Transcript Leadinglearningfutures @libraries.com

Leadinglearningfutures
@libraries.com
Rosemary Ross Johnston
University of Technology Sydney
1
Characteristics of learning futures






Perception and skills in using, adapting and
growing existing knowledge
Interdisciplinary and multimodal carrying and
transferring of knowledge and ideas
Critical reflection on self and others
Cultural awareness and understandings of
difference
Multimodal literacy skills: critical literacy,
imaginative literacy, visual literacy
Personal resilience, ethics and ‘citizenship’
Ideas of Knowledge

as story – narratives expressed in multiple modes, texts, and
media;

as ecology – webs relating humans to internal and external
environments, including technology;

as genealogy – ways of relating human presents to common
and/or uncommon pasts.

‘The young of the birds are fed with flowers and fishbones but the young
of the humans are fed with words.’ (Samoa)

The Power of Words and Language

Language articulates and produces identity

Language articulates what it is to be: many races believe that words
produced reality.


J. L. Austin: theory of the performative (How to Do Things With Words
1962), argues the integral relationship of speech to act. In a performative
utterance the word brings about the act which constitutes the reality,
eg ‘I now pronounce you man and wife.’

Judith Butler extends this idea into a theory she applies to gender

Thus ‘It’s a girl!’ is an utterance that begins a process of ‘girling’
(Gender Trouble 1990).

The Power of Reading and
Literature



Literature is the expression of the human need to communicate, as
readers and/or writers, as speakers and/or listeners, using or
transgressing particular conventions and narrative modes.
Books are ‘sites of the culture’s deepest moral
questionings’ (Parker 1998, p.15)
They express ‘a sense of the density of our lives’
(Murdoch 1983, pp.43-9). Eg Fox (Wild and
Brooks) tells a dense story: of courage (‘I am blind
in one eye but life is still good,’ Dog tells Magpie),
of community (‘Fly, Dog. Fly! I will be your
missing eye and you will be my wings’), of moral
dilemmas (fear, jealousy, loyalty, possessiveness).
Moral awareness of the ‘other’



Language gives shape
and organisation to
thought
Thinking is the most
profound aspect of
literacy
‘Thoughts impact and
subtly change the self
who thinks them’ Eliot



‘I think therefore I am’
(Descartes)
‘I am with others,
therefore I am’ (Ubunto)
Literature, thinking and
the literacy of the
imagination
Critical literacy




reading with a knowledge of language and how it
works
reading with a growing appreciation of the many
possible contexts for text
reading with an awareness of where the text
positions a reader
reading with a perception of the ideas and values
and attitudes (and motivations) that constitute the
implicit framework of the text and out of which
texts are generated
Critical literacy includes visual
literacy—reading and understanding
social signs—and cultural literacy.





Cultural literacy
knowledge of the world (cultural schemata)
knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of diverse
ways of being
awareness of the enclosures of our own thinking
openness to different ways of doing things, different sorts
of formats, different ideas about beginnings and endings,
different ideas even about what language should be, and
different ideas about literacy
Critical literacy
 ‘Knowing’
readers and writers (access to
purposeful models), and speakers
(exposure to the speaking of others
beyond their immediate world and also
classroom response), and listeners
(listening with both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’
ears: listening is more than hearing).
Definitions

Visual literacy pertains to an idea of language, inspired
by an age of visual communicative modes (film,
television, DVD, video and then digital cameras,
computer screens and interfaces, mobile technologies)
that use other marks and signs, very often alongside the
conventional marks and signs that are the letters of the
alphabet, to communicate story, to describe character,
to convey movement, to indicate time and place, to
give shape to an abstraction, to outline a plan, to
develop a thesis, to explain an idea.
Changing ideas of ‘text’ and ‘language’
Two minor revolutions:
1) ‘text’ has been expanded to include any
communication involving language
2) ‘language’ has expanded to include anything that
is communicative: graphics and illustrations,
images and moving images, in all sorts of
combinations and often including audio. (Some
stress the centrality of the image, rather than the
centrality of writing, in the communication
process).

