Poetry and prose as pedagogical tools for addressing

This article was downloaded by: [UQ Library] On: 17 July 2012, At: 01:22 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Pedagogy, Culture & Society Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpcs20

Poetry and prose as pedagogical tools for addressing difficult knowledges: translocational positionality and issues of collective political agency Amanda Keddie

a

a

School of Education, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia Version of record first published: 29 Jun 2012

To cite this article: Amanda Keddie (2012): Poetry and prose as pedagogical tools for addressing difficult knowledges: translocational positionality and issues of collective political agency, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20:2, 317-332 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2012.688768

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Pedagogy, Culture & Society Vol. 20, No. 2, July 2012, 317–332

Poetry and prose as pedagogical tools for addressing difficult knowledges: translocational positionality and issues of collective political agency Amanda Keddie*

Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 01:22 17 July 2012

School of Education, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia In this paper the focus is on the possibilities that poetry and prose offer as pedagogical tools that can both accommodate and address difficult and painful knowledges. The paper presents and analyses poems and prose written by students at a non-traditional secondary school for disadvantaged girls (many of whom identify as Indigenous Australian). Through stories of grief and pain, but also hope and possibility, the poetry/prose book signifies a sense of collective political agency against oppressive relations towards the girls creating new moulds of existence. Contra to dominant approaches to recognising and valuing Indigeneity in schools, these writings represent Indigenous culture as a complex, dynamic and contingent social practice. While it is contended that a valuing of marginalised cultures is an important aspect of cultural recognition, the paper argues that a broader and more critical focus is required in beginning to address Indigenous oppressions. Keywords: pedagogy; culture; political agency; identity/positionality; Indigeneity

Introduction Our stories just need to be told … these are our stories that we need to pass on to our children so it makes them stronger; this is where they came from and even though it is a negative past, I think the girls should be able to speak that, and teach it, because that’s [our] culture; what happened to us and to our parents and to our grandparents…

These words are from Sarah, a young Indigenous woman who is a former student and current youth worker at ‘Gamarada’1 High School. Gamarada is situated in suburban Australia. It is a non-traditional school for disadvantaged girls, many of whom identify as Indigenous Australian. At this school there is a strong focus on positively valuing Indigenous culture and fostering *Email: [email protected] ISSN 1468-1366 print/ISSN 1747-5104 online ! 2012 Pedagogy, Culture & Society http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2012.688768 http://www.tandfonline.com

318

A. Keddie


the girls’ pride in their Indigeneity through, for example, observing and learning about major Indigenous days such as ‘Reconciliation Day’ and NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) and participating in cultural activities such as traditional dance, art and customs. As is suggested in Sarah’s words, such recognition also includes telling the stories of a ‘negative past’. Like Indigenous activist, Jackie Huggins (1998), it is Sarah’s view that these negative stories ‘need to be told’. They are stories, however, that are difficult to recognise within the context of western schooling where painful Indigenous knowledges tend to be either ignored or ‘whitewashed’ (i.e. sanitised) (Huggins 1998; McConaghy 2003). McConaghy contends that current ways of recognising Indigenous culture in schools remain: largely inadequate to the task of teaching through and about difficult knowledges [as they] so often slide back into an easy story of binary oppositions, fantasies of benevolence and inclusion and heroic narratives of success and tolerance. (2003, 15)

McConaghy (2003, 11) poses a significant question here in relation to the tendency towards a sanitising of Indigenous histories within many Australian schools – she asks: ‘Is good pedagogy and good curriculum only that which consoles – not that which provokes?’ She argues that ‘our ability to engage ethically with social issues in the present’ requires pedagogy and curriculum that can ‘bear the weight’ of difficult and painful knowledges – that can assist us to speak the unspeakable’ (McConaghy 2003, 18) in ways that both console and provoke. Following this, she calls for the development of pedagogies that can accommodate these knowledges that characterise Indigeneity past and present. She argues that engaging with and addressing these knowledges is a most pressing issue in western contexts such as Australia given the enduring disenfranchisement of Indigenous people. Referring to the sense of political agency in Sarah’s words, such a pedagogy needs to support a speaking and teaching about negative stories towards creating stronger identities. For Huggins (1998, 133), the individual and collective political agency arising from the telling of these stories is generated though knowing that ‘through all this destruction an [Indigenous] identity and power did evolve’. In this paper the focus is on the possibilities that poetry and prose offer as pedagogical tools that can both accommodate and address difficult knowledges. Drawing on the poems/prose written by students at Gamarada in 2009 that comprise a book entitled ‘Hanging by a Thread’, the paper highlights the girls’ similar experiences of, and struggles against, the relations of oppression in their lives. Through stories of grief and pain but also hope and possibility the poetry book signifies a sense of collective political agency. Towards the girls creating new moulds of existence, this agency can

