or sensual experience. In addition, some processes in the environment were able to be understood through narrative forms of organisation. We move now to consider the kinds of relation to place that were possible for students when they made use of the resources of Literary-English discourse. Previous analysis of children's writing in texts, which took up Tourism and Recreation discourse (see Cormack, Green, & Reid, 2007, in press), had shown that children tended to write about place as a resource for play and as an object of observation. We concluded that Literary-English discourse made different possibilities available.

The relations to place made possible by Literary-English discourse

What became immediately obvious when we considered the question of the relation that children had to the places they represented in their writing was that Literary-English discourse offered the opportunity for children to relate their sense of place. This was sense in the literal meaning of the senses of sight, sound, smell and touch (interestingly, taste rarely featured). This feature of the children's writing was probably often a product of a pedagogical focus in the classroom, as teachers introduced the class to possibilities for representing place--most evident in the more formulaic pieces such as 'Nature' below. However, there were also times when the sensory experience of place was captured in a way more organic to the writing, as in the 'Untitled' piece: Nature (extract) I can feel the wind blowing through my hair I can see the ripple on the water I can smell the grass and the earth and I can feel the sun and the wind (Joanna Potts, 8, Special Places, 1993, p. 99) Untitled (extract) I am drawn towards the sound of the dripping water on the mossy rocks. The small creeping plants carpet the ground. Bellbirds fly across in flocks I hear their ringing sounds echo all around. The water sparkles bright, reflecting the sun's shining light. (Tegan Picone, 13, Where We Live, 1999, p. 50)

Such work is within a long tradition of 'nature writing' (Bowerbank, 1999) in which an individual's sensual connection with place is fore-grounded. This writing tended to cast 'nature' as a place apart, into which the individual human ventures to escape the social. As such, place in this writing tended to be represented as pristine and untouched by humans. The 'Untitled' piece, above, provides a sense of connection--an individual goes to a place and is there taken inside a sensual and calming natural environment, perhaps even to 'wander lonely as a cloud'? And because it was so often an individual, lonely experience of nature, place could be represented as a 'secret', or as somewhere 'special' to the person and therefore not available to everyone. In many ways, the experience of place was something that the children took away with them when they returned from nature: The Murray (extract) As I leave, I look at the blue sky and it too is not man-made. The memory of the Murray shall forever flow in my mind. (Nathan Pask, 11, Living Landscapes, 2005, p. 96). The Forest Floor (extract) No thoughts, no sounds, Just me and nature. Freedom! (Taylor O'Brien, 11, Living Landscapes, 2005, p. 100)

In such work, an emotional response to place was often foregrounded. The Observation text-type--frequently used in English lessons, especially with younger writers--was implicated in this move. An observation is usually a description that is followed by, or includes, an evaluative comment on the object(s) described. Frequently this comment describes a personal emotional response--for example, 'Geckos are beautiful and I love them' (Shari Soding, 6, Living Landscapes, 2005, p. 115). This statement of an emotional response could also be extended to a sense of being overwhelmed by nature or being awestruck. Occasionally this was characterised as the human individual being at the mercy of nature's power--there are many pieces on the theme of drought in the 2005 anthology that exemplify this view. Many children represented their relation to place as involving a positive impact on their sense of self. In the face of the majesty of nature, or its sheer power, or ensconced in its beauty and calm, the individual could escape the social and was free to reflect and to do work on the self. In this way, (natural) place became a site of escape and (moral) work: My Cave (extract) I go to my special place after school is over, especially when I have a bad day. It calms me down-being at my special place. Nobody can hurt me there. (Jasmine Cooper, 12, Special Places, 1993, p. 14). My Two Trees (extract) I go there to clear my head and erase any bad thoughts. Every time I go there, whether the wind is howling or the sun is shining I always feel better when I walk back into the house. When I climb up the thick tree, with all the leaves dressing it like a jumper, I always feel safe ... That is why I like them so much. They give me good thoughts and feelings instead of negative ones. (Taylor O'Brien, 11, Living Landscapes, 2005, p. 100)

The children's representations of place, then, were overwhelmingly of places where nature dominated and where people were only visitors. People were usually there alone. This emphasis on desirable or 'special' places as natural was sometimes underscored by establishing them in opposition to the city or urban landscape--

'Amusement bars, pinball machines are part of a city kid's life but open spaces and lazy days for me are free of strife' (Carla Bingley, 11, Special Places, 1993, p. 31). The 'loss' of rural locations in the face of urban/residential development was an important sub-theme connected to this binary.

To this point, we have focused on the affordances that Literary-English discourse offered students in representing their relation to place. However, we found that not all work focused on the person. In a number of pieces, students used Literary-English writing to represent aspects of place without people. This could take the form of representation of living elements of place such as the flora or even the fauna. This was often accomplished through personification, giving animals and birds human-like qualities, perhaps reflecting the approach of some of the literature and stories that teachers are using with children. Notable in such work was the way in which it allowed the children to take a non-human perspective on place; to even represent humans as Other, and to comment on their activities, especially where they were seen to be harmful. The extract from 'I, Platypus' is a case in point below: I, Platypus (extract) I can only survive in clean water, So pollution in my home is like a slaughter Blue-green algae is like a bad dream, So I thank you not to pollute my stream. (Nerida Dyball, II, Where We Live, 1999, p. 108) Murray River (extract) I twist, I curl, I turn and I bend on my journey to Lake Alexandrina, my entry to the sea. My name is the Murray River. I don't own the land, for the land owns me. I flow slowly in my search for my mother, the sea (Gregory Hughston, 7, Special Places, 1993, p. 53)

The extract from 'Murray River', above, shows how place itself, or an aspect of it usually thought of as inanimate, could be represented as active and alive in its own right. Sometimes this allowed children to display quite good understandings of complex interconnections and natural phenomena--the narrative form (for example, the story of a river's flow as in the example above) allowing children to show connections between land and water, human and non-human life, and so on. Such work demonstrates that literary forms can also help children to arrange and represent environmental knowledge and grapple with the complex nature of places: The Dusky Antechinus (3) (extract) The dusky antechinus runs round at night. It is so small it won't give you a fright. The antechinus is related to the mouse you see. To him home is a dead old tree. (Sarah Coy, 9, Where We Live, 1999, p. 115)

This brief review of the way that children used the resources of Literary-English to relate to place shows that this discourse shapes up a very individual-(ist) and introspective relation to place, even a proprietary one--'my special place' being a common theme in children's writing. This sense of ownership and personal, emotional connection, relates closely to the idealised view of the child as present and future 'custodian' of the environment which was the focus of the Special Forever program as it was first envisaged in 1993. As a resource for thinking about children as future 'managers' of the environment, Literary-English discourse has a less clear role. Certainly it could be seen as an asset for managers to have an emotional attachment to places and an appreciation of their beauty, but clearly they would need more than that. However, this discourse generally speaking did not allow much consideration of the role of the social and cultural in shaping up places, nor for thinking about the causes of environmental damage (beyond broad moral notions of good and bad actions). Thus, while Literary-English offers some resources for understanding place, these need to be seen as both productive and limiting, enabling only some ways of acting on and in the environment to be imagined, whilst being blind to others. Of course it is a moot point whether any individual discourse offers in itself sufficient resources to address the environmental issues facing the MDB.

Conclusion

Writing about 'Nature', about place and environment, is an important if problematical legacy of Romanticism in contemporary English teaching. Special Forever clearly offers primary-aged children located across the Murray-Darling Basin an opportunity to mobilise the resources of that tradition in their own literacy learning, which must also be conceived, and crucially, in terms of identity-work. There is still much to do, however, if this is to be better understood and more fully realised as curriculum practice, and as a richly regenerative form of writing the future.

Considered overall, Literary-English discourse offered a considerable range of resources to children for thinking about, describing and representing their places in the MDB. Some of those resources are comparable with those available in other discourses and forms of representation. For example, the children's artwork was an effective way for them to also represent the beauty of the places and objects they admired. Clearly also, scientific discourse offers ways for children to represent and understand some of the complex interrelationships present in the MDB. However, it should be said that Literary-English discourse offers a powerful set of resources for relating a particular and personal relation to place, and for reflecting on how place is connected with identity and a sense of location.

It is worth acknowledging here that the Romantic tradition in literary studies has by no means been the only game in town, or at all unchallenged. Indeed, opportunities were clearly lost in the historical development of English, as various commentators have observed (Christie, 1993; Reid, 2004), not least because the Romantic orientation meant turning away from those influences that offered a more publicly-oriented, overtly rhetorical perspective--that associated, for instance, with the Scottish Enlightenment. Nonetheless, historically it remains the case that there was a rich, complex productivity in what has been clearly a dominant strand in literary studies, the effects of which continue today, influencing sites of practice such as primary English teaching and Special Forever.

Moreover, it is important to note that the field of literary studies has been for some time now itself quite dramatically changing, opening up to new influences and resources, such as feminism, postcolonial theory, Indigenous studies and eco-criticism. Eco-criticism for instance, as a relatively new field within literary studies (e.g., Buell, 2005), is re-directing attention accordingly to environmental issues and concerns in world literatures and their associated pedagogies. Children's writing about place and the environment is an important aspect of this, as is place-conscious literacy pedagogy more generally.

The challenge is how to develop this line of work in the most informed, productive way. As Gruenewald (2003, pp. 645-646) has said, 'the aim of place-conscious education is ambitious: nothing less than an educational revolution of reengagement with the cultural and ecological contexts of human and nonhuman existence, what theologian Thomas Berry ... calls "re-enchantment" with the world.' It seems clear that the forms and practices of representation described here do capture Berry's notion of 'enchantment' --where connection to place is sensual and loving, a form of cultural and aesthetic learning, as well as being a matter of scientific and ecological knowledge.

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(1) This 'environmental communications' project is conducted by the Primary English Teaching Association in collaboration with the Murray-Darling Basin Commission (MDBC), and involves participation from around 400 primary schools across the Murray-Darling Basin each year. In any one year, approximately 20,000 primary school students engage in environmental communications work on their region.

(2) 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.

(3) It should be pointed out that the dusky antechinus is a marsupial, and only distantly related to the mouse. This remains, however, a useful example of how a child has attempted to display scientific knowledge via a literary form. Main text types categorised as Literary-English (n = 717) Literary literary description 66% 474 literary recount 10% 73 observation 7% 52 narrative 6% 41 Factual factual description 8% 54 other minor categories 3% 23