Focalisation





the way we see things and the way we hear things
authors may write from the perspectives and ideas
of a particular character, or from the position of
omniscient (all-knowing) narrator
illustrators shows us how things appear from a
particular angle.
whose eyes, whose ears?
relationship to agency









Critical literacy
reading (seeing) assumptions and attitudes hiding in
unexpected places
Eg. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe), The Wind in the
Willows (Kenneth Grahame)
- assumptions that indigenous people need
to be ‘civilised’
- assumptions that the wilderness needs to
be tamed and frontiers of civilisation extended
- the historical context of patriotic conquest
- the importance of power and empire
- class structure




Window, Island in My Garden, Paddock, The Story of
Rosy Dock, The Hidden Forest, As I Grew Older, Enora
and the Black Crane, The Burnt Stick, V is for Vanishing,
Way Home, The Rabbits, The Red Tree.
- cultural assumptions that the wilderness
must be protected against the onset of civilisation
- the significance of the natural
environment in sustainable futures
- equal rights of indigenous peoples to
maintain their culture.
Reader response

We can also examine any text through a lens
that helps us to understand how we are reading
it, what attitudes we are bringing to our reading,
and how this may influence our reaction to
characters and story.

Reading is a visual literacy.
Subjectivity


sense of ‘I’ness in a world of others who are also
‘I’s
psychoanalytical term pertaining to significance
of sense of self, of being an ‘I’ who is separate
and individual from all the other ‘I’s in the
world.
Wild Girl, Wild Boy by David Almond
ELAINE
Wild … Girl… Wild … Boy …
That’s the title. That’s the title.
Once … there …was … a … girl … called … Elaine …
Ah. Yes. Phew. That’s the start …
She … lived …with … She holds up the paper and looks at her
words.
ELAINE Look at it! Look at it! I’m so stupid. No, I’m
not! I have problems … writing.
Something to do with the way I … see or
something.
18
THE CHORUS OF VOICES
- Have you seen the way she just stares out the window with her
gob hanging open?
Like she’s catching flies.
Like a little kid.
Like a baby.
And the state of her books?
Like a spider’s crawled over them.
Like somebody’s chucked spaghetti on them.
Hey, Elaine, has somebody chucked spaghetti on your
books?
No, that’s her writing, man!
Now leave Elaine alone. Oh dear, Elaine. We’re going to have
to do better than that, aren’t we?
Concentrate, girl!
-Keep your mind on your work.
Elaine has severe difficulty in maintaining concentration on
the task in hand.
19
The Power of Words –Poetic Images




The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
And I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep
Stopping by Woods on A Snowy Evening
(Robert Frost)






Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
(Act 3, scene ii)
The Fisherman and the Theefyspray
by Paul Jennings and Jane Tanner
Deep in the still cold shadows the last
 Theefyspray looked out of her lonely lair.
 There was not one other like her now. Not in the
heavens. Or the hills.
 Or the deeps of the hushed green sea.

The Power of Words
Social Issues and Advocacy






Words have creative power
Words build powerful STORY
Words – organised into narratives both oral and
written – have changed the world
Speeches of Churchill, Martin Luther King, J. F.
Kennedy
Political documents: declarations of rights
Indigenous writing, black American writing, women’s
writing

Cassius to Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
Know you how much the people may be
moved By that which he will utter?

Literature as persuasive communication







against the social issue of slavery
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
against unjust social systems
Waris Dirie, Desert Flower
against disadvantage and exploitation
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Literature and social issues







Homeless children (compare to Dickens)
Way Home (Hathorn and Rogers)
Story, character, voice,
images, themes of an uncaring city
Boat children
Onion Tears (Diana Kidd)
Only the Heart (Brian Caswell and
David Phu an Chiem)
Boy Overboard (Morris Gleitzman)
Onion Tears by Diana Kidd (1989), Story of the Vietnamese
child, Nam-Huong.




It was just a little boat with hundreds of people in it with
scared eyes and sad eyes and eyes drowned in tears – and
Grandpa and me. Grandpa was squashed up close to me
and he held my hand and put his arm around me when the
waves leapt at us across the deck like snarling tigers.
Sometimes, when we were too wet and cold to sleep,
Grandpa told me stories for hours and hours until his voice
got lost in the wind and the waves …
…[O]ne day I opened my eyes, there was only the sea
screaming around us.
And Grandpa’s hand was limp in mine.