Pedagogy, Culture & Society

319


be conceptualised as the girls’ ‘having presence (rather than absence), as having access to a subject position in which they have the right to speak and to be heard’, where they are ‘the author of their own multiple meanings and desires’ (Davies 2000, 66; Moreton-Robinson 2000; Tamboukou 2003). In contrast to dominant approaches to recognising Indigeneity that tend to represent culture as a fixed and authentic entity that can be reduced to ‘binary oppositions and fantasies of benevolence and inclusion’, these writings represent Indigenous culture as a complex, dynamic and contingent social practice. Importantly, these writings reflect the girls’ translocational positionality. Anthias describes translocational positionality as recognising: the complex nature of positionality faced by those who are at the interplay of a range of locations and dislocations in relation to gender, ethnicity, national belonging, class and racialization. A translocational positionality is one structured by the interplay of the different locations and their (at times) contradictory effects. (2002, 277)

For Anthias (2002, 276), this theorising of identity (positionality) as a complex, dynamic and contradictory process constructed through cultures (locations) and their interplay (translocation) ‘fissure[s] the certainties of fixed singular locations’ and draws attention to context and the situated nature of claims. This focus supports a greater understanding of the specific nature of specific oppressions at specific sites and promotes a critical situational analysis of all knowledges that marginalise (McConaghy 2000). While it is contended that a positive valuing of culture through observing Indigenous events and conducting Indigenous activities is an important aspect of cultural recognition, the paper argues that a broader and more critical focus on cultural recognition is required in beginning to address Indigenous oppressions. Through pedagogies that can bear the weight of painful and difficult knowledges, this focus must acknowledge the translocational positionality associated with such knowledges towards supporting the creation of new moulds of existence. Cultural recognition in schools: difficulties, complexities and possibilities It is clear that culturally responsive teaching and learning environments can enhance the educational outcomes of students from marginalised groups – relevant and meaningful learning encounters can be generated within environments that are respectful of, and responsive to, the funds of knowledge specific to these students. These environments are especially important in destabilising the mainstream schooling patterns that silence and/or inferiorise non-dominant culture and perpetuate inequitable understandings of difference. Creating these environments, however, remains a fraught and difficult task for educators especially in light of the increasing complexity of the diversity within their classrooms and the increasing pub-


320

A. Keddie

lic and policy demands that they respond to this diversity in just and equitable ways. This difficult task is compounded in western liberal contexts where transnational migration flows and new mobilisations of group identity have generated a concern with preserving minority cultures for fear of losing them. A central difficulty relates to how marginalised culture is recognised. Certainly, dominant practice within multicultural and Indigenous education (within western schooling contexts) has tended to deploy cultural reductionism as the predominant frame around such recognition. Here culture is seen as a knowable and bounded entity that is clearly delineable to a particular identity group (McConaghy 2000; Benhabib 2002; Moreton-Robinson 2000). Practices aligning with this frame tend to reflect what Rasheed Ali and Ancis (2005; see also, Sleeter 2005; Garcia 2002) refer to as a ‘holidays and heroes’ approach to multicultural education where there is a superficial engagement or additive approach to addressing culturally diverse knowledges and identities. Through these lenses assumptions of cultural authenticity produce and naturalise the ‘other’ – which can have the effect of reducing all modes of struggle faced by a particular identity group to problems of the ‘cultural’. In relation to Indigenous education, such reductionism has tended to represent all Indigenous matters as problems of race and/or racism – isolating these problems from other political struggles, for example, those associated with class, ethnicity, rurality/geographical location and gender (McConaghy 2000). This has led, for McConaghy (2003, 17), to a situation where ‘culture has become code for what is difficult in Indigenous education’. This reductionism disregards the complex, dynamic and contingent ways in which cultures are constructed and re-constructed within particular contexts and historical periods and in relation to the cultures of other identity groups. Ignoring within-group diversity – including within-group relations of domination and oppression – these assumptions set up binaries such as Black/White, Indigenous/non-Indigenous, traditional/non-traditional, authentic/inauthentic (McConaghy 2000; Anthias 2002). Within these binaries, ‘other’ cultures tend to be either unproblematically celebrated and idealised or denigrated and condemned against a dominant white middle-class norm. Along these lines, Anthias cautions against ‘museumising’ cultures – she argues that such stereotyping: fixes them in stone and can lead us on a number of false trails. Firstly, it can lead us to over-celebrating cultures, as though they exist in little boxes and these are to be cherished and fostered, whatever their contexts and whatever the social practices/outcomes that are ‘claimed’ for them … Secondly, it can lead us to condemning cultures, particularly the cultures of those we see as the ‘other’, as ‘different’, as not like ours, those of foreigners, the ‘traditional’ groups as we might stereotype them. (2002, 276)



