Conference Agenda

One of the foundational arguments for literary study has been the promise of literature to change lives and offer students new ways of seeing themselves, their communities, and the future. The three papers in this panel engage with English literary pedagogy and ‘literary linking’ (McLean Davies, Truman, and Buzacott, 2021) methodology to consider how literary texts can be activated to address pressing contemporary concerns globally including the climate crisis, environmental racisms, and gender equality.

Recent years have seen global wildfires and floods, a international #MeToo movements highlighting ongoing violence against women and girls in schools and beyond. The three papers in this symposium investigate how literature may be mobilized in diverse settings including contemporary classrooms and the street to activate discussions around these crises and beyond. The papers engage with a variety of literature including Indigenous Australia literature (paper 1); texts that center issues of consent, particularly those written by women and non-binary authors (paper 2); and children’s literature on climate justice (paper 3).

Methodology

Each of the symposium’s research projects engages with literary linking methodology which asks teachers to reimagine the potential and purpose of literature through animating the relations between texts, contemporary social issues, and critical theory. Literary linking as a methodology goes beyond notions of a text-based intertextuality and considers teachers’, researchers’, and students’ situated understanding of their own pedagogical spaces, and intersectional contexts and environmental concerns as vital in the creation of literary understanding in contemporary life.

Significance

The three papers in this panel draw from interdisciplinary scholarship in the fields of affect theory, feminism, anti-colonialism, speculative fiction, and embodied learning in combination with empirical research in schools and the community to demonstrate the affordances of engaging with literature to make sense of a world in crisis.

Structure: The panelists will attend in person from Australia and the UK. Each will give a 20 minute paper followed by a discussion.

This paper focuses on speculative climate fiction as a transdisciplinary method for highlighting injustices in the present and imagining different climate and technological futures. I investigate an in-school research project that took place in Australia where year 9 English students engaged with the text Terra Nullius by Aboriginal author Claire Coleman. The project used ‘literary linking’ (Truman, Mclean Davies & Buzacott, 2021) to investigate themes of climate change, settler colonialism through cross-curricular collaboration between English literature and STEM. Australia, like the rest of the planet, is in a climate crisis. The past several years have seen extreme weather events including bushfires, flooding, and drought across the continent. Concomitantly, the crisis of settler colonialism continues in Australia, as highlighted in Coleman’s allegorical climate fiction which although set in a speculative future, incriminates the factual past. As an example of speculative climate fiction, Coleman’s text highlights the potential of narrative as a pedagogical and social tool for predicting, critiquing, and building a different world. Considering the material effects of stories in creating worlds aligns Indigenous scholars (Dillion, 2012) who argue for the power of narrative in shaping experience, critiquing the present, and positing different futures. Specifically, Indigenous climate fictions provide the opportunity for critical reflection on aspects of how our world currently is and where we might end up if we continue along certain paths (Whyte, 2018). These critical reflections then offer a chance for further speculative thinking which asks what needs to be done in the present to arrive at an alternative future. Data sources for the paper will include an engagement with climate fiction narratives, and discussion of an experimental cross-curricular project between English literary education and STEM, in a contemporary year 9 classroom in Australia. Students consider the power of narrative for thinking about climate, settler colonialism, and proposing different futures in times of crisis.

Dillion, G. (2012). Walking the Clouds (G. Dillion (ed.)). Arizona University Press. Truman, S. E., McLean Davies, L., & Buzacott, L. (2021). Disrupting intertextual power networks: challenging literature in schools. Discourse, 0(0), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2021.1910929 Whyte, K. P. (2018). Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment & Planning E: Nature & Space, 1(1/2), 224.

Linking Literature and consent education: literate practices in crisis times This paper takes up the concept and method of “literary linking” (Mclean Davies et al 2020; Truman et al 2021) to explore the intersections of the teaching of literature and consent education in L1 contexts. It reports on a research project--undertaken in partnership with the Stella Prize for Australian women and non- binary writers--which developed a framework to support conversations about consent in Australian English classrooms. This framework was developed in an interdisciplinary collaboration with experts in respectful relationships education and the inductive and iterative close analysis of 50 texts set for study in secondary English classrooms. Background and questions As a result of the continued, gendered abuse of power in public, institutional and private spaces, parents and students have called for greater time spent on consent education in schools. While usually the remit of health and wellbeing curriculum area,issues of ethics and relationships are also implicitly the mainstay of L1 education, through the study of literature and texts. Thus, it is timely to consider how issues of consent might be productively addressed in secondary English and what this means for our understanding of the nature of literary study. Theoretical framework: Drawing on Green’s notion of a “literary literacy” (2002), concepts of relational literacies (McLean Davies et al 2021), and “relational reading” (Graham, 2014), the paper will offer insight into the ways that literary linking as a pedagogy enables consent discourses to be contextualised within broader discussions of relationality and sustainability. Accordingly it will show that raising these issues in L1 expands our conceptualization of the possibilities of a “Literary literacy” in times of global crisis.

Graham, M. (2014). Aboriginal Notions of Relationality and Positionalism. In Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought. 4 (1), 17-22. Green, B. 2002. “A Literacy Project of Our Own?” English in Australia 134 (July): 25–32. McLean Davies, L & Buzacott, L. (2021). “Rethinking Literature, Knowledge and Justice: Selecting ‘Difficult’ Stories for Study in School English.” Pedagogy, Culture & Society. 1 (15). https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2021.1977981.

The paper draws on a three-year project exploring children and young people’s embodied relationship to treescapes (that is, spaces where trees are). We draw on our experiences of using story crafting as a method (Karlsson, 2009) to attend to children’s narratives as sites, where the discursive, the social, and the material/physical intertwine. We particularly are interested in the embodied experiences of treescapes with children in and outside the school context in the North of England. Our focus here was on the ways in which a story could develop provocations and inquiries with the children that led to further thinking about storying in a world threatened by climate change. We apply “critical literacy” (Vasquez 2014) as a framework to provide children a space for engaging in critical discussions around the themes of hope, trees, and environmental change. We read a story to the children who then responded with small stories of hope and drawings. The story was called ‘The Tree of Hope’ which involved a child, Khadra, finding out how to re-plant her home space, which had been a desert. The children in the school were re-planting their playground and finding out why trees were important in the climate crisis. When we told the story new possibilities and stories of hope emerged (Ojala 2012). Through this, we trouble assumptions about who knows what and how in environmental education (Trott and Weinberg, 2020) challenging adult-designed naturalised curriculum practices. Linking literacies through the story created an emergent space of practice that offered a structure in which to work with hope as a method (Kraftl 2008).

Karlsson, L. 2009. To construct a bridge of sharing between child and adult culture with the Storycrafting method. In: Ruismäki H and Ruokonen I (eds) Arts Contact Points between Cultures. Department of Applied Sciences of Education. Research Report 312. Helsinki: University of Helsinki, pp. 117–128. Kraftl, P. 2008. Young People, Hope, and Childhood-Hope. Space and Culture, 11(2), 81–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331208315930 Ojala, M. 2012. “Hope and Climate Change: The Importance of Hope for Environmental Engagement among Young People.” Environmental Education Research, 18 (5), 625–642. doi:10.1080/13504622.2011.637157. Vasquez, V.M. 2014. Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children. Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group: New York. Trott, C. D., Weinberg, A. E. 2020. "Science Education for Sustainability: Strengthening Children’s Science Engagement through Climate Change Learning and Action", Sustainability, 12 (16), pp.1-24. Doi: https://doi.org/10.3390/su12166400