Literacy and environmental communications: towards a 'pedagogy of responsibility'.

Reid, Jo-Anne

In this paper I take up the challenge framed by Martusewicz and Edmundson (2005) and ask whether teachers in primary school classrooms can work to produce a sustainable community through pedagogical practice that links literacy and the environment. Within the framework of the River Literacies project, I outline a call for the development of an eco-ethical consciousness among the population as a whole, and ask how teachers can foreground place-conscious curriculum in their work to encourage their students to examine local knowledges and relationships within their communities around problems that are of concern to the community itself. Questions of situated pedagogy and teacher accountability in terms of literacy learning in relation to the environment are raised.

**********

Martusewicz and Edmundson (2005, p. 71) argue that a pedagogy of responsibility is 'a fundamental commitment to the recognition that we live together on this planet among all kinds of living creatures, human and non-human, in a fragile but essential interdependence. [...] to be human is to live engaged in a vast and complex system of life, and human well-being depends on learning how to protect it.'

From my research diary: a narrative of environmental action

It is a bright cold winter's day in Canberra, crisp and fresh in the sunny school playground as Year 4G lines up, pulling on their hats and jostling to arrange the gardening gloves and water bottles. With them is Jenny, a local Parkcare Group volunteer, who has been coming to this classroom once each two weeks since the beginning of the year, and who has brought along a number of pamphlets about 'the Ridge' where we are heading, to show me, the visitor researching the environmental communications work of this classroom. Jemma, (1) their teacher, is handing out digging forks, shovels and axes:

Jemma: ... and you know not everyone will get one. You'll be sent back to school, honestly, so you have to hold it very carefully.

Child: I'm going to be a weed miner.

Child: Like pulling them out!

Jemma: And we're going to share them. Where's Pradesh?

Child: You're a miner, I do a lot of the dirty work ...

Jemma: Okay, where's ... we're going to go where Jenny says. She's got a spot in her head probably, for us to go to, today, so that's where we're going to go.

Jenny: So we're not doing the planting?

Jemma: No ... the school and I've been in contact with [a member of the local Landcare group] and they've only just emailed me back and I said we want 3 yellow boxes ... I said ASAP because it's time to plant, isn't it?

Jenny: So basically we want the kids to check the verbascum ...

Jemma: Yeah, that will do ...

Jenny: So I think we'll go up above the ...

Jemma: Okay, standing up please. Pradesh, get your hat on your head and your water bottle, come on mate ...

The children line up in pairs, pocketing their gloves and drink, and carrying their 'mining' implements with care, out of the school, under the subway road crossing, and up the path to the walking track on 'the Ridge'. After ten minutes of steep uphill walking, they reach the information point on the public nature trail at Cooleman Ridge, where visitors can collect pamphlets to guide them along the walk. The children eagerly check out the box--which last time they left was full of the pamphlets they had prepared by hand, modelled on those provided by ACT Parks and Wildlife. There are none left, and they are pleased--though someone suggests they should make a sign to ask visitors to read the pamphlets and then return them to the box so that they can be used again. Jemma suggests that next time they might produce their pamphlets on the classroom computers, which would make it easier to replace them.

At last we reach the spot that Jenny had in mind, and the children commence their work. It is on the side of the mountain ridge, a flat wide rocky area about twenty metres square, with a couple of straggly trees at the highest point and a view over the southern suburbs of Canberra and the purple-blue Brindabella ranges. The children are neck high in grass, amongst which can be seen the strong, thick stems and leaves of verbascum, an introduced plant that has taken over the local landscape since the Canberra fires burnt off the Ridge in 2003. The children have been here before, and they know what to do. There is only one instruction--to put their water bottles on the rocks under the tree--before the children set to work, digging, twisting, pulling, carrying and placing the verbascum in a growing pile. They work in pairs and threes, cooperatively, energetically, urging each other on when the digging gets tough in the hard rocky ground, and chattering constantly as they move through the area:

[Sounds of weeding and digging]

Child: Did you get it?

Child: I just snapped this huge root off.

Child: Jack, don't give up.

R: That's right, dig down hard with that now, you'll get it.

[Sounds of exertion]

Child: Jack you're close to it, come on!

R: You've half got it!

Child: It must be down about a hundred feet or something, or maybe there's a rock under there.

R: There might be rock under here.

Child: Some of them are joined together.

R: Yes, and that makes it harder doesn't it?