321

Towards a more inclusive and generative recognition of culture, it is imperative to initiate theory about minority culture from the social location of minority group (rather than majority group) experience (see hooks 1994; Mohanty 2003). Minority groups have long been critical of western imperialist and paternalistic representations of their culture – where they are objects of a white gaze (Moreton-Robinson 2000; Mohanty 2003; Tuhiwai Smith 1999). To be sure, fixing and ‘museumising’ minority cultures tends to be the province of dominant cultures – who have the power to set the terms of the agenda in relation to issues of cultural recognition (Anthias 2002). Initiating theory from the social location of the ‘other’ goes some of the way to remedying the misrecognition arising from this inequity. However, it does not reconcile questions such as whose knowledges and which knowledges should be privileged? Who can know and speak with respect to these knowledges? and Are these knowledges socially just (McConaghy 2000; Anthias 2002)? The project of centring marginalised voices is thus fraught with complexities, difficulties and uncertainties – it can never be definitive and requires ongoing reflection and critique. Responding productively to these questions necessitates an understanding of culture and identity – not as entities but as aspects of negotiated social practice. The notion of translocational positionality offered by Anthias (2002) is useful in theorising the interlocking, shifting and complex positionalities relating to social identities where matters of context and situatedness, rather than static identity markers, are foregrounded. Importantly, a focus on the interplay of social relations/identities shifts attention to addressing problems of ‘hierarchical’ difference and power asymmetries both within and between groups (Anthias 2002). Importantly, such understandings do not delimit the ways in which culture and identity can be used as an organising principle of political solidarity – as hooks argues (2003; see also Spivak 1990), recognising group identity around a specific culture (for example, gender or race) is an important political strategy for minorities to generate collective agency and solidarity in struggles against oppression. It is such collectivity that is necessary for transformations of the self – where individual agency is connected to larger political struggles against repression (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Wekker 1997). The key here, as Anthias (2002, 286) argues, is mobilising collective agency around these struggles rather than a reductionist identity category – as she contends ‘it is clear that organisation on the basis of identities appears problematic, while organisation on the basis of struggles and the formation of solidarity is more useful’. The importance of such theorising in framing generative approaches to recognising marginalised culture in schools is well established especially within the critical and reflexive multicultural education literature (see Banks and Banks 2010; Nieto 1999; Gay 2000). However, illustrations of how this theorising might be articulated through specific schooling practices are less

322

A. Keddie


apparent especially in relation to exploring difficult or traumatic marginalised knowledges and experiences. It is contended here that the poetry book at Gamarada represents a useful pedagogical tool in this regard – especially in reflecting the translocational positionality of the girls’ disadvantage and the capacity to mobilise collective political agency against this disadvantage. The next section provides an account of the research context and processes upon which this paper is based followed by a presentation of data and analysis associated with the poetry book. The research context Established in 1997, Gamarada High School was driven by one woman’s passion to provide quality education for disadvantaged girls. The school is officially classed as independent – its supporting body is the Baptist church, however, the school does not explicitly affiliate with Christianity. The school was initially housed in a three-bedroom premise in suburban Queensland with an enrolment of seven young women (aged 13–16). Over the years, this number has gradually increased to over 100 in 2009. In 2002, the school relocated to its current, much larger premises. The students are aged between 12 and 28 years – most of them identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Many have experienced educational exclusion from mainstream schools and come from troubled family backgrounds. Some students are from violent or sexually abusive personal backgrounds with many in and out of foster care. Some are homeless and many are living in very undesirable conditions. Many have attended a number of previous schools and have long been disengaged from education. A number of the girls are partnered or single mothers. Some who are pregnant have been asked to leave mainstream schools while others have returned to education after some years. Many of the students have come to Gamarada disengaged and insecure in their sense of self with a lack of confidence and self-esteem. For many the school is, as the current principal indicated, the girls’ ‘last opportunity to have a chance of a real education’. Within the local Indigenous and broader education communities, the school is renowned for its excellence in supporting Indigenous education. The school is well recognised for its ‘holistic’ approach to assisting students to overcome barriers that impede their educational success and for its inclusive practices in relation to issues of gender and cultural identity (D’Angelo and Zemanick 2009; Malin and Maidment 2003). For example, it offers a crèche for the young mothers; it liaises and connects students with appropriate community and government agencies to assist economic, health and social needs; and it provides transport and financial services to support the girls’ school and work experience attendance. A third of staff identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander including several teacher assistants/youth workers, a community liaison worker and a teacher. As noted in the