And for a moment I was on the boat again, and the
water was gold around the silent bodies I saw
floating there – floating on the saffron sea, staring
at the saffron sun – and I saw my Grandpa there,
silently floating away.
‘GRANDPA! GRANDPA!’ I screamed …
And all the world was crying – even the wind and
the waves and the gulls that circled above him.
(Diana Kidd, Onion Tears 1989)
(Brian Caswell and David Phu an Chiem,
Only the Heart 1997)




Then she lays the open knife on the bed next to him and moves across
to the mirror, smearing a last message in blood across the glass, and
without looking back she walks from the cabin.
At the railing she pauses for just a moment to look out across the sea.
It is calm. Green-blue and patient. And welcoming, as she opens her
arms to it, and plunges from the deck in a graceful arching dive …
The sea is calm – as calm as such a creature can ever be – and she
rides on its back, lulled by the movement of the swell, unaware of the
exact moment when the waves close over her. Aware only of the silence
and the way the sky looks green and suddenly far away. She is
weightless. She is free.
She is smiling as she opens herself to the waters and breathes in
eternity.
Environmentalism




A long tradition of artistic ‘greenies’
Picture books – with their unique
combination/synergy of verbal and visual – are
ideally suited to urging an ideological stance of
environmentalism
Change in images of ‘the wild’, ‘the beast’
Jeannie Baker’s oeuvre
History




Books written in a present about a past
History is always reconstructed, organised,
mediated
Such organisation will reflect contemporary
ideas, issues and concerns
My Place (Wheatley and Rawlins 1988)

Indigenous cultures have traditionally passed on
knowledge, wisdom, and life-learning through
telling stories and describing ecologies and
genealogies not only in the language of words, but
in the languages of rock art and body painting,
singing and songlines and song cycles, drama and
dance. These are story arts, multimodal
communications.
Two-way learning

The Papunya School Book of Country and History, produced by the
children and staff of Papunya School, in Central Australia:
‘At Papunya School, ngurra – country – is at the centre of our
learning. It is part of everything we need to know …. But
as well as learning in this traditional way, we can also find
out about our country and our history by putting some of
the pieces of the story into a book.’

Tjulkura and Anangu teachers work together, using totemic
honey ant imagery to connect the two knowledge systems:
‘We want to see the children learning both ways and
coming out bright orange and yellow together, like honey
ants.’ (45)
FANTASY







Ideas of time: time shift, fictional futures
Ideas of alternative worlds (The Lord of the Rings, by
Tolkien)
Projections, predictions and warnings
Primary and secondary worlds (Narnia series, by C.S
Lewis)
Themes of good versus evil
Like history, fantasy may relate to ideological concerns
of the present
The magic threshold
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix







Didactic impulse is to represent power of good and the
very real insidious and seductive power of evil
The power of relationships to transform lives
(Dedication to family who ‘make my world magical’)
The power of imagination
The potential of the extraordinary in the everyday
The battle for minds, to control thoughts of others;
capacity of Dark Lord to invade thoughts
The rapid escalation of a climate of suspicion and
repression of ideological difference
The seduction of power





Ideas about death: ‘a tattered black
curtain or veil,’ ‘someone standing
behind’
Ideas about brains, thoughts, Time
‘The mind is a complex and manylayered thing’
The redemptive power of love, sacrifice
and blood (p.736)
Symbol of phoenix = resurrection and
rebirth (Clement of Rome)


‘You see, your daemon’s a wonderful friend and
companion when you’re young, but at the age we call
puberty, the age you’re coming to very soon, darling,
daemons bring all sort of troublesome thoughts and
feelings, and that’s what lets Dust in. A quick little
operation before that, and you’re never troubled again. And
your daemon stays with you, only … just not connected.
Like a … like a wonderful pet, if you like. The best pet in
the world! Wouldn’t you like that?’
Oh, the wicked liar, oh, the shameless untruths she was
telling. And even if Lyra hadn’t known them to be lies …
she would have hated it with a furious passion. Her dear
soul, the darling companion of her heart, to be cut away
and reduced to a little trotting pet? (Pullman 284-285)