Child: And when they're joined together you have to pull the whole lot out.

Child: We can't pull out the small ones, but we can pull out the big ones.

I stand and survey the Ridge over to the south west, closer to the road, where the children have been working since the start of the year, and where Jemma's Year 2 class worked last year. There is a visible line between the weeded area, where the golden grass is swaying in the breeze, and the rest of the Ridge, where tall spikes of dark grey verbascum spear the sky starkly. They are not ugly, but they seem out of place--perfectly 'natural' but somehow unhealthy--like a scaly rash. After the children have built a large pile of pulled weeds, which Jenny says weather will reduce to mulch over time, they sit among the rocks, sweaty and satisfied with their work, swigging from their water bottles and examining the other living things they have dug up with the weeds:

Child: You find them under the verbascum.

R: And what sort of bugs are they?

Child: You can get these worm-looking rubbery things.

Child: Caterpillar looking things.

R: OK, and so do they eat to roots of the verbascum or do they just live there?

Child: I think they just live underground.

Child: Look how much we've pulled out, and look how big that stone is.

As they gather their belongings and start to head home, they have been on the Ridge for an hour and a half. As an outsider, I am struck by the seriousness of the children's activity and the enjoyment of their labour. There has not been one argument, not one incident of playful warcraft with the implements they have been sharing, and there has been no instruction or reminder about getting on with the job. The children leave the pile of weeds behind them, pocketing their gear, and carrying only their weeding tools again. They take the 'long road' back, around the Ridge Trail, with Jenny pointing out changes to the landscape since their last visit, and checking the areas they have already weeded:

R: It is, and there's so few verbascum plants here, there's only two...

Jenny: That's right, well we've been working here for two years. Jemma, you can really notice the difference, can't you? ... How rich it is.

Child: Yeah and ... the beehive!

Jenny: Oh yes, last time we found a feral beehive, and whether he's ... the bees I don't know ...

Jenny: That's where the hive was, wasn't it?

Jemma: Yeah I'm sure it was.

Jenny: It was because we had the blackened ...

Child: Oh, there's a bee. He's getting the honey.

Connecting classroom to the environment: Literacy work?

They arrive back at school at the start of morning recess, and return their tools and gloves to the classroom box before gathering their snacks and heading out again. Jenny stays for morning tea in the staffroom, and then returns to the classroom with Jemma, who connects the classroom computer to the Cooleman Ridge Website as the children return from play. Jenny finds a newsletter recently published on the website of her Park Care Group, using Google, and they search for other sites about the Ridge, looking for information related to their morning's work. These are not texts written for nine-year olds, but Jemma gives them time to peruse, pointing out words as they scan each text silently on the screen of the Interactive Whiteboard. She leads them as they read aloud from each text, short segments of information directly related to their weeding and the planned tree planting for their next visit.

They discuss the things they have seen on the Ridge this morning, and Jenny says she will let the Park Care group know about the bees they have seen, so that they can include this in their next website report. After this session, Jemma moves the children into a maths activity, and then, as they pack up for lunch, she lets them know that the plants for the Drought Resistant Garden have arrived, and that those people who are in the Garden Club will need to bring their gloves and smocks tomorrow, so that they can either begin to plant, or continue to work on the Ridge mural they are painting on the garden wall. The Student Council has assisted the class to develop this garden area, and it has been strongly supported by the school caretaker, who has prepared a suitable site and built a walkway and bridge that will cross a future 'grass river'. I watch as they leave the room full of talk about the planting, and the weeding, and I marvel that there has been not one child in this class of 29 whom Jemma has needed to 'discipline' all morning. Nor have there been any who have needed to be 'managed'. Their seriousness about the work on the Ridge is derived from pride and pleasure in their achievement, and reassurance, from Jenny's continued presence, that their work is productive, useful, and genuinely matters to the world beyond their classroom. The children have not written this morning, they have not had a formal reading session, their reading material is not age-appropriate, and they have not worked through a scaffolded writing session to record their work on the ridge. They are full of talk about the Ridge, and how they will go up there next week, and what sort of plants they will need to select from up there to plant in their new garden area here at school. I have no work samples to collect for the Case Study archive--this does not look like a literacy lesson.