323


introduction, the school is committed to supporting the girls to develop pride in their Indigeneity and confidence as Indigenous women. The research process The paper draws on a broader case study of Gamarada that sought to articulate productive approaches to addressing issues of cultural diversity and marginality in schools. The core data for this study were generated from indepth interviews and follow-up conversations with six key Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff (who were responsible for addressing equity at the school) and three students (two former students and current youth workers at the school and one Year 11 student). Aside from a few comments deriving from these interviews that relate to the poetry book (that appear throughout this paper), these data are not the focus of this paper. The main focus of this paper is the data gathered from the poetry book – which were derived from a cultural audit of the school. The purpose of this audit was to ‘paint’ a comprehensive social picture of the school within which to locate the interview data. This audit involved consulting demographic information about the school and the broader community as well as information to do with the school’s philosophies and policies particularly in the area of equity and diversity. The poetry book was an artefact presented to me as reflecting the key issues of relevance and importance to the student body. The poetry and prose within the book are the core data presented in the following section. While some of these writings are abbreviated for the purposes of this paper (for brevity and to foreground the conceptual and theoretical issues under analysis), they are reproduced as they appear in the book. The writings were analysed drawing on the theories outlined in the preceding sections. Anthias’ (2002) notion of translocational positionality drew attention to the complexities of the girls’ disadvantage – as arising from locations of gender, class, race and youth and their interplay. These lenses revealed the significance of context and the situated nature of oppressions, and generated a focus on the dominant themes in the girls’ lives, namely relationships with families and intimate partners, that both undermined and supported their sense of well-being and agency. Thus, the poetry book was interpreted as supporting a better understanding of the specific nature of the girls’ oppressions rather than fixing such oppressions to issues of Indigenous culture. Following this, the book was analysed in relation to its capacities to act as a useful pedagogical tool for both addressing and moving beyond difficult knowledges. The poems and prose were theorised as enabling the girls to speak the unspeakable in a context that provoked (in the telling of traumatic experiences) and consoled (in the sharing of these experiences) (McConaghy 2003). Against this backdrop, the analysis foregrounded the capacity of the poetry book to position the girls with agency – with access to subject positions in which they have the right to speak and

324

A. Keddie


be heard (Davies 2000) – and to foster a sense of collective solidarity where individual agency can be connected to larger political struggles towards transformations of the self (Alexander and Mohanty 1997). These theoretical lenses framed the study’s approach to issues of researcher positionality. As a white researcher attempting to tell the stories of Indigenous girls, I was acutely aware of my ‘imperial’ gaze and the potential of this gaze to misrepresent these stories (Moreton-Robinson 2000; Tuhiwai Smith 1999). The political agenda and theoretical tools framing the data analysis subjects this gaze to critical scrutiny towards a more authentic engagement with Indigenous priorities and concerns. The poetry book: ‘Hanging by a Thread’ The school’s focus on poetry and prose was designed to support the students’ cultural integrity and political agency. This was an outlet for the girls to express, explore and share their emotions about particular issues in their lives. Self-writing along these lines has, of course, been a crucial theme in feminist explorations of the subject (Stanton 1984; Tamboukou 2003; Moreton-Robinson 2000). Such writing can support a disruption of positions of marginality and a negotiation of new spaces from which to understand the self (Benstock 1988; Moreton-Robinson 2000; Stanton 1984; Tamboukou 2003). Tamboukou’s work (2003), for example, illustrates how women’s recollections of their past can provide a context for them to understand and challenge the very discursive relations that constitute them. Through this process, women can resist their marginal positionings and create new moulds of existence. Marginalised women’s stories have worked in this way to disrupt taken-for-granted ‘truths’ about race and gender and to give voice to alternative knowledges (Moreton-Robinson 2000; Mirza 1997; Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Mohanty 2003). One of the teachers spoke of poetry as a useful tool to support the girls to understand and deal with some of the issues arising from their troubled backgrounds, as she explained in an interview: I think writing, as a tool, has a means to get things off your chest and out of your system … it can also be a means of inspiring change and of healing … it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to show anybody, you know, it can be something you’ve shared with yourself that you can put away. But if you want to, it’s also a means to sharing your ideas and your feelings with other people.