Researching environmental communications

The observation notes on which my research narrative above is based were collected as part of the River Literacies project, (2) where reports have been produced of the work of eight volunteer teacher-researchers from around the Murray-Darling Basin who work as coordinators for the Special Forever program. (3) Our aims in the project included an investigation of:

* what can be learned from the project about quality curriculum and teaching in environmental communications

* how Special Forever might develop beyond celebration of the environment and engage students in critical questions and issues and

* how teachers can develop a range of environmental knowledge and skills important for young people who must sustain the MDB in the future.

These are important questions in a time when at least two Australian inland cities have recently faced public political debate about the feasibility of recycled sewage to serve as drinking water for their populations, and as we hear that the water drunk by Australians living in towns and cities near the mouth of the Murray-Darling is 'a lot of recycled wastewater anyway' (Jenkin, 2006). The necessity to engage with pedagogical practices relating to the sustainability of our environment is becoming clearer and more urgent. This is the context in which educators concerned with environmental sustainability and eco-justice have argued for the idea of a pedagogy of responsibility in relation to the planet and sustainable futures. Bowers (2001) asserts that we have little alternative but expand the sources of information educators use--for example, to embrace traditional cultural and local knowledges in the education of children--to ensure that the capacities of our natural systems are sustained into the future.

In our analysis and critique of the classroom practices we have observed in the Case Study research (Comber, Nixon & Reid, 2007, in press), we have noted the affordances of multi-modal technologies for allowing new forms of networked communication in and about the places where students live and work. We have also noticed that there are potential risks for teachers who support the development of these often ephemeral and informal literacy practices in an educational literacy environment of centralised curriculum and standardised outcomes.

Based on our analysis of the teachers' own accounts and documentation of their work in Special Forever over three years (2004-2006), interviews with each of them and the other thirteen coordinators, as well as observational accounts of their practice, we have been able to point to tentative conclusions about the way that literacy practices realised as environmental communications appear to take on quite complex, mutable and often public forms of production and use. Many of these environmental communications practices do not look conventionally like 'classroom literacy'. The literacy activities and textual production that Jemma's pupils engage in as part of their work on Cooleman Ridge have gone far beyond the conventional representations of 'environmental communications', such as the poetry and artwork that has been predominantly selected by judges as worthy of inclusion in the Special Forever anthologies over the past decade and a half (see Cormack, Green & Reid, 2007, in press; Cormack & Green, this issue).

Jemma's effort in planning, organising and preparing for this work is ongoing, cyclic and ever changing. It is part of the life of 4G in 2006 as a class, and that of the class in the adjoining room, with their teacher, Martina. Last year it was a large part of the life of Jemma's 2G class, and this group had made the first set of pamphlets about the Ridge, some copies of which are still proudly displayed in the school entry foyer for visitors to read. Just like many of the other teachers who work continuously with the environmental focus and with the idea of Special Forever in their everyday classroom practice, the Ridge work is not a special event, a distinct activity, or a one-off program, even though it may be initiated as such. For example Jemma's classroom has a large painted mural of a landform resembling Cooleman Ridge along the back wall, on which are displayed the names of flora and fauna, topographical and weather features, and a detailed glossary of environmental terms related to the local ACT area. This has been loaned to Jemma and Martina by the regional science consultant as a trial of the resource, and the two teachers are working from a specific 10 week environmentally-focused program they have designed around it (Gascoyne, 2007, in press).

Although Jemma says that she does not actually take the children up to the Ridge all the year round, as it is simply too hot in school hours during most of February, some children indicate that they have been weeding on weekends, and introducing their parents and siblings to the issues of exotic weeds in native habitats. As I will describe in the next section, there is much in the evolving practice of Special Forever that can be seen as an emergence of a practical understanding of a 'pedagogy of responsibility' (Martusewicz & Edmundson, 2005) in primary classrooms, and that the literacy work associated with work in the environment is a key component of this pedagogy. While not confined to Special Forever participants, of course, I suggest that the conduct of that program as a support for teacher education and change has been a significant feature in this emergence. In what follows, I provide a brief explanation of the notion of a pedagogy of responsibility before examining the inter-relationship of literacy and environmental education in its practice.

What is a pedagogy of responsibility?

As Gruenewald (2003, p. 9) notes, pedagogy is a term used loosely in Educational discourse. Indeed, in recent years effective literacy teaching in Australia has been conceived and described variously in terms of 'productive' (Lingard, Hayes & Mills, 2003), 'authentic' (Newmann & Associates, 1996), 'situated' (McConaghy, 2003), and 'critical' (Comber, 2001) pedagogy. These sorts of attributions of purpose to the work of teachers support the claim of Simon (1987) that: talk about pedagogy is simultaneously talk about the details of what students and others might do together and the cultural politics such practices support. In this perspective, we cannot talk about teaching practices without talking about politics. (cited in Gruenewald, 2003, p. 9)

A 'pedagogy of responsibility' is a description of practice that is informed and structured by a teacher's commitment to engaging with questions of diversity, democracy and sustainability in ways that are designed to bring about change in the way that human beings live in, interact with and use the environment of the planet. It arises originally from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1998), who claims that all human beings, 'naturally', because we are organic beings who depend on more than our selves for life and sustenance, are therefore always in an ethical relation of 'responsivity' or 'response-ability' to everything that is not the self, that is the 'Other'. We only achieve an individual identity, and understand who we are because we are always faced with 'otherness', and so we are always vulnerable to the sustainability of the 'Other' in sustaining our selves. Because of this we are obliged, not as an act of kindness, or even consciousness, but as part of our own survival, to help sustain the 'Other'. If we do not fulfil this obligation, we endanger ourselves.

Commonsense understandings of the term 'responsibility', which derive from a Conservative discourse of an 'established order in society and a culture of responsibility among those fortunate enough to belong to the middle and upper classes' (Forster, 2002, p. 71), are unhelpful here. They imply that 'responsibility' is something that some people have towards others--and that those who behave 'responsibly' are doing so because they 'want' to, as a matter of their free choice (and of course, that they could choose not to). But as Critchley (1999, p. 64) explains: Ethics is not an obligation towards the other mediated through the formal and procedural universalization of maxims or some appeal to good conscience; rather [...] ethics is lived in the sensibility of corporeal obligation to the other.

In other words, for Levinas, people do not have a choice--our existence depends on our responsibility to (not 'for') each other. It is not surprising, as Hardy (2002), notes, that environmental thinkers have extended this ethics of inherent responsibility to include an eco-ethics, 'developed and justified from an identification of the need of the Other in the non-human realm' (Hardy, 2002, p. 463). Humans in our 'civilised' society, which has 'progressed' so far from the 'natural', must relearn our obligations to our natural environment as well as other humans. Hardy cites the words of Llewelyn (1991) and argues that 'this needfulness is sufficient to endow me with responsibility: "no specific characteristic other than its someway needing me is required in order that I should be directly responsible for another thing'" (Hardy, 2002, p. 463).

The key aspect of a commitment to a 'pedagogy of responsibility', therefore, is that it works at the level of the unconscious, in our bodies and automatic actions rather than our minds and conscious thoughts. While such an eco-ethical sensibility can be seen to exist in Indigenous knowledges and practices about land and place, it does need to be 'taught' in cultures that have come to assume that the 'dominion of Man' over animals and the land comes with no care for the effects of ecological irresponsibility. Teaching this 'unconscious' responsibility acts to shape students as human and social subjects in particular ways, through the acceptance and valuing of diversity and 'otherness' that include the natural world and its non-human elements. The term 'pedagogy of responsibility' has been used in relation to social justice by other writers in a range of literatures related to critical/cultural theory (Giroux, 2004), literacy pedagogy (Dyson, 1997), human rights education (Reich, 1994) and philosophy (Critchley, 1999; Hardy, 2002). In this work it refers to the dynamic relationship between scientific inquiry and action, and is clearly related to Gruenewald's (2003) sense, above, of political action and advocacy. Pedagogies of responsibility explicitly recognise what Lemke describes as the 'irony' that: classroom education and the formal curricula [...] are narrowly focused on informational content that is more or less unique to school experience, when the major developmental processes of these years appear to be about the formation of identities that fill larger scale social models [...] Whatever we offer in the classroom becomes an opportunity to pursue this longer-term agenda of identity building. (Lemke, 2000, p. 286)

But these critical theorists focus on pedagogy for social justice, highlighting the role of culture in shaping and transforming individuals as social subjects in pre-existing relations of power, and the role of education in providing a basis for the imagination of contestation and change to existing power relations (Giroux, 2004). Edmundson and Martusewicz (2004, p. 122), like Gruenewald (2003; 2006), argue that we need to go beyond approaches to social justice 'that do not address our interdependence as humans upon threatened natural systems' (Gruenewald, 2006, p. 3).