As a vehicle for sharing, healing and inspiring change, one of the school’s major projects every year is the compiling of a poetry, prose and art book. These books are professionally published and are distributed to the school and wider community. In 2009, the three (former and current) students interviewed within the broader case study were responsible for creating the


325


theme, title and artwork for the book around a ‘Dreaming’ story. Sarah (one of the former students) described this story in an interview as about connecting the girls to a journey of becoming strong women that symbolised the ‘cycle’ of the students’ ‘journey’ at Gamarada where they ‘better their culture by bettering themselves’: There’s a really meaningful story behind the book. Ms A [original principal] was given an egg from an Elder; it’s an emu egg, and an emu is women’s business and it connects two journeys and our emu – she’s a strong woman and – well anyway, the story goes that when the emu – she’s a baby when she comes here and she’s stepping out into the world, and then she’s going through all these journeys, and her journeys are learning and caring for others around her – she’s guiding our journeys … throughout the poetry book and is making us stronger because she’s been through all these events in her life … there’s a lot of negative influences in the poetries but it’s only made them stronger … and the emu, she doesn’t walk backwards, she can’t, so she moves forward … and it’s kind of like the emu that could fly, and at the end of it all she takes a big leap and she wants to reach the stars … and you’d never think that was possible.

Dreaming or Dreamtime stories represent the traditional ways in which Indigenous Australians understand the world, its creation, their existence and their knowledge. This Dreaming Story is significant in the sense of the collective agency it engenders around journeys of struggle – where the girls can draw on the many ‘negative influences’ in their lives to become ‘stronger’ and further to open up possibilities where they ‘reach for the stars’. In this Dreaming Story, the girls are constituted with agency and the capacity to change their circumstances (Moreton-Robinson 2000; Alexander and Mohanty 1997). This story was an apt framing for the 70 works of poetry and prose in the 2009 collection (most, but not all, written by Indigenous girls) entitled ‘Hanging by a Thread’. In these writings the girls expressed their deepest thoughts about issues of importance to them. The girls’ relationships with their families and intimate partners revealed a common alliance around struggles against oppressions associated with their gender, Indigeneity, class and youth. The poems and prose reveal many disturbing accounts of pain and grief, but also hope and possibility, in the girls’ lives associated with their gendered, classed and racialised identities. As such the poetry book might be understood as a generative pedagogy for examining and addressing difficult knowledges – a pedagogy that both provokes and consoles (McConaghy 2003). The writings provoke in their revealing of traumatic and dangerous knowledges while also consoling in the sharing of this knowledge. Along these lines, Sarah referred to the poems (in an interview) as a way for the girls to connect with and learn from each other; gaining strength from each other through ‘sharing their stories and the burden of their pain’. The opening quote captures Sarah’s understanding of these stories as the Dreaming


326

A. Keddie

stories of her generation that ‘just need to be told … to pass on to our children so it makes them stronger’. The writings in the poetry book articulated many struggles in relation to an interplay of gender, poverty, race and youth oppressions. Struggles against gender oppression were evident in the girls’ stories of sexual abuse and family violence. In one of the poems entitled ‘bed time terror’, for example, a girl recounts being sexually abused by her father, while another tells of her father’s friend who ‘raped and molested’ her ‘for almost all’ her life. Another girl writes: ‘if I could change the world, I would get rid of all the paedophiles’. For another, her life was changed when she first saw her dad hit her mum and then ‘it wasn’t only mum, it was me and my sister too’. In other prose a gender oppression theme characterises the girls’ anger directed towards their fathers for being absent, alcoholic and drug dependent – as one girl writes ‘I lost my father because he thought drugs were more important than his own children’. For another girl her life changed in Grade Three when she and her family began ‘running from the man who screwed our life’ while in another poem a girl expresses anger towards her father – she writes that she will ‘never’ love or forgive her dad ‘ever, ever again’ after being evicted from her home following family violence and being forced to ‘sleep in parks’ with her mother and siblings. In some of the writings, anger was expressed towards boyfriends in relation to pregnancy, as one girl writes: When I found out I was pregnant, I was so sad and very scared. I didn’t want to have this baby. I didn’t think I was ready to be a mum. All I could do was cry. Then all I could do was be angry at my partner. I screamed and yelled abuse at him.