In these terms, conceived of as part of a process of identity formation, such a pedagogy can be partially understood as a realisation of the successful achievement of engaging and high quality environmental education, which, as outlined elsewhere (see Editorial), has been the explicit project of government achieved by the funding of the Primary English Teaching Association (PETA) by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, since 1993, to run the Special Forever program with schools in the Basin. It is also connected to larger and long-standing international concerns for global survival, which recognise the interrelationship of the social and the natural world. As Hardy (2002) notes, the United Nations Environment Programme has been working on a World Conservation Strategy at the international level for decades. As they proclaim, jointly with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the World Wildlife Fund: Ultimately the behaviour of entire societies towards the biosphere must be transformed if the achievement of conservation objective is to be assured. A new ethic, embracing plants and animals as well as people, is required for human societies to live in harmony with the natural world on which they depend for their survival and well-being. The long term task of environmental education is to foster or reinforce attitudes and behaviour compatible with this ethic. (IUCN-UNEP-WWF, 1980 cited in Hardy, 2002, p. 463)

Jeronen and Kaikkonen (2002) suggest that there is a hierarchy of indicators of successful environmental education. This moves from 'sensibility' to 'awareness', to 'knowledge' and, finally, 'action' on the part of both teachers and students. While these 'outcomes' of environmental education may be listed cumulatively in this hierarchical account, they are also inclusive and additive, in that teaching and learning activity in, on and for the local environment necessarily involves, incorporates and reproduces sensitivity, awareness, and knowledge in 'rich' and 'productive' pedagogical practices such as those described by Lingard, Hayes and Mills (2003). As Martusewicz and Edmundson (2005) see it, pedagogies of responsibility are both intellectually challenging and environmentally sustaining. While I do not wish to rehearse their argument in its entirety here, the key aspect for our work, as exemplified in the pedagogy of teachers like Jemma and others in the Special Forever program, has been 'the recognition and emphasis on which local knowledges and practices lead to the requisite responsibility in communities for leaving the future generations a viable and healthy environment' (Edmundson & Martusewicz, 2004, p. 122).

My argument here is that as Jemma's class admires the work they have done in weeding the verbascum that has overrun the natural grassland on Cooleman Ridge after the Canberra fires of 2003, they are developing an eco-ethical consciousness. But it is through her teaching, and in particular the sorts of literacy activities that Jemma and her colleagues are beginning to test out and investigate in their classrooms, that these students are working towards a pedagogy of responsibility in this sense of eco-ethical justice.

Special Forever literacy work and pedagogies of responsibility

When Jemma's students prepare pamphlets to leave in the information box at the start of the walking track around Cooleman Ridge, explaining what can be seen at each of the twelve observation posts around the track, they are engaging in environmental communications. The pamphlets are taken away, used by unknown visitors, and their literacy work has unknown effects in the world. They learn that their writing does not have to be marked and graded to serve a real, if indeterminate, purpose, and they learn that much of the writing that is marked and graded has neither purpose nor effect. Their regular observation and ongoing conversation about the effects of prolonged drought on the Ridge over the seasons of the year, and over time, brings them face to face with the increasing encroachment of suburban housing on the plants and animals of the Ridge. As Levinas said, 'to face the Other is to be taught' (Hardy, 2002, p. 462). It ensures that Jemma's pupils are constituting themselves as individuals who have what Bourdieu (1977) calls a 'habitus' of responsibility for their local area, as part of the identity they are consciously and unconsciously working to form through their participation in their school and place: One reason why people have difficulty understanding global environmental change and the urgency of addressing problems is that many of the components of an ecosystem's functioning unfold in dimensions of time and space that can easily escape people's notice, or show seasonal patterns that are out of sight and out of synchrony with the pace of increasingly mechanised societies. Yet for those who have learned how to see them, the messages carried by migrating birds, shifting weathers and flowing waters tell the story of an interdependent world. Although representations of the environment in books and on television and computer screens can contribute to this process of learning to see, they can never replace the role of direct experience. (Heft & Chawla, 2006, p. 209)

Further, it directly builds on the assumption of the philosophy behind Special Forever articulated in Sobel's (1993, p. 52) claim that middle childhood is a 'critical period in the development of the self and in the individual's relationship to the natural world.' As noted in Gruenewald (2003): Sobel wants to 'reclaim the heart' in place-based education, to create experiences where people can build relationships of care for places close to home. This focus on experience with place is a response against both a 'gloom and doom' approach to environmental education and a conventional education that keeps students indoors and thinking about outdoor places only in the abstract. (Gruenewald, 2003, p. 7)

Jemma has structured the process of an eco-ethical identity formation for her students through her attention to the organisation, activity and language of the classroom, and she is constantly seeking ways to expand and enrich the experiences she is able to provide. As she supports her students through the difficult reading and sorting of relevant information from websites, Landcare brochures, nursery catalogue descriptions and the mural glossary of local flora necessary for the sustained activity of planning, preparing, planting, tending, recording and informing others about the plant life of the Ridge in their own Drought Resistant Garden, they are also seeing their literacy as productive. Her pedagogy is always in process, always responsive to the environment and to what their place provides.

One example is a narrative writing activity constructed by Jemma involving children in building from their face-to-face encounters with the natural environment of their place, in a different way from the practices described above. This activity is formally constituted as a writing lesson in which the language features and conventional textual structure of the narrative text type is revised and practised. This is aesthetic rather than scientific literacy curriculum--and involves creative expression, art and a Romantic notion of 'English'. This sort of literacy activity engages students in speaking, thinking and writing that allows them to develop and articulate a personalised understanding of the 'Other' non-human inhabitants of the Ridge, and to articulate their understanding of their ecosystem from a perspective 'Other' than their own:

Child: On Cooleman Ridge where nobody goes was Wally the Wombat and Ed the Echidna. One day they were walking along when they felt the temperature rising, 'Do you feel that?' asked Wally 'Yes,' said Ed, 'it's getting hotter.' And then they saw the flames coming over the hill. 'Get inside the hole' said Ed.

R: Now, what do you think should happen now? It's a very good opening, a very good opening.

Child: They're going to run away.

R: So they're going to get inside the hole, did you want them to get in the hole? Or did you want them ...

Child: They get in the hole and then they see the flames coming in through the door and then they run out the back and then they have to run away ... but the fire is coming ...

This is what was described as a key purpose of Special Forever (as 'an environmental communications project') from its inception. It was to allow children 'to "bear witness" against actual or potential environmentally damaging activities' and provide, through heightened sensitivity, awareness and knowledge, an 'intergenerational insurance policy' for sustainable action by 'future generations of Murray-Darling Basin residents' (Eastburn, 2001, p. 14).

Cheryll, another Special Forever Coordinator involved in the River Literacies project, for instance, articulated these principles in her commentary on the sort of activity that students and teachers in her local area focused on in the name of literacy development: Some of the good things that I've found are the best are the things that happen out of nowhere; the Native Fish Strategy people rang and said 'we're doing a little bit of a push on species of native fish--we're coming out to your region, would you like to coordinate some things with schools where they could have a look at some of the native fish strategies and how we're doing it ... There was only a little bit of water ... the river was so low then. So we had three different schools, Walgett and Brewarrina, we've got the fish traps there ... forty thousand years old natural fish traps, so they talked about those and also they came to Bourke, went on a paddle steamer and talked about ... anglers and other groups ... so that prompted the kids to talk about what's the best environment for fish, what happens when there's a change in the environment, what do we do about that, can we do anything about it, should we be responsible for cleaning up our area of the river, where plastic fits in. So kids know all of those things, but for them to actually do something about it makes them think 'we can do this, we can clean up our area, we can make sure we keep the snags in the river so that the fish can breed, and all those sorts of things. (Cheryll, Bourke).

It is this sort of activity with students that highlights two of the key questions that pedagogies of responsibility seek to foreground in human consciousness: 'What do we need to conserve?' and, 'What needs to be transformed? As Martusewicz and Edmundson (2005, p. 79) argue: 'Rather than being predisposed to see tradition as oppressive, a pedagogy of responsibility asks what the consequences of the traditions are for the community, and what would be lost if the tradition was changed.' Where Indigenous knowledges and traditions, particularly those that have sustained the land and all its inhabitants over centuries, are in danger of being lost, colonised, or decontextualised, these questions are crucially important. Cheryll's certainty that attention to place will provide the basis for 'any literacy activities you like' is borne out by our analysis of the work of the eight volunteer teacher-researchers. It conforms with contemporary pedagogical theory about 'quality teaching', in terms of ensuring both relevance and connectedness to students' experience, and an insistence on higher-order thinking and the problematic and partial nature of all knowledge claims (even their own).