In many of the writings circumstances of poverty and disenfranchisement intersected with these issues of gender oppression. The following example illustrates this intersection in one girl’s account of the uncertainties of foster care following her family breakdown and the cycle of generational violence that began with her great grandmother: This life was given to me. It isn’t the life I chose. But now I’m fixing it. I didn’t ask for my life to detour around the Department of Child Safety. I didn’t ask for my life to be so confusing, having to worry about where I am staying tonight because my placement has broken down. So because of someone else’s stuff up, my life is now stuffed up … when my real dad cheated on my mum and they broke up, she decided to go out with a dumbarse. Then both of them tried drugs and that was when my stepdad hit us. I then got taken away from mum when I was 12 to the Department of Families.

In several other poems, the girls write about suicide as a form of escaping from the violence and isolation in their lives, as one girl writes:


327


She was haunted by her past, the yelling and the beatings. She used to lie awake and hear her mother screaming. She decided to end it all with a knife across her wrist. I wonder if things would be different if she knew she would be missed.

In other poems issues of Indigenous oppression are a theme, for example, in a poem entitled ‘outcasts’, a girl writes: ‘put aside the black roses and tears, don’t beg for life, beg for death. Dig up the grave because this is the end’. The issues explored in these writings illuminate the complexities of the relations of disadvantage in the girls’ lives arising from the boundaries (or locations/dislocations) of gender, poverty, race and youth (Anthias 2002). The poetry and prose thus reflect the girls’ translocational positionality – they highlight the complex nature of the girls’ positionality in relation to a range of locations and dislocations. In these writings the girls’ positionality is shaped by dis/locations of gender (and oppressions of sexual abuse and early pregnancy); gender and youth (and oppressions of family violence perpetrated by their fathers/step-fathers); poverty (and oppressions of material deprivation); and race (and oppressions of cultural disenfranchisement). As such, the writings illustrate the girls’ critical awareness of some of the ways in which their disadvantaged positionality has come into existence through these various social processes – an awareness that is crucial in supporting their capacity to create new moulds of existence (Tamboukou 2003). The poems/prose thus draw attention to context, the situated nature of oppression and its production in complex and shifting locales (Anthias 2002). For instance, the accounts of homelessness and suicide are located within a broader context of gendered (and generational) family violence, drug taking and poverty. In these accounts oppressions occur through the girls’ dynamic relations with family and intimate partners in contexts and situations and are shaped by discourses associated with gender, class, youth and race. Importantly, difference through these lenses is represented in relation to hierarchies and asymmetries of power in relation to the girls’ subordinate positioning within these discourses – rather than in relation to one specific identity marker. Responding to these hierarchies in ways that promoted the girls’ cultural integrity and autonomy was embedded in the school’s holistic approach. Of course, the traumatic knowledges revealed within the writings such as suicide and physical and sexual abuse requires that the school engage in particular state-sanctioned reporting protocols. This was one element of the school’s multi-dimensional approach that worked alongside a garnering of financial and social support for the girls from community and government agencies. Such broader assistance is crucial in maximising the generative potential of the poetry book as a context that can support the girls’ capacities to think and act themselves out of their oppressive positionalities. Certainly, the

328

A. Keddie

former; thinking beyond these positionalities was central to many of the writings in accounts of hope and possibility. Just as the girls’ relationships with their families and intimate partners revealed a common alliance around relations of oppression, these contexts and locales were also a source of inspiration, hope and determination in relation to overcoming these oppressions. For example, in relation to the poem featured earlier where one girl refers to the violence, drugs and reliance on community services in her life – she goes on to write: This is a cycle that started with my nan’s mum, then my nan, then my mum. But I’m stopping it from coming to me.


Similar resolve to create more positive futures was apparent in relation to prose that referred to the girls’ children and their future children: if I ever have children of my own, I would make sure they have a good father who didn’t do drugs and wouldn’t hit them or me. I would make sure my children were happy and safe. I am a 20 year old mother to a beautiful little one year old. I do it on my own but I love it because she will be growing up with me. She won’t be growing up with violence like I did … I am going to teach her about right and wrong. I am going to teach her to have respect for other races and cultures and people of all different shapes and sizes. All I can say is I love my girl.

In these sections of prose there is a sense of presence and agency in relation to disrupting and moving beyond the oppressive dis/locations of gender, youth and poverty identified earlier. In the context of family the girls position themselves with agency – as the authors of more positive futures for themselves and their children (Davies 2000). The writings reflect possibility and hope that new non-violent, ‘happy’ and ‘respect[ful]’ moulds of existence can be created (Tamboukou 2003). In another piece of prose – an adjunct to the earlier writing about one girl’s anger towards her boyfriend in relation to her pregnancy – this sense of possibility and hope was manifest in an alternative perspective she expressed later in her writings when she states: ‘in a way, I’m glad this baby unexpectedly came along. I feel like a better person’. In further prose, family as a context of support and agency was evident for another girl who writes: ‘it’s a great feeling when I’m with my family. I don’t have a mum and a dad for family. My family is my boyfriend, my brothers and sisters and my boyfriend’s family’. In another poem, relationship to the land, so central to the lives of many Indigenous people, was a source of agency and possibility: My land and we share it, observing our beautiful land, responsible for our land and the way we treat it, indigenous to my land…


329

For others, thinking beyond oppressive positionalities was more individualised in relation to constructing the self in a positive light: I look in the mirror and what do I see? A beautiful girl looking back at me. Long hair, blue eyes and a womanly body. I love the way she looks. Bright, happy in every way. Thank my stars, I am who I am. My future is so bright now, it’s almost blinding. Now all my tears are happy ones and I soar through the heavens. Nothing will stop me now.


Wake up and realise, get out and live your life, strive to be the person that you see in your dreams, connect the dots in your life, make it strong at the seams, build positively into your armour to protect yourself from the sword of negativity, respect yourself and create your own liberty.

In these more individualised writings, possibility and hope are again reflected in the girls positioning themselves with the capacity to construct positive futures where they have presence rather than absence and access to subject positions in which they have the right to speak and be heard (Davies 2000). Here new moulds of existence are about self-confidence, beauty, happiness, aspiration, realising dreams, strength, respect, positivity and liberty. Against the backdrop of the girls’ critical awareness of some of the ways in which their disadvantaged positionality has come into being (in the earlier poetry and prose snippets), these moulds of existence offer alternatives to the oppressive relations constituting the girls’ positionalities. The capacity for the transforming of these relations is supported by the collective context of the poetry book – as noted earlier, transformation of the self necessitates collectivity (Alexander and Mohanty 1997). The book’s focus on sharing the burden of the girls’ pain under the umbrella of the Dreaming Story engenders a collective sense of agency from journeys of struggle that, as Sarah noted, ‘makes us stronger’. In this sense, the book can be seen as promoting an alliance and solidarity around the girls’ collective struggles but also their collective strength and agency. Such alliance and solidarity can serve as a catalyst for organising against the dis/locations of gender, poverty, race and youth that interplay to contribute to the girls’ positions of oppression and disadvantage (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Anthias 2002). Conclusion Creating culturally inclusive schooling environments for Indigenous students is a fraught and difficult task for educators. Dominant practice continues to deploy cultural reductionism where Indigeneity tends to either be unproblematically celebrated and exalted or denigrated and inferiorised against a white middle-class normative frame. The urgency of creating more productive and sophisticated strategies for addressing issues of cultural


330

A. Keddie

recognition is clear in the enduring disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples. Schools must engage ethically with this disenfranchisement towards creating more equitable social worlds. In this paper, the importance of a critical approach to cultural recognition was advocated – an approach that acknowledges the translocational positionality of Indigenous disadvantage, addresses difficult and painful knowledges, and supports the creation of new moulds of existence. The poetry book at Gamarada was theorised as representing such an approach. In contrast with dominant practices of recognising Indigeneity – that tend to fix and museumise culture – the poems and prose reflected the complexity, fluidity and contingency of Indigenous culture as it interplays with other locations such as gender, class and youth. Articulating the translocational positionality of disadvantage, the poetry book was presented as a useful pedagogical tool for both examining and moving beyond difficult knowledges. To be sure, many of the stories of grief and pain in the girls’ writings necessitate broader social interventions of support and sanction than that possible through the processes of poetry/prose writing, sharing and reflection, and it is clear that such a pedagogical tool in delving into the sorts of traumatic knowledges that featured within the girls’ stories must be supported by these interventions. Notwithstanding these important considerations, the poetry book was seen to be a generative forum in its capacity to provoke but also console through the telling of stories of oppression and hope in the girls’ lives associated with family and intimate partner relationships. Rather than emphasising a particular identity/location, these stories drew attention to the contexts and situations that both undermined and enabled the girls’ sense of wellbeing and agency. As such they reflected a situated account of Indigenous femininity – supporting a better understanding of the specific nature of the girls’ specific oppressions at specific sites. Organised around struggles against oppression, the poetry book promoted a sense of individual and collective political agency – while in this forum the girls are clearly authors of their own meanings and desires – they share similar struggles and hopes. As such the book is a forum for the girls to, as Sarah noted, connect with, learn and gain strength from each other. Sarah’s view that this forum will enable the girls to ‘share the burden of their pain’ towards becoming ‘strong Indigenous women’ who speak up and teach about their cultural past – reflects possibilities for collective political agency and solidarity. These possibilities are evident in the capacity of the book to support the girls’ critical awareness of some of the ways in which their disadvantaged positionality has come into existence and critical action in transforming this disadvantage. This capacity is significant in linking struggles for individual agency with larger political struggles against oppression – a linking that can engender unity and networks of female support that can promote personal and collective thinking and acting beyond racialised and gendered identities (Huggins 1998; Alexander and Mohanty 1997).


331

For Alexander and Mohanty (1997), transforming these positions requires both a critical engagement with the everyday issues of domination and marginalisation in women’s lives as well as engagement with collective emancipatory practice. The poetry book represents a context where such critical and collective engagement can be fostered. It contains, as Sarah noted, the Dreaming stories of a new generation that, while difficult and traumatic, need to be told. Note 1. All names referred to in this paper, including the name of the school, the poetry book and the participants in the research, are pseudonyms.


References Alexander, J., and C. Mohanty. 1997. Genealogies, legacies, movements. In Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures, ed. J. Alexander and C. Mohanty, xiii–li. New York: Routledge. Anthias, F. 2002. Beyond feminism and multiculturalism: Locating difference and the politics of location. Women’s Studies International Forum 25: 275–86. Banks, J., and C. Banks. 2010. Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Benhabib, S. 2002. The claims of culture: Equality and diversity in the global era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benstock, S. 1988. The private self: Theory and practice of women’s autobiographical writings. London: Routledge. D’Angelo, F., and R. Zemanick. 2009. The twilight academy: An alternative education program that works. Preventing School Failure 54: 211–8. Davies, B. 2000. A body of writing 1990–1999. New York: Alta Mira Press. Garcia, K. 2002. Swimming against the mainstream: Examining cultural assumptions in the classroom. In Learning to teach for social justice, ed. L. DarlingHammond, J. French, and P. Garcia Lopez, 22–9. New York: Teachers College Press. Gay, G. 2000. Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York: Teacher’s College Press. hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. London: Routledge. hooks, b. 2003. Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. New York: Routledge. Huggins, J. 1998. Sister girl: The writings of aboriginal activist and historian. St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press. Malin, M., and D. Maidment. 2003. Education, Indigenous survival and well-being: Emerging ideas and programs. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 32: 85–100. McConaghy, C. 2000. Rethinking indigenous education: Culturalism, colonialism, and the politics of knowing. Flaxton, Australia: Post Pressed. McConaghy, C. 2003. On pedagogy, trauma and difficult memory: Remembering Namatjira, our beloved. The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 32, no. 11: 11–20. Mirza, H. 1997. Black British feminism: A reader. London: Routledge. Mohanty, C. 2003. Feminism without borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.


332

A. Keddie

Moreton-Robinson, A. 2000. Talkin’ up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism. St Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press. Nieto, S. 1999. The light in their eyes: Creating multicultural learning communities. New York: Teacher’s College Press. Rasheed Ali, S., and J. Ancis. 2005. Multicultural education and critical pedagogy approaches. In Teaching and social justice. Integrating multicultural and feminist theories in the classroom, ed. C. Enns and A. Sincore, 69–84. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Sleeter, C. 2005. Un-standardizing curriculum. New York: Teachers College Press. Spivak, G. 1990. The post-modern condition: The end of politics? In The post-colonial critic. Interviews, strategies, dialogues, ed. S. Harasym, 17–34. New York: Routledge. Stanton, D.C. 1984. The female autograph: Theory and practice of autobiography from the 10th to the 20th century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tamboukou, M. 2003. Writing feminist genealogies. Journal of Gender Studies 12, no. 1: 5–19. Tuhiwai Smith, L. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed. Wekker, G. 1997. One finger does not drink okra soup: Afro-surinamese women and critical agency. In Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures, ed. J. Alexander and C. Mohanty, 330–52. New York: Routledge.