Working in a one-teacher school in a small town where an historic Dare's Truss Bridge (4) is being replaced by a wider concrete bridge half a kilometre upstream, Kate reflects on the pedagogical decisions that have arisen from an excursion she organised with the Road Transport Authority (RTA) to show the children the building site: Well, we'll continue just adding, because even while the children were talking about what they'd remembered this afternoon, I'd go 'oh, I didn't remember [that], and so there's all those, we'll keep those displays up and just keep adding as it comes to, and then we'll do a multi-modal process to distil what are the key themes; so the environmental stuff will probably come out as important. The building issues seem to take the children's fancy, and the environmental ones with the changed water flow from the Windermere Dam ... that environmental thread came through it the whole time. Whilst it wasn't a particular focus today (it was actually a construction site we went to!), it got a mention of the Indigenous issues and the Wiradjuri people with their artefacts and any time a hole was dug, someone was there for the first metre, so it's just amazing. So I don't think we'll have a lot of trouble in children producing different sorts of ways of recording what they're interested in and what they've learnt. So we'll have factual stuff as best as history is, and the environmental stuff, so there'll be a parallel system of the recorded history, and [...] the oral history and then the parents kicking in their bits as well. But obviously, we're going to hop right onto this issue of the Spotted Purple Gudgeon, so the internet will support our learning there, and other experts that we can call on; the parents have a huge amount of knowledge as well, so I don't know where it's going to stop, honestly. (Kate, Goolma)

Over the next few months, Kate's class developed a rich website that will be used by the RTA as part of their public relations reporting of the bridge development, and that reflects all the different perspectives she notes here as related to the building of the new bridge. They have researched scientific, historical and local cultural information in the production and development of their website. They have also learned to spell new words; critique information provided on a website that appeared to them to have oversimplified the facts about the platypus; and rewrite informational material that they think has 'too American' a sound to suit the people in their region who will be reading their website.

Conclusion

In this way, I argue, within her practice in Special Forever, and like many of her colleagues involved in the program, Kate is working with the key principles of a pedagogy of responsibility (Martusewicz & Edmundson, 2005). As she notes above, the children's attention is being drawn to cultural and ecological diversity. It is also focused on principles of sustainability, which require that all decisions take account of the good of the lifeworld; and that all decisions recognise this as an ongoing process. The language, organisation and activity of her program attend to principles of democracy, which recognise that everyone in the community has a responsibility to participate and which stress for these children that they, like Jemma's class, can make a difference. Working elsewhere in the Basin, another teacher involved in Special Forever comments on this consciousness that she sees developing among her pupils, and that indicate how situated, place-based pedagogies for literacy learning and environmental communications work to engage practices of mutuality, responsibility and action on the part of the young children involved.

As Wendy, a long-time coordinator for Special Forever in her region, says: I think that I also have become a much stronger advocate of the project--I just think that the more I do, the more involved I become, the more passionate I am, and the more value I see in doing my little share within it, and children taking on board, teaching other kids, and taking responsibilities on board for putting up signs to turn the taps off, ... collecting the food scraps for the compost, caring about the gardens--last night, three little kids had to wait for their mum who was doing a job for the school ... and they walked around the garden, and I didn't say anything to them, but here they are picking out little bits of rubbish that had gone in, and they were cleaning up without saying anything--now those children are already environmentally aware ... (Wendy, Beechworth)

Martusewicz and Edmundson (2005) argue that a pedagogy of responsibility is grounded in an eco-justice framework, from which teachers seek to develop in children what they term an 'eco-ethical consciousness'. As well as the explicit environmental sensitivity, awareness, and knowledge that Wendy's pupils demonstrate through their actions against pollution here, an 'eco-ethical consciousness' foregrounds attention to cultural and ecological diversity, and highlights awareness that every part of our natural world has a right to be heard, and to be considered.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bowers, C. (2001). Educating for Eco-justice and Community. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Comber, B. (2001). Critical literacies and local action: teacher knowledge and a 'new' research agenda. In B. Comber & A. Simpson (Eds.), Negotiating Critical Literacies in Classrooms (pp. 271-282). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Comber, B., Nixon, H. & Reid, J. (2007, in press). Impossible futures?: Beyond hope and happiness. In Literacies in Place: Teaching Environmental Communications. Newtown: Primary English Teaching Association.

Cormack, P., Green, B. & Reid, J. (2007, in press). Writing place: Discursive constructions of the environment in children's writing and artwork about the Murray-Darling Basin. In F. Vanclay, J. Malpas, M. Higgins & A. Blackshaw (Eds.), Making Sense of Place: Exploring Concepts and Expressions of Place Through Different Senses and Lenses. Canberra: National Museum of Australia.

Critchley, S. (1999). Post-deconstructive subjectivity. In Ethics-politics-subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (pp. 51-82). London: Verso.

Dyson, A. H. (1997). Writing Superheroes: Contemporary Childhood, Popular Culture, and Classroom Literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.

Eastburn, D. (2001). Salt and vinegar: Education for sustainability in the Murray-Darling Basin 1983-1998. Nature and Society Forum. Occasional paper No. 8.

Edmundson, J. & Martusewicz, R. (2004). A pedagogy of responsibility: Linking ecology, culture, and ethics in teacher education. In B.L. Hall & A.M. del C.R. de France (Eds.), Proceedings of Learning and the World We Want: Intersecting Conversations on Education, Culture and Community Conference, (pp. 122-126). University of Victoria, Canada. Retrieved August 13 2006, from http://www. educ.uvic.ca/learning/proceedings

Forster, M. (2002). Diary of an Ordinary Woman. London: Random House Vintage.

Gascoyne, J. (2007, in press). Weeding verbascum: Dealing with problem behaviour through environmental action. In B. Comber, H. Nixon & J. Reid (Eds.), Literacies in Place. Newtown: Primary English Teaching Association.

Giroux, H. (2004). Cultural studies, public pedagogy and the responsibility of intellectuals. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 1(1), 59-79.

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

Gruenewald, D. (2006). Resistance, reinhabitation and regime change. Journal of Research in Rural Education, 21(9). Retrieved August 1, 2006, from http://www. umaine.edu/jrre/21-9.pdf

Hardy, J. (2002). Levinas and environmental education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 34(4), 459-476.

Heft, H. & Chawla, L. (2006). Children as agents in sustainable development: The 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.

Jenkin, C. (2006). Recycled sewage water 'best in world'. The Advertiser, Adelaide, July 31. Retrieved July 31, 2007 from http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/

Jeronen, E. & Kaikkonen, M. (2002). Thoughts of children and adults about the environment and environmental education. International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education, 11(4), 341-353.

Levinas, E. (1998). Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other (Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, Trans.). New York: Columbia UP.

Lemke, J. (2000). Across the scales of time: Artifacts, activities and meanings in eco-social systems. Mind, Culture and Activity, 7(4), 273-290.

Lingard, B., Hayes, D. & Mills, M. (2003). Teachers and productive pedagogies: contextualising, conceptualising, utilising. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 11(3), 399-424.

Martusewicz, R. & Edmundson, J. (2005). In D.W. Butin (Ed.), Teaching Social Foundations of Education: Contexts, Theories and Issues. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

McConaghy, C. (2003). Situated Pedagogies. Researching Quality Teaching and Learning for Rural NSW Schools. Occasional Paper, UNE and NSW Department of Education and Training, Armidale.

Newmann, F. & Associates (1996). Authentic Achievement: Restructuring Schools for Intellectual Quality. San Francisco: Josey Bass.

Reich, B. (1994). Human rights teaching. In Reich & Pivoravov (Eds.), International Practical Guide on the Recommendations Concerning Education for International Understanding, Cooperation and Peace and Education Relating to Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (pp. 27-32B). Paris: UNESCO.

Sobel, D. (1993). Children's Special Places: Exploring the Role of Forts, Dens and Bush Houses in Middle Childhood. Tucson: Zephyr Press.

(1) Jemma Gascoyne teaches at Chapman Primary School in the ACT. Like Kate Charlton, who is Principal at Goolma in NSW, Cheryll Koop, Literacy Consultant at the far west Bourke District Office, Wendy Renshaw, who teaches at Beechworth Primary, in Victoria, and Deb Wangman, an Assistant Principal at Broken Hill, all of whom are mentioned in this paper, she is one of the 21 Special Forever coordinators with whom we have had the pleasure of working on this project since late 2004.

(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) 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.

(4) Harvey Dare was an engineer working for the NSW Public Works Department in the early part of the twentieth century. His design for an improved truss structure to provide extra strength to the wooden road bridges of the time proved very successful, although these bridges have been gradually replaced by the RTA over the past 50 years.

Jo-Anne Reid

CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY