Section 3
Play, Symbols and Language:
Development and learning
in and out of school
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Introduction
This volume began with the recognition that we need to consider complex histories
of community and state, and the nature of local settings, cultures and conditions if we
wish to understand how ways of thinking and acting come to emerge, to change, or to
be sustained. That recognition is particularly needed when we seek to understand or
to make recommendations for culturally diverse groups. Starting there does not mean
that we are uninterested in the analysis of theory. We are, in fact, strongly interested in
the conceptual tools provided by various theories of culture and of development. For
the most part, however, we are building theory and its flow-on to social action from the
ground up, from observations of what actually happens and how it is experienced.
That orientation to theory is carried over to all the chapters in this section, along with
a particular interest in the extent to which old assumptions apply. Old assumptions
often die hard. Unless we examine and challenge them, however, we often make errors
in the ways we interpret what people do and in our proposals about what is needed.
What then is new in this section? Firstly, the most obvious change is in the content
that serves as a focus. Attention turns to ways of story-telling, ways of using language,
approaches to making visual representations of people or events, and approaches to
new learning and teaching. Secondly, the chapters of this section question particular
assumptions: assumptions about the forms of teaching and experience that are needed
for the development of various kinds of competence. All five chapters challenge ideas
that we have come to take for granted, in particular, assumptions of ‘universality’: the
expectation that the same kinds of competence, the same stages in the acquisition of
knowledge and skills, will apply in all settings and conditions.
The third and last new direction is the use of some particular settings and areas of
competence as a base for taking a fresh look at how various forms of development take
place. To give some broad advance notice, the children considered in the first three
chapters are Indigenous, living in various parts of Australia. In the first of these, a
chapter by Ute Eickelkamp, the emphasis is on a local form of storytelling by Anangu
Pitjantjatjara girls and women in Central Australia, exploring how intersubjectivity in
childhood is manifested in this particular cultural activity. In the second, a chapter by
Barbara Piscitelli, the setting is Darnley Island in the Torres Strait. The emphasis is on
the role of arts in education, highlighting the benefits of explicit interaction between
‘modern’ reflexive art practice and traditional symbols and practices, with the
tantalising suggestion that this may contribute to improvements in English literacy.
In the third, a chapter by Samantha Disbray and Gillian Wigglesworth, the setting
consists of three communities in some central parts of Australia. The emphasis is on
the language children understand and use in communities where they experience
both more than one way of speaking and frequent code-switching from one to
another. In both the fourth and the fifth chapters, the children are not Indigenous
Australians. In the first of these, a chapter by Julie Christie and her colleagues, the
storytelling children are in ‘mainstream’ Australian schools. The emphasis falls
on the continuing development of literacy in secondary schooling and the need
for explicit literacy teaching in later years. The final chapter, by Courtney Cazden,
examines approaches to ‘learning’ by people of diverse cultural backgrounds in some
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schools within California and Alaska. In an analysis that resonates with Piscitelli’s,
Cazden emphasises the importance of approaches to teaching that draw on cultural
and traditional themes relevant to the lives of children and youth and enhance their
active, critical, reflective participation in the process.
In the opening chapter (Chapter 11), Ute Eickelkamp examines playful storytelling
in the sand by Anangu Pitjantjatjara girls. This storytelling consists of rhythmically
beating a stick, making marks on the sand, combined with gestures and words or
song. Children start this form of play at a young age, developing over time impressive
levels of speed and coordination. It is highly gendered (boys are discouraged from its
use). The content most often has to do with what occurs within and around shelters
(e.g. the objects contained, who sleeps where). The sand-marks are erased at the end
of each story. Eickelkamp brings out the need to consider both what a cultural setting
provides and what children, their developmental achievements and their personal
experiences contribute to culture. In this case, the cultural context provides some
particular approaches to representation and some particular meanings to parts of the
storytelling. Highlighting the symbolic meaning of the ground as one’s canvas, for
example, Eickelkamp introduces the reader to analyses of Aboriginal art in which
sand is the medium and the background for representation, and in which the marks
on the ground are the ‘traces’ of people (usually erased after death).
Ethnographers, Eickelkamp comments, might stop at this point. Doing so, however,
overlooks the child’s own contributions. One of these is the double use of the
storytelling technique. It is sometimes used as a means of joining in and conveying
information (for example about recent or current visitors). At other times, a girl may
play by herself, withdrawing into a private space and developing her own stories.
The child’s own contributions are also reflections of early developmental experiences.
Here the conceptual background is psychoanalytic theory. To condense a detailed
argument, play often reflects earlier experiences of connection with and separation
from the mother. These interactions involve ‘exploratory touch’: touch that can be
expanded into the use of a stick or wire. From these early interactions there develops
also a sense of self and of space, starting with children first learning about spaces
between themselves and the mother. What always matters then is not only what
the cultural context provides, but also the way children use and internalise what is
provided through their engagement in these playful and exploratory experiences.
The following chapter (Chapter 12, by Barbara Piscitelli) is also concerned with the
development of representation and imagination. It takes up, however, a new area of
competence: children’s drawings, prints, and sculptures. Piscitelli brings out the way
activities of this kind flow on to competence in reading and writing, undoing the
usual assumption that the only way to teach these skills is by focusing exclusively on
them, setting traditional activities to the side: artistic activities especially.
The Indigenous setting in this case is Darnley Island, a small island off the coast
of northeast Queensland, with a population of about 350 people. A review of the
primary school in 2000 (for secondary school the children go to another island or
to the mainland) highlighted low literacy levels. It also prompted turning to a new
approach, with a focus on ‘learning through the arts’. In Piscitelli’s words, ‘the staff
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believe that arts and culture education connect all students, regardless of ability, to
their real world’. They also see effective arts education, taught with an orientation to
problem-solving and critical reflection, as promoting ways of learning and thinking
that can be carried over to all content areas.
How is this done? The school adopted a program with the name of smART. Piscitelli
takes us through the approach: through the use of models and demonstrations, with a
focus on traditional forms. With these as starting points, an ‘expert’ adult consistently
calls for reflection, critical thinking, and improvement. The outcomes are striking.
There was a major improvement in literacy as measured by the standard state tests
(children now met the state’s norms). Evaluation also demonstrated that there were
improvements in active engagement and involvement among both children and
adults in community life.
The conceptual background in this case comes from analyses of development that
emphasise collaboration with others and a sense of agency. Piscitelli provides brief
accounts of proposals from Vygotsky, Rogoff, and Bruner: proposals that emphasise
the importance of ‘scaffolding’ by others and participation in a ‘community of
learners’. Here then is a further set of conceptual tools that teachers or analysts of
development might well turn to for promoting any form of competence, in any setting.
Whether we use those tools or not, this is an elegant demonstration of arts education
as a base for a sense of connection to a real world and for the general development of
cognitive abilities. Here also is a challenge to our usual assumptions about ways to
promote literacy, and a reminder of the importance of linking generations rather than
separating them, promoting a sense of belonging and of shared purpose. School is
then no longer a world apart from everyday life.
In the third of the chapters that use observations of Indigenous children as a base,
Samantha Disbray and Gillian Wigglesworth (Chapter 13) pose questions about
language change. What is happening to traditional languages? Are they being lost?
What parts survive? What is emerging in their place? Is the same pattern emerging in
different places? What circumstances might make for diversity? These questions have
arisen in other countries both with reference to First Nations people and to immigrant
populations. This chapter turns to three Aboriginal communities (Kalkaringi and
Tennant Creek in Central Australia, Yakanarra in the Kimberley in Western Australia).
These are all multilingual communities in the sense that traditional languages, Kriol,
and varieties of English are all spoken.
The authors bring out the marked presence of variety in the languages children are
exposed to and in the forms of language they come to use. They also highlight the
impact of social and historical factors and the importance of dynamic intergenerational
processes of change: children effectively socialise themselves away from competence
in their parents’ and grandparents’ languages. The analysis stresses the need to
consider local conditions in any steps toward language maintenance and questions
the widely held assumption that code-switching always has negative effects.
Chapters 14 and 15 examine formal education in non-Indigenous contexts. The
emphasis is on literacy and approaches to learning. The first of this pair of chapters,
by Christie, returns to forms of storytelling. This time, however, the focus is on the
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construction of written narratives. The author carefully unpacks the ways in which
three written narratives—offered by English-speaking children aged six, seven and
14 years—differ from one another. She highlights the several ways in which children
build a story structure (e.g. a base followed by complication and resolution), and the
ways in which they use various kinds of nouns, verbs, conjunctions and clauses to
indicate sequences, moods, and significance.
Does this kind of literacy competence matter? The new skills, Christie points out, not
only make for more effective storytelling. They are also critical for ‘the expression of …
judgment, evaluation, and opinion’: in effect, for any kind of report. In themselves, of
course, these skills do not ‘ensure success in life’. Without them, however, ‘anyone…
will experience limited life opportunities’. At particular disadvantage, the author
suggests, will be those whose experiences outside classrooms do not offset the usual
lack of direct teaching within them. They are potentially doubly disadvantaged both
in the classroom and in everyday life outside.
Here then is a particular recommendation for social action. Here too is a challenge
to some traditional assumptions about the teaching of skills in reading and writing.
The author challenges the conventional assumption that ‘basic literacy skills’ are all
acquired in the early years of primary school. What catches the eye here, Christie and
her colleagues point out, are ‘the visible features of literate behaviour…the alphabet,
the spelling system, the writing system’. It is then erroneously assumed that, once
acquired, these early skills ‘will be endlessly recycled …in some … unproblematic
way’ in support of the continuing acquisition of literate competences. The later years
of primary and high school in fact call for new forms of literacy and explicit literacy
teaching. Teachers need to understand these new demands, anticipate them, and to
plan ways of helping students to meet them.
The final chapter, Chapter 15, by Courtney Cazden, is more specific about the
importance of engagement in learning. Cazden describes a style of teaching that
encourages reflection (making sense of what you learn), collaboration (participating
with others in what is taught or learned), a sense of agency (of control and selfdirection), and a sense of culture (of constructing a way of living and thinking). That
kind of teaching could occur within or outside classrooms. The two examples she
offers, however, are set within the classroom.
The first comes from a science and literacy program developed by Ann Brown and Joe
Campione (an extension of Jean Lave’s work on learning as based on participation in
‘communities of practice’). The students in this case were disadvantaged ‘children of
colour’ in California. The success of the program has been documented by performance
on tests of literacy and science knowledge. Cazden adds reports from five students
located some twelve years after their 5th or 6th grade experience with that program.
They describe what stood out for them: the experience, for example, of being ‘given
a free hand’, of working with others, of reading ‘beyond kids’ books’, of learning
‘things that matter’. They comment also on what they carried forward to their later
years of schooling: comments that make one aware of the need to ask more often how
skills are sustained or lost over time.
Cazden’s second example comes from an electronic exchange between a classroom in
an Alaskan village (the people are the Yup’ik) and one on a Navajo reservation. Each
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was to ‘select a well-liked story, true to local tradition or custom, and send it to the
other classroom for their enjoyment and discussion’. The story chosen by the Yup’ik,
however, lacked a translation that the students felt conveyed its full meaning. With
their teachers’ support, they chose ‘the laborious task of translating the entire story,
from beginning to end, to be absolutely sure that the meaning of the story would be
conveyed as they understood it’. That degree of involvement, Cazden reflects, arises
only when the ‘culture’ of a classroom encourages reflection, collaboration, a sense
of agency, and a sense that what one does ‘matters’ and is ‘true’ to oneself. These
features, she points out, are ‘characteristics of effective programs for all children’.
Cazden challenges what she sees as our assumptions about how learning takes place
and our usual ways of thinking about culture. Our analyses of culture, Cazden argues,
might well give less attention to culture as defined by skin colour or country of origin.
Instead, we might well give more attention to the culture of the classrooms that children
encounter and the extent to which there is any correspondence between the cultures
of learning within and outside the classroom.
In all, this concluding section provides a fascinating and diverse set of recommendations
for changes in the techniques and the conceptual tools that we use when we seek to
promote particular developmental changes. Together, they encourage us to look closely
at many of the unexamined assumptions that we bring to analysis and to advocacy of
support for children’s development. They also underline the need to examine local,
contextual cultural—and individual—determinants of development and learning. We
need always to ask what others, as agents of ‘culture’, provide and what individuals
themselves contribute: what they see as important or relevant, the ways in which they
combine, and their selective use or transformation of what they encounter, beginning
in childhood. In short, these chapters provide compelling indications of the nature
of culture and social context, and of their contributions to child development. This is
critical to any search for policies, programs and evidence to understand and support
the conditions of child development and learning, and to bring about the outcomes
that we, and the members of our society, wish to see.
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Chapter 11
Play, Imagination and Early Experience: Sand storytelling
and continuity of being among Anangu Pitjantjatjara girls
Ute Eickelkamp
Child development and cultural imagination in Central Australia
Culture does not exist for adults alone. Rather, one might say that it is deeply grounded
in experiences made in infancy and childhood that in turn help condition human
imagination and a sense of self. In this chapter, I seek to explore how symbolic play
in a natural social setting facilitates the process of becoming a self. The focus is on a
particular narrative practice of an Australian Aboriginal desert culture, namely the
distinctive form of playful storytelling in the sand that Anangu Pitjantjatjara girls at
Ernabella grow up with and that they call milpatjunanyi.
Ernabella is the oldest of 14 remote desert communities in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara
Yankunytjatjara Lands in the northwest corner of South Australia, located in the
panoramic rocky country of the Musgrave Ranges. It was established as a permanent
settlement in 1937 by Presbyterian missionaries, who sought to interfere as little as
possible with the Anangu way of life. In 1981, after the communities had become selfadministered in the wake of a nation-wide land rights movement, Anangu gained
freehold title over a large bloc of land. Today, the 3000-odd residents on ‘the lands’
have a strong sense of cultural continuity and relative separateness from ‘mainstream’
Australian society. The central role of family and kinship in all parts of life (see also
Fietz in this volume), the continuing use of their Western Desert language, a thriving
intellectual heritage grounded in the cosmology of the Dreaming, high levels of
regional mobility and ritual activity, and a range of adaptive practices such as the
manufacture of art and craft for ritual use and for sale, all contribute to a distinctive
contemporary Anangu culture. However, older people in particular keenly feel the
need to ensure their cultural survival as, along with many other Indigenous groups,
they face the challenges of social and economic hardship and of demographic change
towards an ever younger population.
Sand storytelling, which also exists in other parts of Central Australia, is a living
tradition belonging to women and girls. It combines the drawing of relatively simple
shapes with the unfolding of a narrative. It is related to the Australian Aboriginal
desert iconography that now has attained such a striking presence through the modern
Aboriginal painting movement and the anthropological literature. What has gained
far less attention than these vibrant and marketable cultural productions by adults are
children’s symbolic expressions. In part, this relative neglect may be accounted for by
the small interest among scholars in applying and exploring developmental theories
to socio-cultural analysis.
This chapter seeks to do precisely that: to pursue an understanding of culture, and
more narrowly of symbolic representation, in developmental terms, drawing on two
main bodies of literature, the psychoanalytic-developmental and the anthropological,
applied to an ethnographic study of play in the everyday life of children. Concretely,
I will be exploring how sand storytelling forges a link between infancy and early
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childhood on the one hand, and cultural symbolism on the other. Particular attention
is paid to the separation-individuation process as it is manifested in certain aspects
of the play technique—the building of a containing environment, the placing of body
symbols into the sand that are then erased, and the progressive advancement into
the social space of peers. Widening the perspective to include the larger cultural
imagination, the discussion also brings together anthropological observations on
the meaning of the ground and mark-making in Aboriginal desert cosmology and
psychoanalytic insights on the formation of the boundaries of self. The aim is to
thereby tease out how milpatjunanyi facilitates the child’s separation from mother and
entry into the larger social field by way of embodying both personal experience and
cultural imagination.
According to the psychoanalyst DW Winnicott, ‘… the live body, with its limits,
and with an inside and an outside, is felt by the individual to form the core for the
imaginative self (1984, p. 244; emphasis in the original removed)’.
Figure 1: 10-year-old girl playing
milpatjunanyi in the company of other girls,
Ernabella 2004
Figure 1 shows the typical sight of a girl at play. The image here is of self-absorption,
self-containment, but also of being with others, being watched, listening, others
waiting, perhaps taking turns. One may ask with Winnicott in mind, where is the
live body in the placing of thoughts into sand? Where are inside and outside in the
imagined space of play? This paper is then both about containment or holding and
the feeling of aliveness that playing seems to bring forth. Rather than asking how
culture and society shape human development, I ask how aspects of psychological
growth shape a distinctive play technique that is as popular now as it must have been
a very long time ago. The vital attraction of milpatjunanyi is not just the result of a
transmission of skills from one generation to the next; it is also, and perhaps foremost
so, driven by the ‘continuity of being’ (Winnicott 1986, pp. 242ff.) that is experienced
from infancy onwards and is expressed throughout a person’s life in relation to the
collective imagination. The perspective adopted here is then bidirectional; it suggests
that forms of self-experience in infancy are bound to be ‘writ large’ in children’s play
as a form of cultural expression.
The discussion is organised in three sections. The first outlines the general features of
the play technique, followed by concrete examples. Section two presents propositions
about infant development and symbol formation. These are then shown to be ‘at work’
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in sand storytelling in section three, which discusses cultural and psychodynamic
meanings of the technique.
General features of sand storytelling and examples at different ages
Sand storytelling is a multimodal form of expressing thoughts and feelings that girls at
Ernabella, a Central Australian community on Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara
Lands, practice and grow up with. It is a playful activity that Anangu regard as an
important tradition originating in the Ancestral cosmology of the Dreaming. With
much encouragement from the women, young girls begin to acquire practical
knowledge of the technique from about two years of age, and are likely to use it
throughout their lives, if with diminishing frequency. Boys may watch and listen to
the stories that the girls perform. It is held to be inappropriate for boys and men to play
milpatjunanyi, although some observers have pointed to parallel forms of expression
in boys’ play.1 At Ernabella sand storytelling is called milpatjunanyi, meaning literally
‘to put (tjunanyi) the stick (milpa)’. The following section describes its basic elements.
Clearing the ground. Once seated on the ground, perhaps giving it a few quick hits with
the wire as if to warm up and also signal to others that a switch to playing is about
to begin, the next step is to clear a patch on the ground with a swiping movement
of the arm. In the local dialects Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, the terms for both
this movement and the cleared space thus made are pana urini or manta urini. The flat
hand, its edge or sometimes the wire, are used to smooth the sand in a semi-circular
area close to the body, usually in front of the player who is sitting cross-legged on the
ground (Figure 2). A performance stage is thus created, a pictorial space with dynamic
multiple qualities that, for the time of playing, will be filled with symbols drawn in the
sand, with gestures in mid-air between face and ground, and with words or song. The
swiping clear of the ground is repeated several times; at intervals that mark the end
of a segment of a story, or, as a young woman explained, ‘when you make a mistake’,
and always at the very end of playing before leaving the scene. Old women explained
that pana urini also has something to do with re-telling the same story. They remember
how, in the past, the children would relish ‘bedtime stories’ told by a grandmother, so
much so that at the end, they would call out, ‘Kami, tjukurpa wirunya palatja. Wanyu
piruku wangka!’—Grandmother, this is a truly beautiful story. Please tell it again!
Figure 2: 9-year-old girls ready to play
having cleared the ground and holding
the wire, Ernabella, 2004
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Using the wire, building the space. Milpa is a bent twig or, as is nowadays preferred, a
piece of wire about 50cm long, with which to beat, poke, strike, stroke and scratch the
ground while a story is told. Both tools are associated with shelters—the traditional
homes made from branches and twigs, and contemporary houses surrounded by
wire fences. Metal is harder than wood and the new material may have given the
movements and shapes a sharper edge.
The ‘story wire’, as girls call it today, is a personal possession that they carry slung
around their neck as they walk about, ready at any time to sit down and start playing.
When in action, the wire is held in the right hand by right-handed girls to give
intermittent support to the mark-making gestures with the left hand. These markmaking actions are usually verbalised and the integration of touch, gesture, visual
perception and words is a striking feature of this technique. Every so often, the girl
would skilfully flex the ‘talking stick’ into the desired curvature. It is mostly the
tip of the wire bent downward that hammers the ground, but every now and then
she might turn it over so that the tip is pointing upward, namely in order to make
strong lines by whipping the sand with the length of the wire. Occasionally, the wire
is straightened to perform this movement. This alters the shape of the performance
space dramatically. Its characteristic form is that of a rounded container dynamically
sustained by movements: (a) by sweeping the arm across the ground in a way that
shapes a horizontal plane bulging outward from the player (Figure 2); (b) by bending
the body over the area as she places graphic symbols with the tips of her fingers in
the sand (Figures 1 and 2); (c) by drawing symbols to represent people that echo the
curved shape of the pictorial plane as well as the U-shaped posture of the player
whose legs are folded under or spread apart (Figure 3), leaving at the end a U-shaped
imprint of the player’s body on the ground in mirror symmetry to the playing field
so that the trace of a circle or sphere becomes visible; and (d) when sitting upright, by
tapping and striking the bent wire.
Another counterbalancing element to the dominant rounded shape of the activity as
a whole is the straight line often drawn to depict a person—when tallying people in
talking about a group, such as family members or peers, and to show a person lying
down. As will be discussed in section 2, the line bears an iconic relationship with the
wire, stick or nail, that is, with drawing tools that become assimilated into the bodyimage. And the body, as I can merely indicate here, is replete with cultural symbolic
linkages. Ethnographers of Central Australian groups reported that each person has a
‘second body’ in the form of a sacred board. Wrapped up in string, it used to be placed
into the infant’s sleeping place. The (Arrernte) women called these boards by the same
name as the little walking stick that toddlers used to hold onto when learning to stand
upright. The symbolic chain also includes punitive elements, namely in the form of
dangerous sticks that a Dreaming being would throw at his human representative in
case his sacred object was mishandled (see Róheim 1971). (Ceremonial poles, fighting
sticks and digging sticks of women, as well as spears used by men, belong to the same
symbolic cluster.)
Characteristic motifs. From middle childhood onwards, the most frequently depicted
motif in milpatjunanyi is the interior of homes. In the past, girls drew a circle or semicircle (Figure 3) with a twig to represent wiltja, the traditional bush shelter made
of branches, and older women today always show homes in this fashion. When
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Anangu began to live in houses in the early 1970s, the girls were quick to adjust the
drawings to their new living spaces—rectangular constructions internally divided by
straight lines that invariably show a floor plan and details of the interior furnishing,
also depicted in plan view2 (Figure 4). Within this topic, the most common theme
is sleeping arrangements. The girls often update one another on who slept at their
house during the previous night, or quietly enact such situations in solitary play. If
at all, verbal explanations of domestic scenes are softly spoken, even at the edge of
audibility.
In addition to scrutinising the social life within family homes, the girls use sand
Figure 3: Family in wiltja by
senior woman
Figure 4: 11-year-old girl drawing
the interior of a house
stories to exchange information on a range of significant events in their lives; a school
excursion to the city, a hunting trip with family, a sports competition, a shopping trip,
a notable scene from their play in the shrub or the classroom, or mishaps such as an
accident or perhaps a fight they may have witnessed. In stories about travelling across
longer distances, movement is represented in a variety of ways: by drawing the floor
plan of a motor vehicle and/or a road to indicate driving, or by dragging or tapping
the wire along a line to represent walking.
The play of younger girls about three and four years of age reflects a different horizon
of understanding and concerns. They often act out fantasies of having a boyfriend,
coitus and pregnancy. These are ‘made real’ by setting the fantasies into a relationship
with actual people, and by expressing strong feelings, both tender and aggressive.
Sexual themes and relationship issues may again become a focal point of sand stories
during adolescence, when a girl might dwell on her situation in solitude or share it
with a close friend.
I next describe three play sessions. One is the solitary play of a young toddler girl;
the other two are mixed peer group activities that highlight the social significance of
milpatjunanyi in the world of children.
Example 1
A little girl about 18 months old is sitting on the ground. She tilts her head slightly
downward and holds her body mostly upright in order to watch her creations come
into being. She is looking into the space in the sand between her legs where she has
just begun to make marks by dragging a rusty nail that she holds firmly in her right
hand. Her grandmother has been showing her how, by placing the nail into her hand,
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patting the sand, encouraging her to draw. I have a feeling that this has become a
matter for attention because I demonstrated my interest by pulling out the camera.
To see the strong and secure motion with which she cuts deep lines into the sand is an
impressive sight, and I am astonished to see such self-possessed behaviour coming
from such a small person; to me her composed posture, skilled motion of the arm and
happily absorbed look on the face, appear at odds with the white diapers from which
the legs stick out, and also with the fact that she is only beginning to mimic baby talk.
Her grandmother sits closely by her side, with one leg stretched out behind the girl’s
back, the other folded under. Her hands, which move with gestures as she is chatting
to other women, including myself, are near the edge of the girl’s playing field. The
grandmother’s dog is lying at the back on the other side of the girl. It is as big as the
toddler and its snout moves in and out of the periphery of the playing field.
The next examples illustrate contexts for playing milpatjunanyi in peer groups of
mixed age.
Example 2
It is school holidays and the best time in the hot weather season to engage with girls
and their sand stories are the late evenings, from around 9pm until after midnight.
I find them in the usual spot between the church and the store, as a church service
is being held outside on the platform across the road. At play tonight are nine girls
between five and 13 years of age.
They sit in a circle, with enough space for each to have an approximately 80cm-wide
story field in front of her, the typical semi-circle in the sand wiped clean with the hand.
No single girl tells a full story. Several make a few graphs in the sand, followed by idle
hitting of the stick (all are using the bent wire). I see mostly squares and rectangles—
rooms inside houses, that is. The two smallest girls throw a dead lizard across, they
try to scare me with the warning—‘Snake!’—and make a snake’s track behind me.
Three older boys come charging through the passageway between church and shop
on the other side of which a police car has pulled up. The boys are running towards a
house and one girl explains to me in English, ‘They’re running from the cops’.
I notice the precision and speed with which they hammer and even stencil marks into
the sand—like a typewriter pounding the letters of a name. M, for whom I had written
my name in the sand the night before, remembered it earlier in the day, ‘typing’ it
without hesitation.
After a while, she leaves the circle and sits down a couple of metres away, again
clearing the space in front of her. One of the older girls sits down next to her, they
seem to be really exchanging something, but I cannot hear what.
Attention turns towards me: Can you tell a story? Where did you come from? Do you
know my mother? Where are you staying? Can we come and stay with you? Have
you got a friend for company? I know most of their grandmothers, and we establish
our kin relationships. My ten-year-old ‘mother’, Y, pulls out a photograph folded
twice—of the deceased girl E, who recently died from a congenital heart weakness at
age 15. She asks if I know this girl, and when I affirm, wants to give me the picture as
a gift. E’s younger sister who is also present does not seem to mind.
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Example 3
On another night, two teenage girls let me sit next to them. They are chatting as they
engage on and off in milpatjunanyi, and are very frank in responding to my queries
about their lives. Both grew up at Ernabella and recently started going to a high school
for children from Anangu Pitjantjatjara lands in the city of Adelaide. They draw their
school bedrooms in the sand: a vertical rectangle, two beds, door, cupboard, a roomdividing curtain, and another set of beds. The girls and boys share rooms according
to communities. Next to the room of these two Ernabella girls is another community,
‘Indulkana’, or is it ‘Fregon’? One of the girls checks every detail in her drawing with
the other—‘Cupboard nyangatja, mulap?’—Is this really where the cupboard is? and so
on. All numbers are counted in English. I ask what else they tell in milpatjunanyi.
The response is instant: ‘We are sitting here, Ute, I, and J [three U-shapes], and we
are talking [the wire is made to poke lots of holes for spoken words—again, the
motif of the typewriter; but letters are never used, as I tells me, even though I later
observe that the girls often write names and initials into the sand. A car is coming
along [rectangle] with two people [two U-shapes inside the rectangle]. This is actually
happening while she is explaining what they play. I can hardly make out anything
in the dark, and admire that everything is spotted so quickly. Then more talk about
family relationships. One of the boys playing nearby is a cousin and the girls point
him out to me indirectly by sketching his position among others in the sand. He is
sitting on a boulder with other boys. The boulder is depicted as a circle and elongated
semi-circles mounted on top represent the boys.
As the examples of older girls at play show, sand storytelling often takes place in
a larger context of various peer interactions. Considering the co-activities around
milpatjunanyi I found especially remarkable the ease and spontaneity with which it
is entered and left, how it echoes, expands, and re-socialises scenes as they happen
close by and in the more distant fields of the past, the future and other locations. The
situation as a whole presents a relatively open space of playful sociality, offering the
individual pockets for withdrawal without being cut off.
Taken together, the vignettes demonstrate that the plurality of aesthetic and technical
features, topics and contexts of telling sand stories is nevertheless integrated into a
distinctive technique. Read in comparison, the illustrations of a toddler’s play and
of older girls also indicate that story performance skills evolve with age; from about
five years the girls know how to elaborate and refine their play in the social context
of peers. However, rather than analysing sand stories across age cohorts of players,
I shall adopt a developmental perspective of another kind. This is to probe those
aspects in the life of infants that, in my view, give shape to the basic attributes of
milpatjunanyi.
Conceptualising playing and development
The developmental perspective that, directly or tacitly, underlies my analysis of
milpatjunanyi is based on the psychoanalytic research and concepts of Donald
Winnicott, Margaret Mahler, Paul Schilder, René Spitz, Wilfred Bion and Erik Erikson.
Outlining that perspective seems most economically achieved in the form of general
propositions about playing and development.
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The first set of these propositions is related to the overall functions of play and its
several forms:
1. The experience of playing appears to be a condition for feeling fully alive.
2. It is natural for children to play, and a child who never plays would be a cause
for concern.
3. Playing facilitates psychological equilibration and growth, and specific forms
of play can be discerned in all stages of life.
4. Play may take the form of fantasy productions in word or image, experiences
made manifest in the imaginary use of objects or dramatisation, acting out
inner dialogue, playfulness in exchange with others, and a whole range of
combinations.
5. The specific forms that appear may depend on cultural and personal
preferences, maturational age and gender, and the immediate situation. But
play, in order to be play, requires artifice: props and techniques that transform
non-play activity (as well as passivity) into play activity.
A further set has to do with early forms of psychological growth and play.
6. Psychological growth occurs by way of increasing differentiation of functions
and their integration (Werner and Kaplan 1963). At first, the functions
of mouth, hands and eyes are closely integrated, as is most evident in the
nursing situation. As the close tie between these three organs loosens, they
take on new and explorative functions that are increasingly directed towards
the environment (Spitz 1955; Mahler and McDevitt 1982).
7. Much of this happens through early forms of playful engagement, when the
baby begins to discover that the feet, toes and fingers she may be playing
with, just like the reflection of herself in a mirror, are indeed her own (Mahler
and McDevitt 1982).
8. A critical part of early growth is the perception of our body as an integrated
whole with an outer boundary and inner volume. The baby forms an inner
space through first perceiving a containing object, primarily the breast, but
other sensations—light, sound, smell—can serve the same function. The
containing object is experienced as a skin and leads to the formation of a skin
boundary (Bick 2005) and skin ego (Anzieu 1980) that become the somatic
core of the self (Schilder 1950).
A third set has to do with the particular significance of the relationship between
mother and child. What is represented is often this relationship. Even before
any representation, however, the relationship between mother and infant is
seen as critical for the development of a sense of inner space and the growth
of imagination.
9. The newborn baby is not a separate self. The perception of our body as an
integrated whole with an outer boundary and inner volume is a gradual
process that depends crucially on the earliest contact with the mother (Schilder
1950; Hartmann and Schilder 1927; Scott 1948). She reflects back the baby’s
whole being through her loving response.
10. Play is essentially an extension of, and even a substitute for, the original
‘potential space’ (Winnicott 1971) between mother and infant that first gives
rise to the imagination.
11. The child’s mental activity is prompted by the fact that the caring environment
can never be perfect (Winnicott’s ‘good enough mother’, 1958). The baby
begins to make up for deficiencies in the caring environment by moving from
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being passively cared for to actively co-creating the environment: a vital step
in the development of mind and self.
Of special interest for examining developmental process in sand storytelling is the
sequence of emerging capacities to differentiate. Infant research shows that newborns
are able to distinguish a finger from an inanimate object such as a stick by touch
(grasping), that the capacity to distinguish visually between animate and inanimate
objects develops around six months, and the capacity to visually distinguish between
mother and stranger emerges at around eight months (Spitz 1965; Mahler and
McDevitt 1982). Spitz (1965, p. 172) considered the combination of these capacities
to be a ‘momentous development in the infant’s thinking process’ that marks ‘the
inception of the concept “alive”, of life’. Of course, these timelines may well vary across
cultural milieus and the meaning that the distinctions may obtain depends always on
the concrete situation. Nevertheless, the innate grasping of the finger, the subsequent
visual differentiations and the known image of the mother must be significant factors
in the process of becoming a self for all children. Milpatjunanyi literally plays with
these early cognitions and vitality feelings.
Cultural and psychodynamic meanings in sand storytelling
I now return to the ethnographic material in order to develop an interpretation of the
characteristic features of sand storytelling. Adopting a psychodynamic perspective,
I discuss certain technical elements, shapes, and socio-cultural aspects in order to
consider how milpatjunanyi might relate to the ongoing process of symbol formation
that begins in infancy and moves towards the development of a separate self.
The use of a nail, stick, or a wire. An elongated mark-making tool is an integral part of
milpatjunanyi. In the play session of the 18-months-old toddler (Example 1 above),
an iron nail is used that is similar in shape and size to a finger of this little girl, and
to make lines with it is much more effective. As a mark-making instrument, the
nail as substitute finger will ‘grow’ with the child into a longer bent piece of wire.
Already the inanimate object is no longer that, and soon the joy of movement made
visible in the sand will be invested in representations of thoughts by way of drawing
meaningful shapes and figures. At this young age, the instrumentalisation of the nail,
which would be insufficiently explained as an act of imitation, is possible because
of the dynamic nature of the body-ego. It is best understood as an act of not only
prehension, but also comprehension, whereby an object is assimilated into the schema
of the body. Fliess (1961) explained that the body-ego can ‘extend into and co-opt …
elements of the object world’. Schilder, he continues, demonstrated this plainly with
the following illustration:
‘When we take a stick in our hands and touch an object with the end of it, we
feel a sensation at the end of the stick. The stick, has, in fact, become part of the
body-image. In order to get the full sensation at the end of the stick, the stick
has to be in a more or less rigid connection with the body. It then becomes a
part of the bony system of the body …’ (Schilder 1935, p. 202; cited in Fliess
1961, p. 209).
I will have to say more about the transpositions between finger, wire, gesture, and
mark at the end of the discussion. I here wish to underscore that milpatjunanyi is a way
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of, quite literally, staying in touch with earlier experiences of self-world relationship
through tactile, groping and grasping action.
The significance of clearing the ground. The initial step of milpatjunanyi is to clear the
ground, pana urini. The swiping movement of the arm has the practical purpose
of creating a smooth surface on which graphs become clearly visible. This is a
developmental achievement and not present from the start. Turning again to the play
of the little girl, we see that a number of features characterise her play as a precursor
to milpatjunanyi. There is the grandmother’s approval of the girl’s mark-making as
a proper kind of behaviour, which she would not have extended to a boy. The girl’s
bodily posture and positioning towards her own sphere of engagement and away
from others indicate the beginning of a self-contained space. But one aspect in the
play situation of the toddler is notably different: At no point does the little girl swipe
clear the ground in front of her. She does not create a confined pictorial space, because
representation is not her intent. With her, movement comes before the image. And yet,
containment is achieved, namely by flanking an area with her legs and the presence of
grandmother and her dog on either side. Soon the macrosphere of life that is physically
present in this play configuration will be transformed into symbolic representations
of sand storytelling proper.
Surface and container as symbolic spaces. Sand storytelling is an important cultural
tradition and needs to be appreciated in terms of its tacit cosmological underpinnings.
Although the children are not fully aware of it, the ground on which they sit and play,
and in particular the space that they transform into a pictorial surface, is associated
with deeper cultural meanings. A first hint to these may be seen in the fact that
clearing the ground is not only a performance device to mark the beginning of a story
or a new segment within a narrative, but also the closing gesture that erases the traces
of the event. Placed into the larger cultural context of mark-making, it could be said
that to clear the ground signifies new beginnings that invite revelations on the one
hand, and extinguishes their traces on the other. So even in children’s narrative play,
the ground is not a neutral medium. Nancy Munn (1986, p. 69), in her ethnography of
Warlpiri women’s visual iconography, saw the smoothing of the ground in women’s
sand drawings as an act of ‘erasure’ that is associated with the unmarked or original
ground that the first Ancestral beings imprinted and shaped through their meaningmaking movements—an interpretation that also applies to clearing the ritual ground
prior to a dance performance.
The cultural meanings of clearing the ground extend to the concept of the ground
itself. It is a dynamic concept closely associated with movements and especially the
rhythmic motions of walking, singing and, as it were, narrative performance involving
the tapping of a wire and speaking. Although it is generally true for children at
Ernabella that the ground is the foundation on which all learning activities unfold,
there is another dimension to it. As ethnographers of Australian Aboriginal societies
in various parts of the continent have emphasised, the ground, like the rock surfaces
used for painting, is a contact zone between Ancestral and human activity. The axis
above-below is associated with public or ‘outside’, and secret or ‘inside’ knowledge
respectively (e.g. Taylor 1996). It is also associated with the life cycle that begins
in the ground in the form of spirit children, proceeds to the surface manifestation
of being born/coming out/becoming visible (expressed by the single verb utini in
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Pitjantjatjara), then through the life span of the person whose traces (footprints, name,
fireplace) will be erased at the time of death, and concluding with re-entering into
the ground (e.g. Munn 1970). People are conscious of the marks they make with their
bodies, such as their footprints or imprints of sitting or lying at a place, that is, they are
conscious of the testimonies to their presence, which counts so much in a social world
where being there and sharing experiences is a condition for discursive participation
(e.g. Sansom 1995, p. 280ff.). The double presence of being there and talking about
past, present or future events is also a hallmark of children’s sand storytelling.
As I will argue in more detail below, milpatjunanyi affords the feeling of maternal
containment from infancy onwards throughout a woman’s life. Conceivably, this
complements the symbolic substitution of the mother-child link that certain ritual
objects afford men from the time of their initiation. I want to suggest a parallel
between the sign qualities of sacred objects on the one hand, and milpatjunanyi on the
other. Marika Moisseeff (2002, pp. 246-247) characterises the Dreaming as ‘dynamic
generator of forms’ that injects vitality by way of giving shape, that is, by way of
creating differentiation and hence perceivable objects. She furthermore makes the
interesting point that the representation of this idea in the form of sacred objects (used
in Arrernte male initiation ceremonies) embodies two focal attributes of the Dreaming,
namely movement and evanescence. The objects are material manifestations of
Dreaming beings, in the shape of oval pieces of flat stone or wood that bear incised
designs, which in turn refer to the geographical locations of Dreaming creativity and
the travelling movements between them. In Moisseeff’s (2002, p. 254) words, ‘[t]hey
are mobile landscapes imprinted with movement’. The efficacy of these self-referential
sacred objects depends on the performance gestures in the ritual context and is laid to
rest after the event, when the sacred objects are stowed away and other paraphernalia
disassembled.
Conceivably the same core qualities shape the technique of milpatjunanyi. It is
evanescent because drawings are only effective as long as the storyteller animates
them and they are wiped out, that is, disassembled, at the end of playing. Movement
is present not only because a girl might depict travel, but also because the drawings
can be made anywhere and individual graphs wiped out and remade. In this sense
they can be shifted in space like objects. The mark-making gestures and the beating
of the wire present further motility factors. But perhaps most importantly, children’s
sand storytelling has a self-referential aspect: by immersing herself in the descriptive
activity which itself constitutes an experience, the girl refers to another experience—
past, present or future, remembered, imagined, or fantasised. In this, the body, like
the sacred object, is both the signifier and the signified, as is fully acknowledged in
the recognition of the U-shaped imprint on the ground made by the player’s body.
And there are further links between the symbolic dimension of development and
tradition.
Milpatjunanyi shows how in childhood there begins an elaboration of forms of
representation in which the ground is both the space of representation and at the
same time a representation of the body-self. The same was observed by the child
psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, who, from watching children build spatial scenes with
toys, also found that ‘experience is anchored in the ground plan of the body’ (Erikson
1984, p. 94). In forms of artistic and ritual representation practiced by adults, these
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connections receive a further elaboration. The close link between person and symbol
is expressed by a culturally conceived affinity between ground and skin as identity
markers within the logic of the so-called Dreaming or Ancestral Law. This has received
substantial commentary. Following Munn’s (1970) exegesis of the links between
country and the human body, Jennifer Biddle (2003, p. 65) writes about Lajamanu
Warlpiri: ‘The fleshly traces of birthmarks and freckles are indicative of how “skin”
is literally and materially the same “substance” as country, in that it is equally a
medium in which Ancestral traces reside’. This is so because Ancestral presences ‘can
enter women’s wombs, cause conception and in turn, leave birthmarks, freckles and
other identifying traits’. She adds that intercorporeal linking between living people
and Ancestors is also effected by filling open cuts in the skin with site specific country
(ground, dirt), and refers to Christine Watson’s report that Kukatja people at Balgo
liken such cicatrices to ridges made in sand drawings (cited in Biddle 2003, p. 65; see
also Watson 2003, pp. 65ff.). Barbara Glowczewski, in discussing Warlpiri women’s
ritual and body painting, claims that the outline of designs is painted repeatedly ‘until
the background becomes saturated, so that the kuruwarri, the Ancestral force, enters
the body through the surface of the skin and “feeds” the woman’ (quoted in Biddle
2003, p. 67). All of these observations—intercorporeal linking, imprinting, seeking
contiguity, and nurturance—can be seen as related to the experience of the motherinfant dyad and early attachment; the symbolic forms appear then as substitutions.
Yet although highly perceptive of psychological factors in cultural practices, these
ethnographers do not consider concretely how developmental dynamics might
shape such cultural conceptions of ‘ground-skin-linking’. In fact, the phenomenon
of ‘primary skin function’ first observed by Esther Bick (1968), and the idea of the
‘skin ego’ formulated by Didier Anzieu (1980) suggest that this cultural imaginary
might bear the traces of the impact of the nursing situation on the formation of an
inner container in which sensory experiences gradually evolve into symbolic forms.3
Fred Myers, in his analysis of Pintupi social thought, did recognise that the core social
metaphors derive from the principles of child socialisation. Men ‘hold’—have rights
to, knowledge about, and responsibility for—country, he explains (1991, pp. 145ff.),
but country also ‘holds’ people:
‘One’s own country (ngurra walytja) is … a place of security. Here, dangerous
noumenal forces are absent: One is “known” by the spirits and one “knows”
the proper rituals that maintain the ongoing relationship. One’s own country
provides the source of one’s identity.’ (Myers 1991, p. 151)
The mapping of individual identity and group identity onto the landscape suggests
an image of containment, of being held. In other words, people and country are in a
mutual relationship of nurture and care, and in this way, both territorial organisation
and emotions are held in place. However, it would be erroneous to picture a purely
benign relationship between people and country, just as the mother-child relationship
is never without ambivalence. People swear at the Ancestors if they feel neglected
(von Sturmer 2007; see also Maslow and Honigman 1970, p. 332), not unlike children
who show aggression towards mothers, as Aboriginal children often do—mostly
without reprimand. If children’s attacks on mothers are part of the struggle of
becoming a separate self, the re-creation of the bond in sandplay, especially when
the child begins to move her play away from mother and into the peer group, may
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be interpreted as a sign of individuation. From a cosmological perspective, the total
fusion with the ground is brought about by death, whereas the task of the living is
to seek differentiation through symbolic work. As I have tried to show, children’s
play in the form of sand storytelling is foundational in this process, as it facilitates
a transitional space between self and mother that is necessary for the experience of
individuation and of cultural integration.
Enacting the inner dialogue
I described the experience of containment as a prominent aspect of sand storytelling. It
is reflected as a circle or semi-circle in the graphic vocabulary; as the curving surfaceshape onto which the story is told; and in the arc that is formed by the body of the
player and the bent wire in motion. As a total image, sand storytelling is reminiscent
of the traditional round wet-weather shelter made from branches and twigs. It has
womb-like qualities, and the term for home, ngura, can indeed mean womb. The
symbolising activity, that is, the actual mark-making, is directed back into this inner
protected cavity.
I believe that the primary intent of sand storytelling is to continue the space of the
early mother-child relationship in order to facilitate separation. It is this that the girl seeks
to re-animate, to re-integrate, and to self-contain, as she is living through profound
psychological changes and challenges. The stick or wire becomes an extension of
the live body, the playing field a zone of familiarising the world around and within
the self, and in the total dynamic situation of humming, stroking, rhythmic beating,
reaching out and pulling back in, the girl literally cradles herself. Through these
sensory dimensions milpatjunanyi enhances the ‘continuity of being’ that begins even
before symbolisation is possible. It begins with the earliest forms of optic, sound
and tactile perception that, like the motor structure of the organism, have rhythmic
qualities (Schilder 1950). Such early impulses are an integral part of the infant as a
whole person; they cannot be separated from early experiences of attachment, from
what Ivri Kumin (1996, p. 21) has described as ‘the sense of “being there” and “being
with” which accompanies all normative human experiences’. He gave this early
stage the apposite term ‘pre-object relatedness’, a stage that marks the beginning of
an internal space. As the child matures, these now unconscious forms of knowledge
and experience that Spitz (1963) called ‘basic dialogue’, continue to actively shape
conscious action and interaction in the world.
From this angle, milpatjunanyi can be understood as an enactment of inner dialogue.
It indeed reflects that early non-verbal forms of communication are a condition for
verbal speech (Freedman and Grand 1977). If it is correct to see in the microsphere
of milpatjunanyi a momentary recreation of the baby’s omnipotent being, the selfmade shelter of playful significations makes this possible. Winnicott’s (1958, p. 253)
observation that, at six months of age, the baby ‘is at times using the circle or sphere
as a diagram of the self’, seems relevant here. This and the previous observations on
the co-evolution of self and m/other might explain why the most frequent motif of
milpatjunanyi is the house, or more exactly, the interior of the child’s home. The house
refers to the breast and what it stands for—nourishment, containment, repletion, and
stimulation (von Sturmer 2007; Anzieu 1980, p. 27). Although more evident in the
cocoon-like structure of the bush shelter and its graphic representation as a circle or
semi-circle (Figure 11-3) than in the rectangular constructions common today (Figure
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11-4), this is true for any kind of home building. Importantly, the emulation of maternal
nourishment advances the girl’s psychological growth towards her own feminine
identity: by giving expression—that is, space for recognition and reflection—to the
spatial and morphological experience of her own body. Erikson (1951; 1984, p. 93) has
made this explicit when he found that there are ‘significant sex differences in the use of
play space’, with boys tending to create strong motion scenes and high structures that
tumble down, and girls preferring to build ‘static interiors, which are open, simply
enclosed, and peaceful or [benignly] intruded upon’. In milpatjunanyi the girl not only
depicts a house; she re-creates the early relationship to the mother and extends the
original dialogue into her own inner life. The fact that the usual mode of speech when
playing is fragmentary and at the edge of audibility also indicates that here, the child is
addressing the inside of the self4. Furthermore, milpatjunanyi is an attempt to describe,
make intelligible and change the mother-figure, by way of incorporating certain parts
of her into the self and rejecting others (Klein 1975). Sandplay is therefore not a sign of
regression to an infantile state per se, but a vehicle for separation-individuation while
feeling held. I have also indicated that the maternal womb-like space transforms into
the social world of relationships, and that this is reflected in the gradual progression
from the self-absorbed solitary play of the very young to the communicative play of
older children.
We are now in a position to appreciate the story wire and the motif of the house as
part of the process of coming to inhabit the body and the world through playing.
International studies show that children frequently and spontaneously draw houses,
trees and people (Di Leo 1983, p. 41), and the three themes may be regarded as the
building blocks of their world. I found the same when I asked all schoolchildren at
Ernabella to make family drawings on paper, but it was not until I embarked on an
analysis of sand storytelling that I could see that the children are doing more than
creating representations of the self and elements in their environment. I now think
that house, tree and person are objects of knowledge and also the unified schema that
the self uses to make itself known to itself in relationship with others.
It was suggested that the earliest schema of the self is a sphere—something that
expresses the striving for closure. As the sphere of the mother-child bond expands
and grows, it also becomes differentiated, yet without losing its spheric structure. In
sand storytelling, I propose, this structure, which is at once unified and differentiated,
is reflected in the transpositions that link stick, house and person. As an extension of
a finger, the story wire is assimilated into the body-image. Its shape is also echoed in
the straight line drawn in the sand to symbolise the body of a person. Róheim (1971)
had observed that the traditional walking stick for Arrernte toddlers is believed to
represent the child’s sacred object which in turn is his double or second body. Twig
and piece of wire are materials used in house building past and present, and they are
used in storytelling in such a way that the shape of a container is formed through
gestures and graphs.
As the child leans over the narrative space, placing graphs into the sand and beating
the bent wire, her whole body-image obtains the gestalt of a container. But she is now
filling the sphere of earlier bonds with associations and ideas progressively of her own,
and that she will soon put to the test in the company of peers. Since, like all children’s
play, sand storytelling not only transforms early experiences and life situations into
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symbolic representations—it also is a social process and, as such, creates a distinctive
sociality of its own. Milpatjunanyi might then be seen as a metaphor—a specifically
desert Aboriginal female metaphor—for separation-individuation.
1
2
3
4
Research on children’s play and family in Central Australia was initially funded by a Macquarie
University Research Development grant in 2004 (A004651), and is currently supported by an Australian
Research Council Discovery Project grant (DP0556111). The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Studies funded most of my fieldwork between 1995 and 2004 (L95/4955, 95/5021,
G97/6033, G1999/6217, G2002/6645, G2004/6887). For discussions of ideas I thank John von Sturmer,
Gary Robinson, Jacqueline Goodnow, and my husband, Jadran Mimica. My greatest debt is to the
children and their families at Ernabella, who do not wish to be mentioned by name.
Milpatjunanyi is clearly perceived as a distinctive technique belonging to girls and women. Nevertheless,
boys and girls play on the ground and enact stories, by digging a track, using toy cars or other props.
Until perhaps a decade ago, it was common for boys to make toy cars out of powder milk cans, that
were steered with a piece of wire stuck through the can and formed into a wheel at the other end. An
Anangu teacher observed that the boys would be talking to themselves as they walked along with a
‘rolly-polly’, and she saw this as an activity comparable to the girls’ sand storytelling. A discussion of
such convergences and of the larger context of oral traditions is reserved for another occasion.
I have provided elsewhere (Eickelkamp, 2008, pp. 36-37) a discussion of the distortion of the rectangular
shape representing residential homes in children’s sand stories, which I interpret as a realism of the
habituated body.
Anzieu (1980, pp. 22-23), for example, describes how the baby feels the mother’s warmth, softness
of skin, her movements and nursing activities, and emphasises that this is accompanied by a flow
of words. On this experiential basis, the infant gradually learns to ‘discern a surrounding volume in
which he feels himself bathed, with surface and volume giving him a sense of a container (p. 27)’.
Bick (2005) similarly held that the state of the newborn is one of un-integration, hence the need for
a containing object, such as the nipple in the mouth, or the holding, talking and familiar smelling of
the mother. She concluded that the containing objects feel like a skin, namely in the sense of a holding
boundary, and that once the baby is able to internalise such a binding force it had first perceived in an
external object, other differentiating processes will set it. Importantly, this first inner space remains the
locus of our sense of self. I believe it is explored, challenged, re-made, expanded and consolidated in
milpatjunanyi. Not only do the children play in the knowledge of acting within the secure boundaries of
an established tradition, or in the physical company of a caring adult or significant peers; they also rebuild the maternal holding by creating a ‘surrounding volume’ of rhythmic movement, flow of words,
sound, and touch.
For this and the statement that follows it I am indebted to von Sturmer (personal communication).
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Chapter 12
Images of Childhood:
By children, about culture and identity
Barbara Piscitelli
Introduction
There are many ways to explore the imagination of children—but I find the richest
source to be their artistic lives. In their drawings, paintings, sculptures and multi-media
productions, children reveal a lode of information about their culture and identity. In
the past 30 years, young children’s artistic and cultural learning has assumed greater
importance as researchers such as Jacqueline Goodnow (1977), Howard Gardner (1980,
1982), Claire Golomb (1992), Anna Kindler (2004), John Matthews (2003) and Susan
Wright (2003) have studied the artistic cognition and practices of children. Collectively,
these researchers focus on children’s artistic outputs in various domains (especially
the visual arts) and the environmental conditions that support their learning.
Vygotsky’s theories are endorsed by many as a useful frame for understanding
children’s artistic and cultural learning. In particular, the concept of the ‘zone of
proximal development’ (Vygotsky 1978, p. 86) is considered important in arts and
cultural learning, as it is the region in which the transfer of ability from the shared
environment to the individual takes place; that is, the distance between the actual
level of performance the child can reach unaided and the level of participation
possible under the guidance of a mentor. In arts learning environments with a social
constructivist philosophy, adults play integral roles in shaping children’s ongoing
growth and development. Thus, social interaction studies are of value in exposing the
powerful roles of catalyst and protagonist in shaping children’s artistic thinking. In
terms of realising human potential, mentors and guides have significant roles to play
in developing arts and cultural knowledge with novices.
Mentors play crucial roles in cultural knowledge acquisition. According to Cole
(1985, p. 158), cultural learning and comprehension occurs in a ‘process of interaction
between children and adults, in which adults guide children’s behavior as an essential
element in concept acquisition/acculturation/education’. Similarly, Rogoff (1990, p.
18) describes the concept of apprenticeship to be a form of ‘guided participation’,
in which children’s everyday involvement in activities is supported by adults, or
more competent peers, to facilitate the overall development of children into skilled
participants in society. Lave and Wegner (1991, p. 29) broaden the concept of mentorapprentice learning even further with their notion of ‘situated learning’ through
‘legitimate peripheral participation’. In their theory, emphasis is placed on the
importance of the learner’s actual participation in a specific activity, within a ‘culture
of practice’ (1991, p. 95). Over time and under the guidance of a skilled practitioner,
the learner moves from the periphery of the activity to full participation. Transition in
skills and knowledge occurs as a mentor assists the learner to create meaning through
interpretation of the situation.
Both arts educators and early/middle childhood educators around the world maintain
that an artistic learning environment should promote children’s creative exploration
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and discovery in enjoyable, playful situations, as well as provide direct transmission
of knowledge from adult to child as required. Arts learning environments of this
type emphasise mentor-apprenticeship arrangements characteristic of the social
constructivist approach to learning and development. Under these conditions and
during collaboration with an adult, or a more competent peer, new cognitive abilities
are constructed by the learner, and then internalised to become part of the learner’s
knowledge and skill base. This ‘loan of consciousness’ is a gift from a mentor to a
learner (Bruner 1986).
My work has focused on educational settings, both the formal environment of
the school and the less formal contexts of learning (museums, galleries, libraries,
community centers, after school programs) (Piscitelli 2002; Piscitelli, Weier & Everett
2003; Piscitelli et al. 2004). In education circles, there is a general confusion about
how to engage with children’s artistic practice. Traditionally, there has been a laissezfaire approach whereby children are left to their own devices to create images and
make art. Until recent years, there was a strong studio based bias in arts programs,
with little emphasis on introducing children to the discipline of art or to the lives
of practicing artists. Though proponents of new practices have been writing and
promoting more discipline-based and guided approaches to learning about art
since the 1960s, most children are still left to their own devices when making art in
school-based art education (McArdle & Piscitelli 2002; Kindler 2004; Matthews 2003;
Wright 2003). Some children are fortunate to work with skilled artist and educators,
whose work helps them to open their minds and develop more sophisticated ways of
communicating their ideas.
In this chapter, I explore the notion of social engagement in culture and the arts through
children’s association with adults who guide their learning. My interest in learning
is the exchange of ideas that happens in artistic engagements, and the subject of my
work is children’s production and appreciation of the visual arts—drawings, painting,
prints and sculptures. Initially, my views were shaped by cognitive, developmental
and aesthetic points of view, but over time, my focus has zoomed in on the social
relationships between learners and the ‘knowledgeable others’ (Vygotsky 1978, p. 86)
with whom they learn. I utilise the perspectives of Rogoff (1990), Vygotsky, Dewey
(1934), Cole (1985), Bruner (1986) and others to give rigour to my thinking about
children’s engagements with cultural mentors—their teachers, family members, elders
and the artists with whom they share and shape their artistic and cultural identities.
In the new paradigm of visual education1, it is widely believed that learning occurs
under certain conditions, one of which is the engagement of learners with experts.
When children engage with artist-teachers, there are beneficial outcomes that emerge
from their interactions—benefits that reach both individuals and communities. This
paper focuses on the artistic practices and lives of a group of Indigenous school
children, and shows the powerful role an experienced artist-teacher plays in making
arts and cultural ideas accessible to young learners in their island school.
Learning about art and culture on Darnley Island
Erub (Darnley Island) is one of Australia’s most remote and isolated Indigenous
communities. It is situated in the eastern Torres Strait, about 260 kilometres northeast
of the tip of Cape York on the Australian mainland and 60 kilometres south of Papua
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New Guinea. Approximately 350 people live on the island, with 80 children enrolled
at the primary school. There is no facility for secondary school, so children go off the
island to complete their education on Thursday Island or the mainland. The Torres
Strait is rated as a ‘most disadvantaged’ area according to the Index of Relative SocioEconomic Disadvantage (IRSED)2.
Education in Torres Strait schools is under the jurisdiction of the Queensland
Government, and resources for schooling are provided by Education Queensland.
Students at Darnley Island State School attend a well appointed facility; their
encounter with schooling brings them into contact with formal instruction and with
the mandated curriculum. Though Erub children speak Creole at home, the language
of instruction at the school is English.
After a school review of student outcomes in 2000, staff became concerned about low
literacy levels in the student population. Under the principal’s leadership, the staff
refocused its attention to learning through the arts since they believe that arts and
cultural education connects all students, regardless of ability, to their real world. For
the past several years, the children of Darnley Island State School have been involved
in an innovative curriculum approach using the arts as a foundation for learning in a
fully integrated arts and education program.
Throughout Indigenous schools in Cape York and the Torres Strait, Darnley Island
State School is known for its smART Learning program. Initiated by the principal,
Diann Lui, the program has developed over many years. Since 2001, the school has
been the recipient of several State and Federal grants to assist with the development
of an arts centre (Wau Ewer Meta) on the island. The dream is to create a viable arts
practice on the island—one that might provide meaningful work and productive
cultural engagement for island families. Grant funding and award funds have
been used to build specialist arts facilities, employ specialist experts and to acquire
specialist equipment (such as a multimedia technology lab with visual arts software,
printmaking resources and ceramic supplies).
The smART Learning program had its early origins in an artist-in-residence project
where the school and community participated in making a multi-media installation
about the traditional story of the creation of nearby
Edgar Awark (Nepean Island). Collectively, children
and community members engaged with an artist
to make painted murals and ceramic elements
about their land and legendary ancestors. The
project sparked considerable interest between the
school and its local community, with collaboration
occurring between the teachers, parents, children
and the artist-in-residence. Once completed, the
murals and sculptures were installed on the walls
and grounds of the school; a few were stored in
the museum in the new arts centre building.
Darnley Island State School – Ceramic and Mural
Elements in school grounds, 2005.
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The smART Learning program has adapted over time—from a short term artist-inresidence program to a full time artist-teacher with the task of generating lifelong arts
and cultural learning within the school and the community. In the smART Learning
model, the visual arts are seen as a foundation for learning for everyone. School
students have access to the artist-teacher and the specialist studios for lessons on
a regular basis. In addition, an enrichment program in arts and literacy learning is
offered to high achieving students on an annual basis, and involves intensive weeklong residential schools in integrated visual arts, literacy and technology education.
Short term arts and culture workshops are offered to returning secondary school
students during school holiday periods. Community residents have access to the art
studio through workshops and classes held on a regular basis to learn screen printing,
ceramic, jewellery and multi-media techniques. These classes are held via TAFE
(Technical and Further Education) and through the CDEP (Community Development
Employment Program) scheme, thus making arts learning accessible to the whole of
the island’s student and adult populations.
The artist-teacher, Lynnette Griffiths, holds qualifications both in art and in education,
and has been working with Indigenous education for nearly two decades. She notes:
‘Before becoming a primary artist-teacher, I taught at TAFE (Technical and
Further Education, a post secondary education program). While I was there,
I had the realisation that TAFE students were coming to us with minimal
skills—they might have been good at drawing—but their understanding in arts
learning wasn’t rich. My reason for going to primary school was that there was
a chance to really embed arts thinking skills through the process of problemsolving oriented programs. I believe that to do this at a young age would help
their learning in all areas.’3
The underlying philosophy of the program is clear and well developed. Accordingly,
smART Learning uses a seven-step process of artistic involvement as its pedagogical
structure4. The process involves children and staff in collecting, exploring,
collaborating, creating, individualising, producing and reflecting. Lynnette describes
her approach to getting started with novices or new projects:
‘Good visual arts education requires the confidence to demonstrate. That is what
makes an artist-teacher different to an art teacher. Modeling and demonstration
is central to good visual arts education, but not with a bag of tricks or a handout.
It is important for children to see things growing from the base up, to see there is
a procedure for making things. The next step is for children to do it themselves
and to meet the challenge of building on their own.’
The process of reflecting on learning is essential to the program, as a final stage of
artistic involvement and as a critical checkpoint throughout the process. Lynnette
claims:
‘Unless you are reflecting, you are not learning. The students always have
thoughtful things to say in reflection. The children are not afraid of risk-taking
and small failures along the way. Every step of the learning structure is modeled
and demonstrated in the program. This helps them to learn.’
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Diann Lui, the school principal, supports arts learning and is passionate about its
benefits, claiming that art and culture is the basis for deep learning in her school
population. Diann stresses the central role of arts and culture in every child’s life
and promotes integrated arts learning across the school curriculum. This means that
every child at the school is involved in smART Learning in a school-wide curriculum
plan. The principal and artist-teacher maintain that students can be challenged, work
at their own pace, develop skills and become self-directed, sustainable learners in
a non-threatening environment. Diann notes some benefits of this kind of school
environment:
‘There is a greater motivation in these children since we have heightened our
expectations. They know they are to perform well, and they enjoy all of that
process. They are rewarded by getting their work in exhibitions and getting
known as an artist. The recognition of their work in exhibitions gives them
status in the school and community.’
School staff plan an integrated arts-literacy program. Sessions are delivered both by
classroom teachers and by the specialist artist-teacher. Classroom teachers integrate
art into regular lessons while the artist-teacher takes children for fortnightly specialist
sessions in the school art studio. Working in a systematic way, the artist-teacher’s
work with both school students and community members offers a fertile area for the
study of artistic and cultural education, as the act of making art provides a rich field
for understanding not only the growth and development of artistic competence, but
also the emergence of personal meaning-making.
New ways to look at children’s artistic practice and outputs
Children’s art reveals their way of looking at the world, and specific information
about their lives. Those who theorise childhood often look for ways to distinguish
the impact of geography, class, economy, race, culture and education on the lives of
children. These frames are useful, but at times mask our understanding of the palpable
experience of childhood by distancing us from the lived reality of the children. I believe
that there is a need for new frameworks for examining the work of children and those
who engage with them in arts and cultural practices. Two bear consideration:
• The first framework focuses on the social exchange between children and their
adult guides. In this frame, we might look very closely at what is happening in
the ‘zone of proximal development’ and examine how the exchange of cultural
ideas occurs and is shaped in the act of making art when ‘more knowledgeable
others’ collaborate and co-construct ideas with children. By looking through
this strategic lens, we may be able to acquire valuable information about how
mentors work in the ‘zone’ to enable and extend artistic capacity in novices.
• The second framework fixes our gaze more purposefully on children’s artistic
thinking and message sending. Through more thoughtful associations with
children in artistic practice, we may be able to get closer to a study of their
identity and their views of their position in the world, to understand, as
Goodnow (1977) indicates, ‘… their perceptions, their emotions, their concepts
and their intentions.’ This kind of knowledge will add significantly to our
understanding of children in contemporary times.
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The first framework: What is happening ‘in the zone’?
Of all the conditions necessary to learn about art, the presence of artists is paramount.
Many schools accommodate artists through residencies and short duration programs
related to festivals and projects, but few have their very own artist-teacher to work
directly with primary age children. At Darnley Island State School, the artist-teacher
position has been a part of the school for several years, and the role provides a rare
combination of skills—practicing artist and educator—in a challenging, innovative
lifelong learning program. This unique model of arts learning provides an opportunity
to research the impact of the artist-teacher on learning—and to examine the exchange
of ideas ‘in the zone’.
To study the dynamic of learning in the zone, I worked as a participant observer in
a week-long project to engage children in making picture diaries of their lives. Art
sessions were held each day with a group of eight to ten year olds. I led a session with
children making self-portraits in their classroom; the following two days involved
drawing and painting exercises about legendary characters of the islands, led by the
artist-teacher; the final two days involved printmaking with the classroom teacher.
During the week, I collected field notes and photographs. The stories that follow are
part of the experience of arts and cultural learning at the school.
In the zone, on the beach. It is the second session of the morning, and the children have
returned from recess. Lynnette tells them to come along to the museum to collect
their sculptures for a drawing excursion at the nearby beach. She reminds them of the
time when they made the large sculptures, and who worked on which pieces. Today,
she explains, the children will take two of their two-piece ceramic ancestor figures
to the beach to sit among the sand and rock at the water’s edge. A female figure (the
gatherer) and a male figure (the hunter) are selected and carefully moved from the
school’s museum to the beach, and then placed at the water’s edge.
Lynnette organises distribution of the drawing materials. Each child is given a drawing
board with paper ready to use. A black border has been drawn near the edge of the
paper. A permanent black marking
pen is distributed to each child.
Once distribution is complete,
Lynnette sits on the beach and looks
with clear focus at a sculpture placed
at the water’s edge. She explains that
she is ‘looking’ at the sculpture and
relates how she is thinking about the
problem of drawing the sculpture
onto the small piece of paper affixed
to the drawing board. She has a paper
viewfinder hooked around her arm,
and uses it to delimit the sculpture.
Artist-teacher explaining drawing
problem at the beach.
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She explains how she sees through the viewfinder:
‘So, if I put the viewfinder up really close to my eyes and look out, I see lots of
the big picture—the horizon, the sky, the sea, the land and the sculpture. The
sculpture is just a small part of the overall picture in this view.
But, if I put the viewfinder further away from my eyes, and look out, I see
the sculpture in closer. I can move the viewfinder so the sculpture is in the
center and fill up with the frame mainly the sculpture, but also with all the little
textures and background—see the sea, and the rocks?
I think I might do a middle view—so not too far away, and not too close. Okay,
let’s see—here I go, I think I will start by deciding how tall “the hunter” is going
to be on the page.’
After working for a brief time on the next steps in her sketch, Lynnette invites the
children to find a place on the beach—‘every drawing will be different because you
will see things from different positions’, and to start to draw—‘just go ahead, but look
first, really look and see, and then put it down on the paper’. Some children ask for a
paper viewfinder, and Lynnette distributes them as requested.
There is purposeful activity as children find a place to sit and begin to draw their
sculpture at the beach. A ten-year-old student, John, picks up his viewfinder and looks
at the problem. When Lynnette was demonstrating how she would solve the problem,
John was intrigued by the viewfinder as a tool. Now, he has a chance to use it and play
with it. Back and forth, back and forth—his arms move the paper frame until he sees
the composition he wants to draw. He holds still and looks carefully within the frame.
His eyes shift between the composition and his blank page—back and forth, back and
forth—as he makes decisions about where to situate the sculpture in his drawing.
Child sketching at water’s edge
He works quickly—but with determined and firm lines—and places the sculpture
in the front and centre of his drawing. In the background, he solves the problem by
placing a cluster of rocks nearby the shore, giving way to choppy water and cloudy
skies at the horizon’s edge. He uses repetition of line to achieve his goal and is finished
with his drawing very quickly.
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Others have finished, too, and the children collect around Lynnette to critique their
work. They place the sketches side by side and talk about their drawings—how they
look, what works, what could be improved. That done, the sculptures are loaded back
into the car, drawing boards and pens handed back to Lynnette, and everyone heads
back to school for lunch.
Critique of drawings at the beach
In the zone, at school. The following day, Lynnette and the children meet in their
classroom with their teacher. Lynnette takes each of the drawings and holds it up for
the class to have a look. She comments on each one—discussing what works, what is
unusual, where things appear incomplete. She directs the children’s attention to the
colour palettes on each table, and to the brushes. The task for the session is to add
colour to their drawings with gouache, using fine brushes. The children have never
used the media before, so a short lesson is given to demonstrate how the tools and
materials behave. The children play with the discs of water colours and the pots of
water at their desks for a while, but then get on with the task of filling in their line
drawings with paint.
Lynnette works ‘in the zone’—employing a self-conscious mentoring strategy
which aims at transfer of skills from the expert to the novices. She works in a subtle
manner:
• She reminds one child to make sure there are variations in the colours used in
the sky and the water, as in real life.
• She asks the group to remember the colours of the seascape with their sculpture
in place—she calls out names such as grey, blue, black, brown, silver, beige,
white.
• She works the room, answering questions as the children require assistance.
• She reminds children of the rules for colour mixing, tells them to clean their
brushes, stops to admire the work of children and raises questions about what
they might do next.
These children have lots of experience with art, but—even so—they are uncertain
about what to do in some circumstances. Lynnette makes suggestions, gets children
to visualise a solution or discuss it with peers to get a range of technical and aesthetic
advice.
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Suddenly, time has run out, materials collected and work spaces are tidied up. Even
so, a brief reflection session is crucial to the session, and Lynnette leads children to
talk about their successes, failures, and feelings about their work.
The second framework: What do children think about art?
In recent years, the arts have assumed greater importance in the lives of many
Darnley residents, and local people are selling prints and ceramics to private and
State collectors. The children’s understanding of art is about as wide as it can be for
their age and life circumstances. Their achievements are notable: art by the children
of Darnley Island has been exhibited in regional, state and international venues,
including Cairns Regional Gallery (Home Island, Home Country), the Embassy of
Australia5 (Erub Omasker: Erub Children; Washington, DC), and throughout Indonesia
and south-east Asia (Green Turtle Dreaming, Asia Link).
The children’s comfort in the art lesson or art studio is notable, with many students
knowing nothing other than high quality arts education for their entire school career.
So, what do these arts-smart children think about art? In a small group, 8–12 year olds
discuss art in the studio during a break in their workshop program:
‘Well, art is fun! You get to make all kinds of things.’
‘… and you get to go to the beach to collect stuff to use in art.’
‘I like that I learn how to make things in art.’
‘I use my sight, hands and brain all the time to do art.’
‘You become a good artist by doing it—you need lots and lots of practice.’
‘Art is good for you, and could be a job in the future.’
‘I feel good when I come to art. It is really exciting to learn like this.’
‘We learn lots of skills to use as an artist.’
‘We have used lots of design skills in our projects.’
‘We learn to build up ideas in our work.’
When listing the qualities of a good art teacher, these children were clear and quick: a
good art teacher has to be strong, honest, creative, thoughtful, caring and passionate.
The children said they had a pretty good art program, but as always, wanted ‘more
time’ and ‘more space’ for art and technology. They said they wanted to use specialist
facilities all the time (art and technology centers), and expressed interest in changing
their school by creating new learning environments, books and materials.
The children’s art from Darnley Island conveys a striking set of images about island
childhood. Their self portraits reveal their lives as strong, happy children, while
their landscapes and prints convey their sense of themselves as Islander people and
Indigenous Australians.
Robust discussions about art and the meaning of their work emerge in everyday
conversational settings, such as during a studio workshop or at the formal end-oflesson critique. In critique sessions, Lynnette encourages the children talk as a group
about various aspects of their artistic practice—they discuss technique (e.g. how to get
a cleaner colour, how to pull a really sharp print), aesthetics (e.g. find one really good
thing you like about this work, what one element would you change), and meaning
(e.g. the story behind the work, what is personally relevant). Critique is a regular
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part of the smART Learning seven-step approach to teaching, and plays a vital role in
developing children’s capacity to make sense of their own art.
The children are familiar with the exhibition and gallery world connected to art, but
it holds no real interest for them aside from the transient status associated with such
events and places. To these children, art is a lived experience—the making, building
and creating process. They enjoy the challenges of their smART Learning program,
and probably cannot imagine school or life without art. Art is as natural to Darnley
Island children as fishing the traps or playing soccer on the beach.
In 2005, Darnley Island State School received a ‘highly commended’ award in the
National Literacy Awards, for significant success in improving literacy levels among
school students through the smART Learning program. Since the program was
introduced, the school has recorded steady improvements in student literacy levels
and high school retention rates. While the Queensland average in literacy rose 25
points from a score of 683 in 2000 to 708 in 2005, students at Darnley Island State
School made significant increases in their literacy levels—rising 161 points from a
score of 487 in 2000 to a score of 648 in 2005. Clearly, the smART Learning program
has made real in-roads into creating positive outcomes for some young island people,
and in providing a healthy option for activity in children’s lives. While the test scores
tell a very promising story, the benefits of the arts program are seen more broadly than
in rising literacy levels. According to literacy consultants and network teachers in the
Torres Strait, Darnley Island State School students also have high levels in problem
solving, group work and communication skills. These results are seen as a part of
the smART Learning program’s innovative approach which focuses on collaboration,
creativity and communication as keys to student achievement.
Conclusion
Darnley Island State School has a history of acting as a centre for the creation,
facilitation and maintenance of cultural developmental activities within the school
and the community. The long term vision of the Council, the school and the parents is
to have a joint school-community arts and cultural learning facility (Wau Ewer Meta),
to synergise learning across ages and generations. When completed, the facility will
offer state-of-the-art studios for artists and craftspeople, broadcasting and multimedia
studios, museum keeping places, shop facilities and performance areas.
While many might maintain that bricks and mortar are essential to creating new
futures, it is equally important to place knowledgeable experts in the company of
learners. Experts open doors to imagination, knowledge and skill for novices, and—
in the most productive of relationships—assist children to go the next step in their
thought, communication and action. By taking on the tasks of protagonist and catalyst,
mentors provoke learners with interesting new ideas and materials to explore. As
children use their skills, knowledge, imagination and ingenuity to solve conceptual
and technical problems, they work in unscripted ways—and when the challenge
involves the visual arts, the results can be quite striking. Their art shows the essence
of their ideas—the drawings and prints communicate directly.
An arts-focused learning program is recommended by many as a positive possibility
for changing the lives of school children. In the United States and throughout Europe,
schools have adopted arts-centered pedagogy in their reform agendas, claiming
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John Duel, 2005 The hunter
Zujaph Pilot, 2005 Self portrait
Kapal Pilot Self portrait
Meschach Pensio The gatherer
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that working with children in this way
is highly beneficial to both education
and community development goals6.
The commitment and leadership of the
school principal is important, for without
the passion to drive such a challenging,
complex, innovative program, there
would be no new models. If the support
and involvement of the principal is vital,
so is the on-going support of a wide
range of people and systems: parents,
teachers, local Council members, arts
organisations, philanthropic bodies and
education authorities.
If our goal is to find healthy, sustainable
ways of working with children, cultures
and communities to develop positive
futures, then these kinds of practices
are worthy of study and consideration.
Culture is a growing concept, and one
that relies on all members of a society to
Zujaph Pilot The hunter
give it an explicit shape it and identity.
Through the arts— under the guidance
of experts, in a supported environment—children, culture and community flourish.
To date, investments in this sector remain quite small—yet even modest funds have
proven powerful in making changes and in developing cost-effective models of arts
and education practice.
As usual, the real challenge is in scaling up these arts education/community
development model programs to spark growth in culture at a much broader level.
The benefits of such initiatives may not show up immediately, but over time
test scores change, attitudes alter, economies grow and people develop pride.
From a policy perspective, there are wide open opportunities to invest in healthy
programs for communities and schools—programs that nurture art, communication,
technology and innovation—with new partnerships (e.g. schools, local government,
arts organisations) to support the imagination and talent of children in contemporary
times.
At the World Summit for Arts and Culture (2006), advocates of arts centered learning
and economic recovery claimed that ‘human intelligence is distinguished by our
capacity for imagination’ (Robinson 2006). Our future depends on the ways in which
we harness our ideas and create our lives. Accordingly, summit leaders called for a
renewal of creative thinking and creative education, with an emphasis on putting art
and culture on the agenda for transformation of our societies. These noble aims can be
realised by acknowledging the importance of the creative force, by nourishing artistic
talent, and by celebrating cultural diversity—essential for all people, and especially
the young.
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Ashleigh Oui Dugong grazing
Charles Thaiday Turtle
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the staff at Darnley Island State School for all assistance with this project
and its various components. Special thanks to Diann Lui and Lynnette Griffiths for
organisation, support, kindness and professionalism. Thanks to Queensland Museum
for permission to include their map of the Torres Strait, and to State Library of
Queensland for support in gathering the children’s picture diaries and for caring for
them in their Children’s Art Archive.
1
2
See the National Review of Visual Education for definition of visual education: http://www.
visualeducationreview.edu.au.
Index of Relative Socio-Economic Disadvantage (IRSED). An index constructed from 20 variables
collected at the Census of Population and Housing. These variables describe the population of each
Census Collection District predominantly in terms of employment/unemployment, income, education,
family structure, housing characteristics, Aboriginality, and English language fluency. It is important
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3
4
5
6
to note that the school score refers to the Index of Relative Socio-Economic Disadvantage for Census
Collection Districts comprising the school’s catchment area. The school score is an average of the index
weighted by enrolments taking account of the geographical location of the student population. (http://
education.qld.gov.au/schools/statistics/glossary.html).
The artist-teacher, principal, parents and students were interviewed in March 2006; observations were
conducted in May 2005 and March 2006; children’s art was collected in May 2005.
The seven-step process has been developed by Lynnette Griffiths and Dot Walker.
Erub Children: Erub Omasker – Prints & Drawings by Children of the Torres Strait was curated by
the author. The exhibition was held at the Embassy of Australia, 1601 Massachusetts Avenue NW,
Washington, DC from 25 May to 15 June 2006.
See the web for details of many organisations and entities supporting arts education & community
development, e.g. Americans for the Arts http://www.artsusa.org/.
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Chapter 13
A Longitudinal Study of Language Acquisition in
Australian Aboriginal Children in Three Communities1
Samantha Disbray
Gillian Wigglesworth
This chapter discusses the preliminary findings of a longitudinal study in which a
series of case studies are being conducted in three Aboriginal communities: Kalkaringi
and Tennant Creek in Central Australia, and Yakanarra in the Kimberley in Northwest
Western Australia. In each community, data are collected twice a year from a small
group of focus children, who were around the age of two at the beginning of the
study. The focus is on the language input that these children receive in multilingual
communities such as these where traditional indigenous languages, Kriol and varieties
of English are all spoken. The overall language picture indicates that traditional
languages in all the communities are not being fully transmitted to children, but the
details of the linguistic changes taking place vary across communities.
Using Tennant Creek as an example, we illustrate the range and type of language
input children are receiving from adults of different ages and in varying contexts.
In this dynamic, multilingual language setting, children are exposed to traditional
languages, a creolised form of English and other varieties of English, particularly
Standard Australian English. The code switching they are exposed to and engage in
is rich and complex. These findings serve to illustrate that while younger people in
these communities are not learning to speak a traditional language fully, the languages
remain an important part of culture and identity, and people actively draw on their
knowledge of the traditional language in resourceful and symbolic ways. We then
briefly chart some differences in language use in Yakanarra and Kalkaringi.
Introduction
The language that is spoken to children attracts interest for several reasons. In
addition to impacting on the nature of children’s acquisition of language, it can reflect
language change and shift, as well as retention of various ways of speaking. Language
is a crucial factor in group identity and intergenerational continuity, and Australian
Indigenous communities also recognise the importance of language in children’s
development. As Nicholls (2005, p. 164) argues: ‘It is widely recognised in Australian
Aboriginal communities that language plays a critical role in the process of children’s
identity formation and in their socialisation in the more general sense.’
An understanding of the type of language input that Indigenous Australian children
are receiving has implications not only for understanding the processes of language
shift (McConvell 1991; Malcolm 2000), but will also contribute to our knowledge of
how and in what ways languages are maintained. The language spoken to children
is an important indicator of language health. There are a number of typologies
which have been suggested which are indicative of the state of a language’s health.
For Australian languages, McConvell (1986) suggests a three-stage typology which
reflects the extent to which the languages have been disrupted. In type 1, both adults
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and children speak the language fluently; in type 2 adults both understand and
speak the language fluently, but may not speak it to children, although children may
understand it to some degree. In type 3 it is only older people who speak the language
although not frequently; middle age people may understand but do not speak the
language, and children neither understand not speak it. McConvell and Thieberger
(2002) propose the following typography:
Age
Strong
5-19
20-39
40-59
60+
speak
speak
speak
speak
Endangered
(early stage)
don’t speak
speak
speak
speak
Seriously
endangered
don’t speak
don’t speak
speak
speak
Near-extinct
Extinct
don’t speak
don’t speak
don’t speak
speak
don’t speak
don’t speak
don’t speak
don’t speak
Table 1: Recommended language endangerment indicator (McConvell & Thieberger 2002, p. 54)
As both these typologies suggests, there is a strong relationship between the
age of speakers of the language, and the strength of the language, or its degree of
endangerment. Such typologies are necessarily relatively gross measures; this study
is designed to investigate at a more detailed level the nature of the languages children
in these communities are acquiring.
The majority of studies into the type of input children receive, and how it impacts on
their acquisition, are based on circumstances that are quite different from those that
apply in Australian Indigenous groups. Both input and acquisition research studies
into children’s acquisition of language have focused predominantly on children
growing up learning one language and becoming monolingual speakers. Where input
and acquisition have been studied in bilingual situations, they have been largely
focussed on children growing up in middle-class families where the parents are native
speakers of two different languages (see, for example, de Houwer 1990; Deuchar and
Quay 2000; Lanza 1997). In these situations the input is generally controlled, and often
in the form of ‘one parent one language’ (Döpke 1992), and the social situations which
the child encounters tend to be either predominantly monolingual, or demonstrate
clear functional separation of the two languages. From studies of children growing up
bilingually, we know that children are able to functionally separate their languages in
such situations at an early age (Genesee 1989; 2001), and that their languages develop
in generally similar ways to the language of their monolingual peers (Oller et al. 1997).
In these studies, mixed language input has tended to be negatively evaluated (Goodz
1989; Lanza 1997) with the implication that where parents code-mix, it is likely that
children will also, and that this makes learning, and differentiating the two languages,
more difficult for the child.
In contrast, we know little about multilingual settings where there appears to be
less clear differentiation: where one person may use more than one language and
where code-switching2 is frequent. In many bilingual and multilingual communities,
children are immersed in pervasive code-switching, reflecting the complexity of the
local language situation. They receive highly variable input, which may include
several languages and/or dialects, in addition to considerable code-switching from
the individuals who provide the major sources of language input. Thus the input these
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children receive is completely different from those children growing up in one parent,
one language environments. The striking exception to this large gap is a study by
Kulick (1992), which examined language acquisition and shift in Papua New Guinea.
There are almost no detailed descriptions of the language environment of Indigenous
Australian children growing up in these complex multilingual environments where
code switching and language mixing are widespread, and reflect the normal mode of
communication of the community.
In Indigenous Australia, traditional languages in many areas are disappearing or
speakers are shifting to speaking Creoles or mixed languages (see, for example,
McConvell & Meakins 2005; O’Shannessy 2005). Studies which report on Indigenous
Australian children’s language acquisition are few in number and have tended to focus
on the children’s acquisition of the traditional language (see, for example, Bavin, 1987;
1990; 2000), rather than focus on communities in which language shift is taking place,
where multiple languages are in daily use, and code switching is pervasive. In these
communities, children are often acquiring rapidly changing languages, which may
vary from one generation to the next within the community, and within the extended
family.
This large Australian study, the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project3
(ACLA) was prompted by this gap in our knowledge. It focuses on the nature of
the language addressed to children (language input), and to a lesser extent on the
children’s language acquisition (language output). Although questions about the
nature of what children produce, and about the links between what is spoken to them
and what they speak are constantly in the background, in this paper we focus only
on input. This focus is based on the assumption that what children say is influenced
both by what is said to them as well as by the language or languages they hear around
them. It focuses our need to know more specifically about the nature of the speech
addressed to children in these communities.
Children learn the language of the community in which they grow up, and they learn
the language from the language input they hear around them. However, in order to
understand how children learn the language around them we need to describe the
language they hear. While there are formal grammars of the traditional languages in
the three communities (Hudson 1978; McConvell in prep; Simpson 2002) we cannot
rely on these grammars of the adult language as a description of language use to and
around children, as Lieven (1994) points out. This project was designed to describe
the range of language that children growing up in three different communities were
hearing with a view to a subsequent analysis of their language acquisition.
In this chapter we begin the process of documenting the variability and range of
language input the children in these communities are receiving from traditional
Indigenous languages, Kriol and varieties of English.
The communities
The three communities were selected because they are communities with which the
researchers already had strong relationships. Each community demonstrated quite a
different demographic profile, and we were aware that there were variations in the
degree of language shift which had taken place in the different communities. Two,
Tennant Creek and Kalkaringi, are in the Northern Territory, and one, Yakanarra, is
the north of Western Australia.
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Tennant Creek, the largest community, is a small town, with a population of around
3,000 many of whom identify as Aboriginal. Both primary and secondary schooling are
provided, and there is a range of amenities and services. Warumungu is the traditional
language associated with the area, and in a town of this size the language situation
is complex. Kalkaringi is the traditional home of the Gurindji people, and is situated
south west of Katherine, about 780 kilometres drive from Darwin. The community
also has a range of services, including a community office, and provides both primary
and secondary schooling. The population of Kalkaringi is approximately 700 people,
although this varies with people coming and going. Gurindji is the traditional language
of the area. The smallest community in the study is Yakanarra, with a population of
approximately 150. Approximately 80 kilometres south of Fitzroy Crossing, Yakanarra
was first established as a community in 1989. It also has a school for primary and
secondary students, and a small Adult Education Centre. Walmajarri is the traditional
language of the majority of the residents in Yakanarra although its use appears to be
very limited now. In all three communities the Indigenous population is mobile.
Data collection
In each community between four and eight children were identified as focus children.
At the beginning of the study, the children were between the ages of one and two
years of age. Twice each year, over a three-year period, several sessions with each
focus child were recorded. In these sessions, the children interacted with a variety
of caregivers of different ages, in more and less structured situations. Three to five
recordings of each child were made on each visit. The data include structured sessions
involving activities with culturally appropriate picture books, such as the caregiver
telling the child a story, and semi-structured sessions in which toys were provided
for the children to play with each other, and/or their interlocutor. These sessions are
important for the purposes of comparison across communities. Other data sessions
were more naturalistic involving, for example, children and caregivers playing at a
swimming hole, on hunting trips, or on fishing trips. All data were recorded on digital
video, and transcribed.
The children’s language input: Patterns of language use in the communities
In the communities involved in this project, code-switching is pervasive and thus
provides much more diverse and varied input than has traditionally been the case
in the published studies of bilingual acquisition. In these communities, the input
children are receiving comes from a wide circle of relatives and peers, and individual
speakers use their languages variably. There may be more or fewer traditional
language tokens4 used in the speech of caregivers, and this tends to be correlated with
age, with more tokens being used by older speakers; other interactants may use a
more or less acrolectal5 creole, and/or using more or less Standard Australian English
(SAE). In all three communities, in the input directed to children, a clear pattern is
emerging suggesting that the traditional languages used in the different communities
are losing ground in favour of either mixed languages or a variety of creole (similar to
the northern creole known as ‘Kriol’). However, the creole variety spoken varies from
one community to the other (Simpson & McConvell 2006).
In the next section, some examples of the variability of language input children in
Tennant Creek receive are discussed to demonstrate how variable the input is that
these children have access to as they develop their own linguistic repertoire. Following
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this, the two other communities involved in the study are discussed, though more
briefly. In these communities the range of variability in the input to children is similar
to that found in Tennant Creek, but particularly in Kalkaringi, the type of language
the children are receiving is different, and this illustrates the degree of variability
across communities.
Tennant Creek
Tennant Creek is a dynamic multilingual community and the language input that
children receive is rich and varied. From older kin, they may be addressed in or
exposed to a traditional Indigenous language (TIL), as most of these are spoken
fully by older people only. The creolised English spoken by the families involved
in the project and living in Tennant Creek is known as Wumpurrarni English (WE).
Wumpurrarni is ‘black’ in Warumungu and its meaning has been extended by
Warumungu people to refer to Aboriginal people. While the vocabulary of WE is
derived overwhelmingly from English, TILs have informed and continue to inform it
in many ways in terms of vocabulary and semantics (the categories of meaning in a
language), parts of the grammar and word order, prosody (the rhythm and delivery
of speech) and pragmatics (the impact of context on speech and the ways that people
act and construe meaning through language).
Warumungu is the traditional language of the country upon which Tennant Creek
is located and the ancestral language of the families involved in the ACLA project.
Strong proficiency in Warumungu is generally associated with age; the younger the
speaker, the lower the fluency in Warumungu.
The following four extracts show a range of interactions and speech styles by speakers
of various ages. Extract 1 is a story telling by a mother aged in her 30s. Extract 2
is interaction between children playing with a doll’s house. Extract 3 is interaction
between a great-grandmother, a grandmother and two young children during a play
session with a cubby house. Extract 4 involves a group of children role playing with a
toy medical kit. The extracts from the video recordings have been transcribed in Kriol
orthography (Lee 2002) to render them more accurately in terms of pronunciation,
and to distinguish it as a code separate from SAE. The Warumungu utterances are
transcribed in the orthography found in Simpson (2002)6. In the extract below all
Warumungu words and morphemes are in italics.
Extract 1
In extract 1, the mother is telling a ‘sand story’. While narrating the story, the woman,
who is in her 30s, draws in the sand, a traditional form of story telling. The illustrations
represent landforms, their spatial orientation to one another, human figures moving
through the landscape, and various plants and animals. In this family, the mother
regularly sits with children and other adults and makes up stories of travel, hunting
and ceremonies, as well as love stories. This kind of story telling was common amongst
girls and women when the narrator was a child, although children in Tennant Creek
today appear to tell sand stories less frequently than previously (but see Eickelkamp,
this volume). However, this style of story telling endures with traditional topics,
though the narration is largely in the new variety, Wumpurrarni English. The speaker
inserts a number of Warumungu nouns and also a discourse marker ‘wartta!’—oh, look
out!
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43 Mot:
44
Mot:
45
Mot:
46
Mot:
47
Mot:
48
Mot:
49
Mot:
50
Mot:
51
Mot:
52
Mot:
53
Mot:
54
Mot:
dadiwan iya kukimbat big faya.
(The) father here lights (a) big fire.
i bin meikim big faya.
He makes (a) big fire.
kengurru dei kukimbat bigwan na.
Kangaroo, they cook (a) big (kangaroo).
kengurru iya kabarimap, na kabarimap.
(this) kangaroo (he/they) cover (it) up, cover (it) up.
an mami iya.
And (the) mother (is) here.
dei bin krajimap na, klinimap manaji.
They dig up and clean bush potato.
klinimap da manaji na.
Clean up bush potato.
dei go ‚wartta! bigwan ngappa kamin’.
They go ‘oh! (a) big rain (is) coming.’
bigwan ngappa bin kamin.
(A) big rain came.
dei bin rikiman na laikajat, laikajat.
They rigged (it) up like that, like that.
wuntta dei bin meikim wuntta.
Shelter they made, (a) shelter.
purnu garrim ngappa, manaji- jangu, ngajarrma, ngappa tu said.
(the) coolaman with water, with bush potato, skinny yam, rain
water (is running on) both sides.
55
Mot:
dei bin meikim faya.
They made (a) fire.
(Tape SD062)
Through story tellings of this type, knowledge of country, the edible plants (manaji,
ngajarrma, line 12) and animals (kengurru, line 4) who live on it, ways of finding
and preparing food (krajimap manaji, line 6), and cooking (meikim faya, lines 43, 55;
kabarimap, line 46) are shared. A further important aspect of this recording, which is
not rendered in this transcription, is the prosody or rhythm used in the story telling.
The speaker draws on typical Warumungu prosody patterns, elongating vowels to
express duration of events, intoning and stressing repeated items and manipulating
pitch and tempo of speech to dramatic effect. Warumungu word order is also seen in
the object initial clauses in lines 46, 53 and 54.
Extract 2
Extract 2 demonstrates the variety of language input children may receive from older
children, and here the focus child is the three year old boy who is with a group of
children who are playing with a doll’s house. The children discuss who the house
belongs to, and perhaps, given that it is pink, the girls decide that this is a girl’s
house. This leads to the topic of gendered spaces, and the children demonstrate their
awareness of the widespread indigenous idea of having single (or temporarily single)
men’s and women’s camps. Most of the discussion is in WE with some Warumungu
nouns inserted. The three children (Ch1, Ch2, Ch3) are six-year old girls. Ch4 is a
three-year old boy. Ch5 (Stephanie, aged 4) is also present and referred to here but
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does not speak. Ggm is great-great grandmother to some of the children, and great
grandmother to others. She is in her 80s.
372
Ch1:
373
Ch2:
374
Ch1:
375
Ch4:
376
Ch3:
377
Ch2:
378
Ch3:
379
Ch1:
380
Ch1:
dat’s ma haus.
That’s my house.
dat tappali kayi?
(is) that (the) women’s?
ye.
mi na.
Me now (let me now)
beibi kayi (pointing to a cradle).
Baby’s
ola gelmob kayi inti?
(It’s) all the girl’s, isn’t it?
dei lip iya.
They sleep here.
ol av da gel, das wimob kayi.
All of the girls, that’s ours.
pikka gel an jeil gel an Stephanie an im gel, an mi.
(pointing to the researcher = im)
Baby girl and [child] girl and Stephanie and (her) (are) girls, and me.
381
Ch4:
an mi, mama.
And me, (and) mama.
382
Ch1:
na yu boi.
No, you (are a) boy.
383
Chi:
?mama.
384
Ggm:
(laughs) jangkayi haus.
Single men’s camp house.
(Tape SD055)
The possessive –kayi is a feature from Warumungu which has been incorporated into
WE and is used frequently here because the ownership of the house is the topic of
discussion. Quantifying nouns or phrases for groups of people, such as tappali (group
of women, line 373) are common in Warumungu and the Creole ending –mob appears
to function in a similar way in WE (e.g. gelmob, line 377). This extract is a good
example of the ways in which Warumungu tokens are incorporated into daily speech,
particularly when the topic relates to traditional practice.
Extract 3
This extract is taken from a recording in which two girls, aged three (Kallie: Ch1)
and four (Ch2) played in a cubby house made from a large cardboard box, while
the grandmother (Grm) of the younger child (and aunt of the elder) and the great
grandmother (Ggm) of the younger child looked on. The grandmother is aged in her
40s, the great grandmother in her 60s. In the following section they play a kind of
peek-a-boo game.
13
Ch1:
a kan si yu
I can’t see you
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14
15
Ch2:
peace! (making peace sign)
Grm:
a kan si yu
I can’t see you
16
Ggm:
Peace!
17
Grm:
da dat purluju maanjunwan, alinya!
headlittle there
There is that little head, there!
18
Grm:
alinya purluju.
There head
There’s her head.
19
Grm:
wanja Kallie kayi purluju?
where’s head
Where’s Kallie’s head?
20
Ggm:
a don no
I don’t know
21 Ggm:
wanja Kallie kayi purluju?
where’s head
Where is Kallie’s head?
22
Grm:
wanja?
Where?
23
Chi:
am in da rum
I’m in the room
24
Grm:
Kallie kayi purluju wanja?
’s head where
Where’s Kallie’s head?
25
Grm:
a kan si
I can’t see (it).
26
Ggm:
i kantu?
She(’s) inside?
27
Ch2:
i haidin
She’s hiding
28
Ch2:
kantu
Inside
29
Ggm:
kantu na
Inside NOW7
30
Grm:
papulu kuna
House in
In the house.
31
Ch1:
(pops up)
32
Grm:
alinya!
There!
(Tape SD057)
This short but rather more complex extract demonstrates the range of language
input the children are receiving. In several lines (18, 19, 21, 22, 24) the input is in
full Warumungu used mainly by the grandmother; in other lines (15, 20, 25) the
input is entirely in WE, whereas in other lines the input is provided in a WE frame
with Warumungu insertions (17, 26, 29). The common Head/Modifier order used in
Warumungu (which is the reverse of SAE) is illustrated in line 17 where the head noun
of the clause (purluju ‘head’) is followed by the modifier adjective and determiner
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(maanjunwan ‘little’). Note also the use of the pronoun ‘i’ for ‘she’ (e.g. line 26).
Australian languages generally do not distinguish between he, she and it. Some of
the distinctions in the pronominal system have been incorporated into WE.
Extract 4
The final extract is taken from a recording in which eight children were playing with
a toy medical kit. The three oldest girls (Ch1 and Ch2 aged 8; Ch3 aged 9) were roleplaying being doctors and dentists, and the younger children were the patients. The
extract demonstrates the children’s access to a wide linguistic repertoire and their
strong language awareness with the girls using a style closer to SAE when role-playing
the health professionals, illustrating their awareness of appropriate style or register
shifts8. In this extract we transcribe utterances with SAE phonology and morphology
in the normal SAE spelling, and use WE spelling for utterances with WE phonology.
403
Ch1:
404
Ch2:
405
Ch1:
406
Ch2:
407
Ch3:
408
Ch1:
409
Ch2:
410
Ch4:
411
Ch1:
452
Ch3:
453
Ch2:
454
Ch3:
455
Ch2:
456
Ch1:
457
Ch2:
458
Ch3:
459
Ch2:
460
Ch1:
461
Ch2:
yu garra stay in the hospital for five days.
You’ve got to stay in hospital for five days.
nat five days.
Not five days.
alrait, how much?
Alright, how many?
wan days.
One day.
keep it under there, keep it under.
(to younger child with thermometer under her arm)
How much?
How many?
2 wiks.
2 weeks.
? duim diswan.
just wait here.
Just wait here.
this wan mai baby (holding doll)
this one (is) my baby.
scus mi am finish. It’s ok, a‘l put it iya? (giving ear torch to Ch3)
excuse me, I’m finished. Is it ok (if) I put it here.
no Kami yu da dakta, a’m nat da dakta.
No Kami, you (are) the doctor, I’m not the doctor.
When I put it like that, it’s very, very, very, very horrible.
(looking in the ear of a doll)
put it raun (bandaging doll)
Put it around.
weya’s dat yelowan. (looking for ear torch).
Where’s the yellow one?
yelowan?
Yellow one?
wan i go laik dis.
The one that goes like this
yu garra nain tooth.
You(’ve) got nine teeth.
yu the dentis.
You’re the dentist
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462
Ch1:
Scus mi, she garra nain tooth, yu luk.
Excuse me, she(’s) got nine teeth, you (have a) look.
(Tape SD022)
The language of older children is a major contributor to the input that younger
children receive. In Extract 4, the older children use a number of standard English
features. Firstly, the use of plurals is rare in WE, but is used on days and weeks in
lines 403, 404, 409, and overcorrected in line 406, but the irregular plural ‘teeth’ is not
used (lines 460, 462). Other Standard English features include ‘a’m’ (line 454) with the
copula (from the verb ‘to be’) ‘am’ and ‘a’l’ (line 453) with the modal ‘will’, though
the copula does not appear with ‘yu’ (lines 452, 454, 461). We also see ‘put it’ rather
than the Kriol ‘pudum’ (line 455), the use of the English determiner ‘the’ (line 461).
Phrases like just wait here (line 411), excuse me (lines 453 & 462) and very, very, very,
very horrible (line 455) and are also examples of how these children draw on particular
linguistic resources, in this case SAE, to create an identity. Notice that in line 459, Ch2
switches back to WE, with the relative clause wan I go laik dis. Most of the girls in the
recording are the daughters of a group of sisters who have Standard English in their
repertoire, and this style is reinforced for the children in the school setting, and forms
an important part of the input that the younger children receive even before they
begin to attend school.
In summary, from the first and third extracts, we can surmise that children are
addressed in Warumungu by older speakers, or hear WE with Warumungu insertions
by both middle aged and younger speakers. There is evidence in the language around
them that they are also hearing at least some aspects of Warumungu, in particular
nouns and some endings (see also Figure 13-4 below) and we may surmise that the
children’s passive knowledge of Warumungu is likely to be greater than their active
knowledge. The first extract also shows that some of the input children have model
ways of communicating associated with traditional languages. The third extract
demonstrates the degree of code switching to which children are exposed, while extract
4 illustrates that the older children have an awareness of different registers and code
switching, and that these are modelled in the input younger children receive. These
extracts reflect the complexity of the language input children encounter, and these
features in the language input reflect the cognitive and language processing demands
made on the children as they learn language and develop their language awareness.
In the next section we turn to a much briefer discussion of the language environment
of the children in Yakanarra and Kalkaringi. In both communities, the language input
children receive is similarly variable, once again often depending upon the age of
the speaker, but particularly in Kalkaringi, it differs from that of Tennant Creek in a
number of ways.
Yakanarra
In Yakanarra input directed to children from family members is largely in Kimberley
Kriol. People in Yakanarra are multilingual and shift with varying degrees of facility
between Kriol, English and Walmajarri. The language directed toward the children
is to some degree, but by no means entirely, determined by situational factors such
as location, activity and age of interlocutor and the children learn both Kriol and
English, but young children’s major input is in Kriol and their production is almost
entirely in Kriol. The following example is typical:
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Extract 5: Yakanarra kriol
70
Mo:
Aa luk iya wat i du _ing?
Ah, look here what (’s) he doing?
71
Mo:
Wat i du_ing dis men?
What(’s) he doing, this man?
72
Ch:
I silip _in iya
He(’s) sleeping here
73
Mo:
A i silip _in
Ah he(’s) sleeping
74
Mo:
En wat dis kunyarr du _ing?
And what (’s) this dog doing?
(Tape KM047)
Figure 1: Incorporation of Traditional language tokens into
children’s language input by age.
The token, kunyarr in line 74, is in Walmajarri, the traditional language of the
community. Its influence is observed in the incorporation of varying numbers of
Walmajarri tokens across age. However, as shown in Figure 1, which is based on a
small subset of the input data to the children (McConvell, Simpson & Wigglesworth
2005), for all but the oldest age group, there are fewer Walmajarri tokens incorporated
into the Kriol than is the case in Tennant Creek where children appear to hear more
Warumungu tokens incorporated into WE across different age groups.
Further analyses of these input data to the focus children in Yakanarra and Tennant
Creek show additional differences in terms of the range of different parts of speech
which are incorporated into the language. In Yakanarra (see Figure 2), speakers over
the age of 50 incorporate a range of different parts of speech from Walmajarri (e.g.
nouns, adverbs, pronouns, verbs, adjectives) while those under 50 used a restricted
set of largely nouns, with the numbers of tokens decreasing with younger speakers.
The pattern in Tennant Creek is similar, as can be seen in Figure 3, but there is a
greater spread of different types of parts of speech across all age groups.
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Figure 2: Variety of Walmajarri parts of speech in the input to children by age of
interlocutor
Although the size of the data set means that caution must be exercised, the analysis
to date suggests that the distribution of the presence of varied parts of speech differs
with age of speaker, but this trend appears more notable in Yakanarra than Tennant
Creek. Older speakers generally have a wider range of parts of speech, and this is
particularly the case in Yakanarra. Nouns appear to be the most likely parts of speech
to be retained and the two communities differ with respect to the extent to which
grammatical morphemes are retained, with a greater presence in Tennant Creek than
Yakanarra.
Kalkaringi
The situation in Kalkaringi is rather different from both Tennant Creek and Yakanarra,
although once again children receive a variety of different input depending on the age
of their interlocutor. Older adults speak to each other using the traditional language
of the area, Gurindji, but the input directed specifically to the children tends to be an
emerging mixed language, Gurindji Kriol (McConvell & Meakins 2005). Thus, although
the children have some understanding of Gurindji, they are learning predominantly
Gurindji Kriol, and this not only forms the major part of their linguistic input, but is
also the only language they use in production. Meakins (2004) suggests that Gurindji
Kriol is now spoken by everyone under the age of 55 as their first language and while
younger speakers generally have a passive knowledge of Gurindji, they do not speak
it. The lexical content of Gurindji Kriol is derived relatively equally from the two
source languages, with approximately a third drawn from each of Gurindji and Kriol,
and the remaining third containing forms synonymous in both languages where the
selection of a lexical item is sociolinguistically driven by factors which include group
identification and age of the addressee (Meakins & O’Shannessy 2005). Syntactically,
the verb phrase is related to English, but the noun phrase structure is currently
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Figure 3: Variety of Warumungu parts of speech in the input to children by age
of interlocutor
Gurindji in form and morphology although this is in a process of shift (McConvell
& Meakins 2005). This means that the input the children receive is quite variable,
although as Meakins & O’Shannessy (2005) argue, there are noticeable patterns in the
linguistic input which relate to the age of the speaker.
While there is no evidence that length of contact contributes to this situation, other
historical factors may go some way to explaining this difference. Meakins (2004)
argues that the lack of complete shift toward Kriol may have been the result of the
handing back of traditional lands to the Gurindji people in 1975. This followed the
well-documented cattle strike in 1966, which was also a struggle for land rights. She
suggest that it ‘is possible that the pride associated with these momentous events and
the resultant desire to mark Gurindji identity linguistically may have affected the
course of language shift and motivated the maintenance through a mixed language’
(2004, p. 10).
The following example, from Meakins & O’Shannessy (2005) is an example of Gurindji
Kriol, in which a nineteen-year old mother is telling a story to her 2.5 year old son:
Extract 6: Gurindji Kriol (Gurindji tokens in italics)
1
Leyton-tu
partaj tri-ngka.
climb tree
‘Leyton climbs up a tree (using a ladder).‘
2
wumara i
bin trai gedim kankulak tri-ngka.
rock up
‘He wants to try and get the rock up in the tree.‘
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3
binij
Shadow kirt
leg i
bin baldan an
jampirrk Shadow
break squash
‘But that’s it, Shadow (his dog standing under the ladder) breaks his leg. The
ladder fell down and squashed Shadow.’
4
imin
kirt
nyanuny leg Shadow lungkarra ankaj.
break his
cry
poor thing.
‘It broke his leg. As a result, Shadow cries, poor thing.
5
i
bin
trai partaj igin, bat laitining-tu
na,
climb
‘Leyton tried to climb up again, but this time the lightning …’
6
nyanuny wartan-ta i
bin straikim nyantu.
him
arm
him
‘… struck him on the arm, it hit him.’
As Meakins & O’Shannessy (2005, p. 46) argue, the verb frame is Kriol with the verb
stem, tense and transitive marking deriving from Kriol. Nominals reflect Gurindji
case marking in the use of ergative9 (-tu, lines 1, 5) and locative10 (-ngka/-ta, lines 1,
2 and 6) suffixes. However, lexically there is a mix between Kriol and Gurindji with
verbs and nouns derived from both Kriol (e.g. ‘straikim’, line 6, ‘ti’, line 1, laitining,
line 5) and Gurindji (e.g. jampirrk, line 3, partaj, line 5, ankaj, line 4, wartan, line 6).
Even in this short example, that variability can be seen in the use of the locative (lines
2, 6), and with different constructions used for the expression of possession (zero
in line 3; a dative pronoun in line 4 and a dative pronoun plus locative in line 6.
Thus the language input children receive in Kalkaringi differs from that in Tennant
Creek and Yakanarra in important ways because of its mixed language nature, but
nonetheless reflects a similar variability to that found in the languages of the other
two communities.
Discussion and conclusion
The input language the children in this project are receiving varies across community,
but the input to each individual child varies both across speaker and within speaker.
In terms of the community they live in, the children in Tennant Creek and Yakanarra
are getting the majority of their input in Kriol, with some limited input from the
traditional languages of the area they live in. The Kriol the children in Yakanarra are
learning appears to be slightly more acrolectal than that in Tennant Creek in terms
of phonology, syntax and morphology, and they generally have more limited access
to the traditional language of Walmajarri. In Kalkaringi, the children are learning a
mixed language incorporating elements from both Gurindji and Kriol. This can be
roughly summarised as follows:
The linguistic input the children hear around them, in all three communities, is rich
and varied, and the language the children hear is influenced to greater and lesser
degrees by the traditional languages of the areas in which they are being raised. While
the codes the children are hearing are expressive and full, they are non-standard. The
Wumpurrarni English spoken in Tennant Creek reflects a good deal of the vocabulary
and grammar of SAE, but the input the children are receiving still reflects Warumungu
ways of speaking in many ways, together with tokens of the traditional language.
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The situation is similar in Yakanarra, although there appears to be less incorporation
of Walmajarri tokens. In Kalkaringi, the input the children are hearing is that of a
language in the process of change resulting in a mixed language, Gurindji Kriol. Thus
the input for this generation of children reflects the fact that language changes are
taking place in these communities, although they manifest in different forms in each
community. This suggests that the pressures of colonisation on Indigenous people
and their languages have created a linguistic ecology that in many areas threatens the
viability of traditional languages.
Kalkaringi
Mixed language (based on Gurindji and Kriol)
Tennant Creek
Variant of Kriol, with Warumungu items
Yakanarra
Light (acrolectal) variant of Kriol
Table 2: Language being acquired in the three communities.
The results of this study demonstrate quite clearly that none of the children being
followed in this project are getting enough input in the traditional language of their
older kin to expect that ultimately they will use more than the occasional token of
the traditional language. While children will acquire the language or languages that
surround them in their communities, they cannot learn those which do not appear
substantially in their input. Nonetheless, the children in all communities are developing
language which is influenced to varying degrees by the traditional languages of the
regions in which they are living and they are developing an awareness of different
codes, and style shifts from their varied interlocutors. The languages these children
are learning are undergoing continuous and fairly rapid shift, and we may expect that
this will continue over the next generation.
The input the children are receiving comes from a wide circle of relatives and peers,
and individual speakers use their languages variably. There may be more or fewer
traditional language tokens used in the speech of caregivers, and this tends to be
correlated with age, with more tokens being used by older speakers; other interactants
may use a more or less acrolectal creole, and/or use more or less Standard Australian
English (SAE). In all three communities, in the input directed to children, a clear
pattern is emerging which indicates that the traditional languages used in the different
communities are losing ground in favour of either mixed languages or a variety
of creole (similar to the northern Kriol known as Kriol), although the Kriol variety
spoken varies from one community to the other (Simpson & McConvell 2006).
This longitudinal study of three communities has focussed on addressing questions
about the kind of language input Indigenous Australian Aboriginal children receive
in the pre-school years, focussed specifically on describing the range and variety of
linguistic input in the target languages, and the extent to which this reflects the loss of
traditional languages, or the emergence of new mixed languages.
It is important, however, to note that these findings contrast with those of other
communities, such as Lajumanu, a community only about 100 kilometers from
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Kalkaringi, but one in which children are retaining an active level of proficiency in the
traditional language of the area, Warlpiri (O’Shannessy 2005). This is not in evidence
in any of the three case studies reported here. Thus these three case studies reflect one
pattern of change in language use in Aboriginal Australia, but while there may be
similar trends in language shift in other communities, they are not representative of
the situation everywhere.
We are very grateful to Betty Morrison Nakkamarra who collected the language samples in Tennant
Creek with the first author, and to Felicity Meakins and Karin Moses for contributing extracts from
their data. This project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, DP 0343189, to
Gillian Wigglesworth and Jane Simpson.
2
Code-switching occurs where bilingual speakers move between their two (or more) languages in the
same conversation.
3
http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/research/projects/ACLA/
4
A token refers to a word or a morpheme.
5
The acrolectal variety incorporates more features of Standard Australian English than a basilectal
variety.
6
Writing systems for most Central Australian languages have been developed by the community in
conjunction with linguists, and resources such as learner’s guides and dictionaries (for Warumungu,
Simpson, 2002, and Disbray, 2005) have also been compiled.
7
Where ‘now’ is used for emphatic force.
8
Registers refer to the different styles of speech adopted in different situation e.g. formal registers used
in lectures versus informal registers used in the home.
9
An ergative marks the subject of a transitive verb in languages which differentiate the transitive subject
from the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb which are both marked with
the absolutive.
10
A locative expresses the location of an action.
1
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Chapter 14
Advanced Literacy Development for the
Years of Adolescence
Frances Christie1
Introduction
In the contemporary world, literacy is of a very high order. This is apparent in the
range of text types available and in their sheer quantity. There is no aspect of modern
life that is untouched by literacy and literacy practices, and as we move into the 21st
century, it is clear that all Australian citizens will need to engage with, interpret,
produce and use a very wide range of texts. Possession of literacy may not in itself
ensure success in life, but it is clear that anyone without literacy skills will experience
limited life opportunities. Hence, when we consider the range of contexts for child
development, as well as options for effective intervention in the lives of children, it is
evident that educational policies designed to foster literacy development must have
an important role.
A great deal of the literacy research in the past has tended to focus on the early years
of development—the first years of schooling in particular, but in any case, mainly
those of the primary years. There have been good reasons for this: on the entry to
school, mastery of literacy and of numeracy looms large as an educational goal. All
the visible features of literate behaviour tend to attract the attention of parents and
community leaders, as they think about such matters as the alphabet, the spelling
system, the writing system and the punctuation system. These matters attract the
attention of early childhood teachers as well, as they start the processes of initiating the
young into reading and writing behaviours. While there are indeed important literacy
learning tasks of the first years, to do with learning, spelling, writing, punctuation,
it is nonetheless misleading to imply that the most significant learning is done in
the first years, or that it is concerned primarily with these visible manifestations of
the written code. It was even suggested a few years ago that for young children in
primary schools there is a ‘narrow window of opportunity’ through which the young
must master the ‘basic literacy skills’, otherwise they miss out. Some rather minimal
literacy skills are assumed to be sufficient in this manner of conceptualising the issue,
and it is implied that these, once mastered, will be endlessly recycled in the service of
dealing with future literacy tasks in some reasonably unproblematic way.
Such a model of literacy is insufficient, both because it fails to address the nature of
written language, and because it cannot throw light on the challenges of learning
literacy as students grow beyond the early years. Recent research (e.g. Christie 2002;
Coffin 2003; Derewianka 2003; Macken-Horarik 2002; Martin 2003) reveals that there
are significant developmental tasks in achieving control of literacy and that these are
a feature, at the earliest, of late childhood to adolescence, marking the transition from
primary to secondary schooling as an important rite of passage.
In this paper I shall pursue these ideas by tracing developmental changes in children’s
control of literacy from childhood to adolescence. I shall refer to texts written by three
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children of different ages. Increasing control of literate language will be expressed in
expansion of all the resources of the language, leading to capacity for dealing with
abstraction, detailed description, judgment, opinion and evaluation. The grammatical
organisation of the language changes to facilitate the emergence of these capacities,
and ideally this is a development of late childhood to adolescence. In practice, many
students in schools do not succeed in mastering the literacy levels required for
successful participation in secondary school, and they fall behind. If we can develop
a knowledge of the language resources required, then such knowledge can be used to
guide pedagogy in the future.
To develop the discussion, I shall select one text type or genre, the better to trace
some of the developmental changes in control of written language. The genre selected
is the narrative, because it remains a continuing source of pleasure, often taught in
schools. To analyse and interpret the texts I shall use systemic functional linguistic
(SFL) grammar (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), which has been used extensively in
undertaking detailed analyses of children’s writing.
Early literacy developments: a first narrative
We have set out Text 1 to display the elements of structure. Tim, who wrote it, had
selected a structure familiar in children’s narratives. (The analysis of structure owes
most to the work of Labov and Waletsky 1967, Plum 1988, and Rothery 1991.)
Text 1: The story of a minotaur (written by Tim, aged 6)
Orientation
In the ancient times there was a minotaur that was very nice and kind
and lived in a cave
Complication
but one day he stepped on a magic spot and turned bad. So he started
to kill the dwarfs and people
Resolution
and one day a witch came along and turned him good again and made
everything alive again
One reason we know this is a successful instance of a narrative is that its elements
are structured clearly. Using the functional grammar, note that in each stage, time is
signalled using a marked topical theme: 2
In the ancient times…
but one day he stepped...
and one day a witch came along...
These serve to progress the text forward, and while each is a marked theme, they
are also instances of what are termed circumstances of time. Written English makes
considerable use of circumstances, expressed normally in prepositional phrases and
sometimes in adverbs, and they provide useful information. They first appear in
children’s language, in speech, and later in writing, expressed in prepositional phrases
of time (in the ancient times) or of place (in a cave). Overall, the language choices in Text
1 are simple, apparent both in the simplicity of the circumstantial information and
that of most of its nominal or noun groups, such as the ancient times, a witch, a magic
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spot. One nominal group in the opening sentence makes use of what in the functional
grammar is termed an embedded clause: a minotaur [ that was very nice and kind [[and
lived in a cave]] ]. Here, Tim has exploited the nominal group: namely its capacity
to ‘pack in’ a great deal of experiential information by expanding upon the noun
that constitutes the head word. Capacity to expand the nominal group in this way
in writing would appear to be developmental. Many young writers don’t use it for a
time.
Verbal groups express processes of various kinds—of being, doing, feeling, thinking,
saying and so on. Looking to Text 1, we note that the text begins in orthodox fashion
with a use of an existential process: there was a minotaur, serving to bring the principal
protagonist into being. This is followed by an attributive process realised in another
part of the verb ‘to be’, that was very nice and kind, while a later process creates action:
the minotaur lived in a cave. There is a patterned interaction of process types that build
character, characteristics and action. Such a pattern is sustained in the middle element,
where action is followed by a new state of being: he stepped on a magic spot and turned
bad. A sad consequence follows: he started to kill the dwarfs and people. Finally, in the
concluding element, another action this time by a witch, is followed by a return to
happier states of being: and one day a witch came along and turned him good again and
made everything alive again.
Conjunctions build relations between events. Thus, the happy state of the minotaur
established in the Orientation is challenged with the use of the contrastive conjunction
but (but one day he stepped...) and the bad events that follow are further signalled
with the use of the conjunction so: so he started to kill the dwarfs and people. Additive
conjunctions (which also carry an implicit sense of time) are used in the Resolution
to signal the return to the usual state of goodness: and (then) one day a witch came along
and (then) turned him good again and (then) made everything alive again
Among mature writers, attitudinal expression is found in the discourse in several
resources. It is found in the lexis itself, in nouns, verbs, adjectives and the like. It
is found in the resources of intensity as in adverbs such as very. It is found in uses
of modality, building judgments about accompanying events. A sense of judgment
about matters deemed ethical informs Text 1, giving moral purpose to the tale. The
minotaur, we are told, was very nice and kind, where the intensity involved in the
use of very and the two associated adjectives build a value position. A reference in
the Complication to the minotaur’s turning bad, and others in the Resolution to his
being turned good again and to the witch making everything alive again serve further to
build the general moral position. The bad forces in the tale didn’t triumph while the
minotaur returned to his state of goodness. In this sense the tale is transformative, and
it reinforces the values of being good and kind.
Overall, the text is simple, and its language choices represent instances of a control
of the grammar of the language that is congruent, and in many ways close to that
of speech (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004, pp. 636-9). That is, the language choices
accord with the most direct and immediate ways in which English grammar works
to build experience: nouns identify entities, persons and other things, and, with the
exception we have noted involving an instance of an embedded clause, the nouns are
indeed simple; verbs identify actions or states of being; prepositional phrases create
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circumstantial information, in this case of time or place. Increased control of these
linguistic resources leads to enhanced capacity to deploy new meanings.
Literacy development in the junior secondary years: a narrative from year 7
Text 2 is a ‘traditional narrative’ written as part of a Year 7 study. We have set it out to
show the elements of structure, drawing on other descriptions of narratives alluded
to above.
Text 2: A ‘traditional narrative’ (written by Nina, aged 12 years)
Orientation
A poor man named Cody once roamed the beautiful green hills
and the dusty paths of the countryside, thousands of years ago.
Cody had a kind heart but no money and nothing to eat but a
stale piece of bread.
A few months passed and the weather began to turn bad. On
one moderately cold day Cody was walking along a curvy path
when he tripped and fell flat on his face and came at eye level
with a pixie. This pixie introduced himself as Zucchini and gave
Cody an offer he couldn’t refuse. Zucchini told Cody that if he
could give him shelter during the winter then he would give
Cody 10 bags of gold.
Cody agreed to keep Zucchini in his coat pocket during the
winter. The winter that year was one of the worst ones ever.
It was raining nearly every day and there were always storms
and hailstones falling. At times Cody had nowhere to stay and
would have to spend the night outside in the freezing cold and
it was usually raining. Cody had many colds that winter but
he soon got better. During these months while Cody was living
it rough Zucchini was kept snug, safe and warm during the
winter months.
The winter passed and Zucchini was kept out of the rain for
all of the winter and as promised Cody received his 10 bags of
gold. He built a castle and hired many servants. He married
a lovely lady named Leah and they had two children named
Lachlan and Julia.
Complication
As the months turned into years Cody changed quite a bit.
He began to work his servants over time until they were
completely worn out and he even began to disrespect his wife
and children. His whole castle had transformed from a lively
and cheerful castle to a dull and lifeless castle all because of this
one man. It seemed as though he has lost his kind heart.
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Temporary
Resolution
It was time for Cody to learn his lesson. While parading around
his castle, he tripped and came face to face with Zucchini.
Zucchini gave him a warning telling him that if he didn’t
ease off on his wife, children and servants then he would lose
everything including his family. Cody agreed to change and he
did, for about two days, and then the trouble started again.
Complication
As threatened, Cody lost everything and was not angry at
Zucchini because he deserved his punishment. He was however
at a loss on what to do. So again he roamed the country a poor
man with no money.
Evaluation
Cody lived poorly for the next 10 years and during that time
he started to become his old self again. His kind heart had
returned. He was always happy although at night he longed to
see his family but he knew it was not possible. He had learnt his
lesson.
Resolution
Cody awoke one morning with the sun streaming in his eye. In
front of him, staring at him straight in the eye was Zucchini. He
told Cody that he had learnt his lesson and that he was never
to make the same mistake again or he would lose everything
for good. At that moment Cody was back in his castle with his
family and his servants. He was extremely grateful at being
given a second chance and he never did a horrible thing again.
The text is much longer than Text 1. Its principal interest lies in revealing in what
ways the language is different from the earlier text, marking evidence of growing
maturity in deploying language, including deployment to express attitude and value
judgment. In a manner characteristic of such narratives, the passage of time is signalled
very visibly, often revealing the onset of a new stage in the overall development. In
the opening sentence, time is indicated with the use of the adjunct once, while later
movements forward are sometimes signalled in whole clauses:
A few months passed
It was time for Cody to learn his lesson
In at least two cases a dependent clause is put first, making it thematic to what comes
next:
As the months turned into years// Cody changed quite a lot. (a dependent clause put
first)
It was time for Cody to learn his lesson
While parading around his castle// he tripped….(a dependent clause put first)
Sequence of event is also signalled in other themes expressed in circumstances put
first:
On one moderately cold day Cody was walking...
At times Cody had nowhere to stay
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Cody lived poorly for the next 10 years and during that time he started to become his
old self again.
There is considerable skill in the resources in which the text is progressed forward,
either with uses of prepositional phrases that build circumstances, or with dependent
clauses. One important dependent clause is made thematic at a point where the
Complication is introduced:
As threatened, Cody lost everything and was not angry…
Experientially, this text, like Text 1, starts by identifying a principal participant using
another embedded clause:
A poor man [[ named Cody]] once roamed the beautiful green hills…
This is not the only instance of an embedded clause, for this is a resource often
exploited by this writer:
Cody ... had nothing [to eat] but a stale piece of bread.
Zucchini gave Cody an offer [he couldn’t refuse]
He married a lovely lady [named Leah] and they had two children [named Lachlan and
Julia]
It was time for [Cody to learn his lesson]...
Each of these compresses relevant experiential information, helping to build the
increased lexical density that marks written language. Use of embedded clauses
constitutes one of the several resources available in English for building information.
A clause that is embedded is said to be ‘rank shifted’ (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004),
in that it does not have independent status as a clause of rank; instead, it is buried in
another structure, often but not always in a nominal group. Both Painter (1999) and
Derewianka (2003) have suggested that emergence of such features of language in
children is a first step towards capacity to play with and expand on the congruent
expressions of language. A movement towards less congruent expressions creates
what Halliday (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004, pp. 592-3) has called ‘grammatical
metaphor’.
There are other ways in which the resources for building experiential information
are used. The nominal group structures are expanded sometimes without clause
embeddings:
Cody roamed the beautiful green hills and the dusty paths of the countryside,
The noun that is head word is expanded with a pre-modifier [the beautiful green hills],
or a post modifier [the dusty paths of the countryside].
Many nominal groups are found within the prepositional phrases, one of which we
have already noted:
On one moderately cold day Cody was walking along a curvy path...
Zucchini told Cody that if he could give him shelter during the winter…
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Zucchini was kept out of the rain for all of the winter
His whole castle had transformed from a lively and cheerful castle to a dull and lifeless
castle
These expressions reveal an expanding control of vocabulary or lexis.
Verbal group structures and the processes they realise are more complex and varied
than in Text 1, also revealing an expanding control of vocabulary, and a growing
capacity to deploy it. Some, as was true in Text 1, build actions necessary to the
unfolding of the story:
A poor man named Cody roamed the beautiful hills...
He built a castle and hired many servants
While parading around his castle, he tripped and came face to face with Zucchini.
Some build attributes of the main character, using relational processes:
Cody had a kind heart
Cody was not angry at Zucchini
He started to become his old self again,
Others build other aspects of his inner behaviour:
His kind heart had returned
He had learnt his lesson
In fact, the text is particularly successful in its manner of creating a sense of the feelings
of the central character and its manner of judging his actions, and we shall say more of
this below. First we should say something of the clause structures in the text.
Clause types are more varied than was true in Text 1, and this is a development of late
childhood to adolescence (Perera1984). Note the manner in which several dependent
clauses are enclosed in others (<<,… >>), making them variously prominent in the
unfolding of the events:
During these months << while Cody was living it rough>> Zucchini was kept snug,
safe and warm…
The winter passed and Zucchini was kept out of the rain for all of the winter and << as
promised>> Cody received his 10 bags of gold.
The writer shows skill in playing with conventional sentence structure, as when
subject and finite verb are rearranged:
In front of him,<< staring at him straight in the eye>> was Zucchini.
Overall, sentence structures are varied, ranging from a number which involve several
clauses to others which are remarkable for their simplicity in making their point:
He had learnt his lesson.
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This last sentence marks the end of the element we have termed the Evaluation and
indeed it opens the way for the next stage of the tale—the Resolution—in which we
are told:
Cody awoke one morning with the sun streaming in his eye.
Cody is returned to his former state of goodness and all is well. This narrative is
also a story of personal transformation. All the linguistic choices we have alluded to
mark the developmental changes in the student who wrote Text 2, rather than Text 1.
Attitudinal expression is also different. Strong judgment about Cody is expressed in
part in the choices of lexis: he was a poor man; he began to turn bad; he kept Zucchini
snug, safe and warm; he began to disrespect his wife and children; he lost his kind heart. Some
of the resources create intensity, gradually adding to and hence amplifying the sense
of what is going on. Especially in the build up to the Complication this is significant.
Thus, it was a moderately cold day when Cody met Zucchini. But the tale advances, the
winter was one of the worst ones ever and at times Cody would have to spend the night
outside in the freezing cold and it was usually raining. After Cody turned bad he lost
everything. However, in time he became good and he was always happy. He knew that
if he made more mistakes he would lose everything for good. He was extremely grateful and
he never did a horrible thing again.
Most of the linguistic resources we have identified may appear simple. Yet it is the
total deployment of linguistic resources in all aspects of the grammar that makes the
text possible. Attitudinal expression of the kind identified is not a feature of the texts
written by young writers. It takes some years to develop the necessary facility to
handle all the linguistic resources involved.
Literacy development in the mid secondary years
Text 3: An Imagined extract from a diary: Remains from the Diary of Hew Costello,
14th November 1887 (written by Anna, aged 14)
Preface/
Orientation
Last night was something I would prefer never to relive again,
yet it was the most wonderful night of my life. I am certain
that Kit does feel the same way about last night, when we both
delivered our twin boys. Such a night cannot be described
in words, for it seemed that it would end in disaster. Kit had
been worrying such a night as this. She had become fretful
and turned to the Old Ways of her People, creating frightful
concoctions and brews with such revolting smells that they
hung around the house for days of end, finally resulting in me
spending a night under the stars. Kit had her firm belief that
her people would return to help her with the birth, but I knew
better. Her People would never return to my beloved Kit, seeing
that I am still around. Days past (sic) and her anxiety increased,
as she saw no sign of her tribe. We both knew that with such
isolation, medical help would be a good few hours from here.
All we had to rely on was a drunkard’s wife who lived half
an hour’s walk from our residence and the hope that my
experience with delivering foals would prove useful.
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Complication/
Evaluation
And so the night arrived and Kit was taken with such a panic
that it terrified me. We had been waiting for this time, but the
reality of our situation alarmed me even further. It was raining
and the ground had become deep with mud, the undergrowth
slippery and the trees (were) * providing little shelter from the
rain. Kit insisted I get the drunkard’s wife, her decision strong
and firm. At first I refused, not knowing the trust we should
have with this woman, but Kit’s present condition begged me
to at least try. And so out into the pounding rain I ran, the pitch
black of the night covered me like a blanket and the feeble glow
from the lantern barely made out my path. As the rain pelted
down, blinding me, I managed to tack up my bay horse Sykes
and plunge him through the relentless scrub hidden with sticks
and slippery leaves. I trusted Sykes with my children, Kit’s and
my life as we negotiated our way around trees and cautiously
sliding slopes, always picking up the pace when the ground
looked flat. I was constantly alert even though the darkness and
rain left me sightless and the pounding of droplets crashing
onto the foliage around us caused me (to go) deaf. I knew fox
traps were laid around these parts and the last thing I would
need was to have Sykes’ (sic) leg snapped by one of those
vicious contraptions.
Finally, when the rain assailed us harder than ever, we made it
to Bill, the drunkard’s house. Their structure was not a sturdy
one, and I saw no hope on it becoming one, for it was a wonder
how Bill scrapped (scraped) enough money to buy grog than
to fix up his house. I ran up the rotted, termite infested steps
and banged on the door. Fortunately it was his wife Martha
who answered, but she was not in good sorts. She kept her
voice down and demanded why I was here, I explained my
dire situation but she told me she could “not do nuthin’ ‘bout
it”. I noticed the great black mark that had blossomed it’s (sic)
way into an ugly shade of purple-red across her cheek. Her
breath too, indicated that she had become fond of the bottle
tonight. I did not want to put my Kit’s life, and my children’s
in the hands of this broken woman. I shortly departed from
Martha’s presence and mounted my horse, driving him back
into the hazardous bush we had just emerged from. I pushed
good Sykes harder than ever; hearing his ragged breath as we
scrambled up slippery footings and watching the flecks of foam
fly from his mouth and dissolve into the pounding rain.
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Resolution/
Evaluation
I returned to the house and Kit was in a dreadful state. She
did not protest when I said that I would have to help deliver
the children for she was in such pain it almost paralysed
her. Birthing babies in this day and age is always tricky and
dangerous business, my wife, or children or both could have
easily died and something could have simply gone amiss seeing
the conditions Kit and I were faced with. It was bloody business
birthing children; I never wish to experience it again. Every
item of clothing was soon stained with blood and I only used
the most delicate and sterile tools to cut the attachments on my
two babes. After hours, near the break of a new day, my two
boys were born and brought into the world by Kit and me. A
good shedding of tears were passed between Kit and me as we
marvelled at the birth of our two sons.
The sunlight of the day broke, flooding the bush with new rays
of light. The storm had ceased only a few hours earlier leaving
the trees dripping crystalline drops glittering in the sunlight.
My feet sank ankle deep into the mud as I plunged my way
outside to clean up the bloodied sheets. And so now, I sit on a
damp tree stump, in awe of what I had been given hours earlier.
The most precious gifts of my life. Kit is lying, half asleep
by the fire with my two sons cradled in her arms. The most
beautiful boys ever seen. Their skin is a deep chocolate brown
and the hair black and curly like their mother’s, but their eye,
they possess the most astonishing eyes that I will never tire of.
Amazing yellow eyes, like mine, (such) a sharp contrast to their
dark skin that it makes them stunning. When I return and once
Kit has mustered enough strength after the ordeal last night
to be able to talk we shall debate names for our children. And
from now, we have the entire future ahead of us, Kit, my two
baby boys and me.
* Note: where an occasional set of brackets is introduced, this marks a word that has
been introduced into the text to clarify the meaning.
Text 3 reveals advances upon Text 2, and since it is longer than the earlier text, we
shall deal only selectively with some its features.
The passage of time is again very visible, and expressed in a variety of resources, often
in theme positions, helping to carry forward the discourse forward:
Last night was something I would prefer never to relive again...
At first I refused…
As the rain pelted down.. blinding me, I managed…
Finally, when the rain assailed us harder…
After hours, near the break of a new day, my two boys were born…
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The experiential information is expressed in a range of nominal group structures,
many with embeddings:
Last night was something [ I would prefer never to relive again]
yet it was the most wonderful night of my life
all [we had to rely on] was a drunkard’s wife [who lived half an hour’s walk from our
residence and the hope [[that my experience with delivering foals would prove useful]]]
At first I refused not knowing the trust [we should have with this woman]
Other nominal group structures show evidence of non-congruent expressions:
We both knew that with such isolation medical help would be a good few hours from
here.
A more congruent way to say this would be as follows, showing several separate or
ranking clauses:
We both knew // that we were isolated// and therefore it would take a good few hours//
to reach medical help.
I earlier alluded to the notion of grammatical metaphor. The grammar of speech
changes with the entry to writing, creating the more lexically dense expressions
typical of the written mode. Grammatical metaphor is one of the resources that
contribute to this increased density. In the case I have cited, the relationships between
events signalled with uses of conjunctions in speech are buried, in this case within the
circumstance with such isolation.
Circumstantial information is provided in a variety of resources, though I shall
identify only a few:
It seemed that (the night) would end in disaster (circumstance of manner)
we had been waiting for this time (circumstance of purpose)
when the rain assailed us harder than ever (circumstance of manner)
watching the flecks of foam fly from his mouth (circumstance of place)
The sunlight of the day broke, flooding the bush with new rays of light (circumstance
of accompaniment)
Clause structures are varied, and there are several sentences containing non-finite
clauses, for example:
I pushed good Sykes harder than ever; hearing his ragged breath as we scrambled up
slippery footings and watching the flecks of foam fly from his mouth and dissolve into
the pounding rain.
All the grammatical resources involved contribute to the building of strong attitudinal
and evaluative expression. There is plenty of action expressed, in the main through
material or action processes as in:
we both delivered our sons
we had been waiting for this time
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out into the pounding train I ran
my feet sank ankle deep into the mud
However, while action is important, the text makes its impact mainly through
expression of attitude, evaluation and appreciation of the turn of events. A strong
sense of the writer’s emotional response to events is evident from the opening:
Kit had her firm belief [that her people would return // to help her with the birth]...
Her people would never return to my beloved Kit...
Last night was something [I would prefer never to relive again]
it was the most wonderful night of my life
I am certain [that Kit does feel the same]
As the text unfolds, the language draws on all the resources of attitudinal lexis,
intensity, and modality to build a sense of the emotional significance of the events:
And so the night arrived and Kit was taken with such panic that it terrified me
As the rain pelted down blinding me, I managed to tack up my bay horse Sykes and
plunge him through the relentless scrub...
I was constantly alert
I returned to the house and Kit in a dreadful state
I never wish to experience it again.
And from now on, we have the entire future ahead of us, Kit, my two baby boys and
me.
Once again, this is a tale of transformation. In this case, out of hardship and fear come
joy and fulfilment with the arrival of two new lives. Narratives very often offer a
sense of a transformative experience, and it is notable that all three texts all provide
such a sense.
Conclusion
I have looked at narratives only and to some extent that constrains what is said.
However, many of the characteristics of developing literacy we have alluded to are
relevant for other genres. All the resources of the language are extended and expanded,
and the various capacities in control of language that are unleashed as students grow
older make possible the expression of abstraction, judgment, evaluation and opinion.
Thus, experiential information is expanded in that nominal group structures are
enlarged, often by use of embedded clauses, but sometimes by expanding on the head
noun in other ways. Circumstantial information, as captured in both prepositional
phrase and adverbial groups is also enlarged, and greater delicacy in expression of such
information is made possible. Verbal groups are expanded, creating a greater range
of process types. Theme choices become more varied, having particular significance
in directing the discourse forward, shaping the manner in which the text unfolds. At
the same time, much of the grammar changes, creating grammatically metaphorical
expressions which contribute to the enhanced density of written language. One
result of this is that conjunctive relations between otherwise independent clauses are
buried in other expressions in the grammar. Clause structures change, and a range of
dependent clauses emerges, including some that are non-finite, helping to add to the
lexical density. Attitudinal expression becomes enriched, drawing on all the resources
of lexis, modality and intensity.
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All the linguistic resources involved take some years in their development and their
appearance is a feature of secondary school. To return to a theme with which we
opened this paper, literacy teaching is not uniquely the responsibility of the early
years of schooling, for it is also a responsibility of secondary schools and even postsecondary education. Many children don’t achieve adequate levels of literacy of the
kind they need to be effective participants in the modern world, and this is often a
failure of the secondary school. We need communities of teachers who understand the
linguistic resources in which mature control of literacy is expressed, so that they can
anticipate their students’ requirements, model various forms of written language, and
intervene to direct them towards appropriate patterns of written language in order
to meet the challenges of literacy for the 21st century. At all stages of schooling many
of the pedagogical steps will be the same: extensive modelling of target texts; wide
reading; scaffolding by teachers of reading and writing tasks, to build comprehension
and interpretation in students; development of a metalanguage for dealing with
texts, the details of which should become more sophisticated as students move up
the school.
Overall, there is an important responsibility for teacher education, both pre-service
and in- service, in preparing teachers who are better informed about the nature of
literacy and about the manner in which it changes across the developmental stages
from childhood to adulthood.
1
2
This paper emerges from an ARC study devoted to Key development of indicators in adolescent writing.
I am grateful for the assistance and involvement of other members of the team: Beverly Derewianka,
Shooshi Dreyfus, Sally Humphrey and Helen Lewis. I am in particular grateful to Sally Humphrey for
help in identifying the third of the texts discussed.
An unmarked topical theme occurs whenever the subject of the verb is theme as in ‘The boy chased the
ball in the street’. If we were to write ‘In the street the boy chased the ball’, we would be making ‘in the
street’ the marked, or atypical theme. This serves to foreground the information involved.
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Chapter 15
A Longitudinal Follow-up Study of the Alumnae of a
Middle-School Science and Literacy Program:
Achieving and Sustaining
Courtney B. Cazden
In Keywords: The vocabulary of culture and society, Raymond Williams (1983) gives us
a social history of words from aesthetic to work. His long entry for culture begins,
‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’.
Explaining that in all its early uses, it was a noun of process, ‘the tending of something,
basically crops and animals’, Williams continues, ‘From early 16th century, the tending
of natural growth was extended to a process of human development’ (p 87).
In contemporary discussions of formal education, culture has come to have two
meanings, referring to two separate settings where children’s growth is ‘tended’
in particular directions. What I will call Culture I (CI) refers to the ways of being
and doing of children’s families and home communities that form their primary
developmental socialisation. In the United States (US), these would include African
American, Samoan American, Yupik Native Alaskan communities, and so on.
What I will call Culture II (CII) refers to the sometimes very different ways of being
and doing of classrooms and schools, of formal education itself. These learning
environments that children enter through the schoolhouse door form children’s
secondary socialisation. They are the purposively designed activity structures in which
teacher and students act and interact. Ideally, the teacher inducts her temporarily
‘immigrant’ students into her particular Culture II, and the students gradually
appropriate this culture and become fluently bi-cultural—retaining their home CIs,
while taking on new capabilities developed in CII.
In the first section of this chapter, I describe one successful Culture II in inner-city
California, and quote some of its students’ reflections more than a decade later on
its long-term impact on their subsequent lives. This program is described in some
detail because I want to argue for the importance of the design features of such a
formal learning environment for all children, including those from indigenous CIs.
Then I describe, in a briefer example, a CII in a school in a small Native Alaskan
village that deliberately incorporated the students’ CI into the curriculum. Elsewhere
(Cazden 2000) I discuss four innovative programs, two of them in Australia, that also
incorporate CI.
Fostering a Community of Learners in inner-city California
‘Fostering a Community of Learners’ (FCL) was developed as a middle-school science
and literacy program during the early 1990s by psychologists Ann Brown and Joseph
Campione. It existed in an inner-city public school in Oakland, California for several
years until Brown’s death, and became one of the most visible school reform programs
in the U.S. The impact of FCL on student learning was documented by the quantitative
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achievements of its students on standardised literacy tests, and on criterion-referenced
tests in both literacy and science that were developed within the program (Brown &
Campione 1994). It has also been discussed in the writings of numerous academic
visitors (including Cazden 2001). FCL is the one program discussed in detail by US
senior psychologist of education, Jerome Bruner in his book, The Culture of Education.
Sharply critical of preoccupation with test performance and standards, he attributes
his understanding of a ‘more intimate perspective’ on learning and teaching in schools
to Brown’s work (Bruner 1996, p. 86).
In this chapter, I will add to existing quantitative documentation and professional
analyses some new qualitative evidence of FCL’s long-term impact on its students,
even though each student experienced the program for only one year. The evidence
comes from interviews conducted during 2004 by Martha Rutherford, the classroom
teacher who collaborated with Brown and Campione in FCL program development.1
Rutherford interviewed as many of her former fifth and sixth-grade students—now
in their early twenties—as she could locate in the Northern California area. She spoke
with them, as a group and individually, about memories of their FCL experience,
and about its impact on their lives during the intervening more than 10 years2. Their
words speak eloquently to how a powerful classroom culture can affect students’
social and intellectual development.
FCL students were overwhelmingly children of colour. One article about the program
gives statistics for ‘one representative sixth-grade class’: 60% African American, 15%
Asian, 12% Caucasian, 6% Pacific Islanders, 7% other; with almost half of their families
receiving free or reduced-cost lunch (Brown et al. 1993, p. 195). The five students who
participated in the 2004 interviews are African American or Samoan, three young
women and two young men.3 They are identified here, with permission, by their real
names and by their current occupations:
Adoaha Lumumba is an assistant nurse, attending night school to complete her
RN certification.
Florencia Tuaum has finished a pre-med college course and has entered medical
school.
Hanadora Esclavon is working while raising two children as a single mother, and
plans to go back to school to get a nursing credential as soon as she can.
Jonathan Davis is working as journalist and teaching coach while he finishes his
BA and gets his teaching credential.
Nwaoha Lumumba has just finished an engineering degree.
To understand quotes from their interviews, it is necessary first to understand the
FCL curriculum and how the pedagogy was organised. The big curriculum idea was
the natural science concept of biological interdependence—first in a shorter unit on
the effects of DDT in Borneo, and then in a longer multi-month unit of endangered
species. Students were organised into research teams. In negotiation with Rutherford,
each team chose from a list of possibilities—panda, alligator, and so on—which
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animal they would study; team members then negotiated within their own team
their individual assignments of a specialised feature of their team animal (adaptation,
reproduction, and so on).
Each team had the responsibility for a final team report on their research and for
contributing questions for inclusion on a final test that the entire class would take.
They also had responsibility for teaching the rest of the class what they, individually
and as a team, had learned so that everyone could pass that test on what the class,
collectively, should now know.
To engage in this work, the students became socialised into patterns of participation
expected in a set of regularly recurring activity structures: Benchmarks, Research
rotations, Jigsaw groups, and Cross-talk groups:
Benchmarks. These were whole-class lecture-discussions led by Rutherford or
her science co-teacher, Doris Ash—first, to draw out students’ initial ideas and
later to ‘seed’ more sophisticated understandings: for example, the function of a
food chain in explaining how animals become endangered.
Research rotations. through several activities: (a) individual research, reading,
note-taking etc; (b) working at the computer to find new resources, e-mailing
classmates or outsiders (such as biology graduate students co-opted to give
expert help), or working on their team’s report and conferencing about it
individually with the teacher; (c) participating, initially under the teacher’s
guidance, in Reciprocal Teaching (RT) comprehension discussions of texts—
from books, the Internet, or sections of student reports.4
Jigsaw groups. Periodically, as research teams became more knowledgeable
about their subtopics, a student from each team met in an ad hoc group with a
member of each of the other teams and taught them—typically for as much as
30 minutes—the results of their research-in progress, sometimes by ‘RT-ing’ (as
the students called it) a relevant text or a section of the team’s own report.
Cross-talk. When the students themselves realised that Jigsaw teaching required
them to know all about their team’s animal, not just their individual sub-topic
on adaptation, reproduction etc, they initiated an intra-team version of Jigsaw
that they named ‘Cross-talk’.5
These recurring FCL activity structures are important not for themselves, but for the
design features they enact. To organise excerpts from the five students’ interviews I
have adopted four design features from Bruner’s analysis after he visited FCL at a
time when the students were designing a program to save the animals endangered
by the catastrophic oil spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker off the southern coast of
Alaska. In his words, these are:
• Agency: taking control of your own mental activity.
• Collaboration: sharing the resources of the mix of human beings involved in
teaching and learning.
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• Reflection: not simply ‘learning in the raw,’ but making what you learn make
sense, understanding it.
• Culture: the way of life and thought that we construct, negotiate, institutionalise…
(1996, 86-7). 6
I will interpret quotes from the FCL student interviews under these headings and
then, with additional quotes, suggest how these five young people thought about the
enduring impact of their one-year experience in this classroom culture. (CAPS within
the quotes indicate speaker’s emphasis.)
Agency
Florencia (now in medical school) speaks to what entering FCL meant to her after
years in a more typical inner-city school:
‘I came from a school that was in threat of being closed down due to increased
violence, and a curriculum that was practically deadening and very noneffective to say the least…
When I take my mind back to the first day that I SAT in that classroom and saw
the excitement…. I couldn’t help but feel excited myself; it was as if a spark of
intellectual hope and potential had been ignited. I don’t know whether that
was intended but it was truly felt… Sitting there hearing what we were about
to do was like, at least for me, a starved child being shown a meal fit for a
King. My mind was the hungry child and I could feel myself grown eager in the
hopes that I could be filling my mind to its fullest potential. It was almost like
a MIND homecoming of sorts. It was something we had ALWAYS been able to
do but never actually had the chance, and now, the possibilities were seemingly
endless.
I never had that opportunity before… Most teachers I had already interacted
with didn’t care about me or what I had to say let alone THINK… They only
cared if you listened—even if they were talking about nothing. The [FCL] project
made me feel like the opportunities were limitless…
We were given a free hand to read, write, learn, teach and most of all—grow.’
Actively feeling a ‘spark of intellectual hope and potential’, a ‘mind homecoming’,
where teachers cared about what she thought and where ‘opportunities were
limitless’—in contrast to classrooms where teachers only cared if students ‘listened,
even if they were talking about nothing’—these are signs of a dramatic shift in
Florencia’s sense of agency.
In Nwaoha’s words (he is now an engineer), agency is in the availability of choices:
‘You guys submitted a broad list, broad categories of different options that we
could do, and we as groups had to determine amongst ourselves which one,
we had to come to a consensus… [After that] we had to figure out what we
were going to do individually, and that kind of personalised it more because
you were actually deciding what you were going to be responsible for and then
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actually taking responsibility for doing your part and being part of a team to
do all the parts. I knew I had to get all the information on the adaptations or
what not. This made our topics really important… When you are the one who
decides on what you want to do, nine times out of ten you are going to put more
effort into it—if you have an option to choose.’
Jonathan’s sense of agency (he is now training as a teacher) is expressed in choices not
of topics, but of the approach or stance one could take to a topic:
‘By freedom—yes, we had our assignments, and roles, and some of the stuff
that was supposed to be addressed in the paper was mandatory. But you could
take different angles… There wasn’t a right answer, and it was one of the first
times in school where there wasn’t, like, “Here is the question and it is one
right answer.” There were plenty of right answers. So you had the freedom to
approach the topic or approach the question however you wanted, as long as
you came away making some kind of sense or some kind of logic and reason.’
Collaboration
When Rutherford began the group interview with the open-ended question, ‘What do
you remember about the FCL project?’ Hanadora’s answer (she is now hoping to train
as a nurse) was echoed by others, ‘I remember working with a group. It was my first
time working with a group on a project’. Later in that session and in their individual
interviews, other students said more about the impact of collaboration on their
individual learning. As the students remembered it, collaboration wasn’t confined
to the specific activity structures designed with that feature in mind (Reciprocal
Teaching, Jigsaw, and Cross-Talk groups); it spontaneously pervaded all their work:
Nwaoha: ‘I learned how to work with others to actually put a good quality
product together, as a team effort. You know we also helped each other—like
when we couldn’t find information on something, we asked someone else if
they knew where to find information. So that was important… That was what
the structure of the class did…it made us all involved—like we all worked
together, first of all…We had to, as a group you know, come up with specific
animals that we would research—like as a group we picked endangerment of
the primates.’
Jonathan, in describing his sense of ‘freedom’, referred to the teacher’s trust in the
students that made possible the freedom of physical movement that in turn enabled
collaboration during non-official-group times of the day:
‘Like I didn’t have to raise my hand to go to one of my team mate’s desk to ask
them about, you know, what do you think about crocodiles and reproduction,
or do you have any notes about DDT and Borneo… I guess it was the trust
thing, and once we gained the trust it was easy going from there. But it was like
the trust was always there. Like from the first day, like this is how it is going to
be. And that’s how it was.’
To Florencia, this freedom for consultation entailed a responsibility to others:
‘I remember all the books were in the back of the class, and there was a browser
that we used for looking up books. And I remember everyone telling each other
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that when you look up a book for yourself, try to find at least one book for
someone else to help them with their research. Then when I found a book for
someone else, I would say, “Look, I found you this book—you owe me”.’
Florencia also explained how taking on the teaching role in the Jigsaw groups led to
the realisation that she had to learn more than she herself had researched:
‘You know when you work on something for so long, you kind of get attached
to your information, to your research, and I was really attached to mine… And
it seemed really hard to answer questions about someone’s part that you didn’t
even write. But that was the thing: When you presented it [your team’s research],
it was no longer my part or her part, it was our part. So we learned we had to
take responsibility for the whole thing.’
Reflection
Bruner defines reflection as ‘making sense, going “meta”, turning around on what
one has learned…, even thinking about one’s thinking (1996, p. 88)’. Under various
names—metacognitive awareness, self-monitoring of one’s comprehension etc—
reflection has become a prominent objective of strategic teaching toward students
‘learning how to learn’. The FCL students expressed the basic idea indirectly,
focusing—as Florencia did just above—on awareness that was prompted by the
varied obligatory collaborative activities:
Hanadora: ‘It really helped you to see it from other people’s point of view, and
then you really knew what you needed to go back to and to write more clearly—
to work on.’
Jonathan: ‘When you have to explain your positions, thoughts, and beliefs more
thoroughly, it helps to have an open mind. Because when you delve deeper into
your reasoning or logic, you usually see similarities between your view and
different opposing views.’
Florencia: ‘I had gotten into the habit at one time of just taking the exact thing
out of the book, and [the teacher] would ask me, “OK, but how would YOU say
it?”…It was one thing for me to revise and reform an idea, but at the same time
that idea would manifest itself differently in the paper itself… I have to put that
concept into play with the WHOLE question being asked. If the topic was sea
otters, then I had to take my idea back and fit it into the big picture concerning
SEA OTTERS and so forth. Putting it into motion was different than KNOWING
it itself.’
Collaborative activities are advocated today for various reasons: to motivate
engagement, to stimulate reciprocal civic responsibility, to develop discourse skills
of explaining, demonstrating, and group problem-solving. These FCL students add
a potential cognitive benefit (that all teachers can attest to): only when you have to
successfully explain an idea to someone else do you realise just what you do and
don’t know.
Culture
Early in The Culture of Education, Bruner says that he will ‘constantly be enquiring
about the interaction between the powers of individual minds and the means by
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which the culture aids or thwarts their realization (1996, p. 13)’. Later, he expresses
this theme more concretely: ‘In the Oakland project, Ann Brown has joined agency
and collaboration together in the design of classroom culture….They [agency and
collaboration] need to be treated together, else learning is made to seem either too solo
or not solo enough’ (1996, pp. 92-93).7
When Martha Rutherford, the FCL teacher, read a draft of this chapter and the four
features that Bruner had singled out, she wrote back8:
‘In many ways, the construction of culture in the classroom is the sum of the
three, with the addition of learning stuff that matters. The kids saw themselves as
engaged in important work…and they were in an environment where Bruner’s
notions of agency, reflection and collaboration, a shared culture that valued and
fostered academic excellence, emerged.
As teachers we have an opportunity to co-build a dynamic educational cultural
community that fosters taking control of your mental activity in a way that is
powerful and generative—which means folks have to reflect on what they are
doing, as we [MR and CBC] are doing [now] about this very topic. And that
means thinking through things in the company of others. This shared work is
part of the stuff that makes up a culture.
What is scary is that…there is always a classroom culture. The challenge is what
we (teachers, kids, parents) do with it. In way too many places the pervasive
culture is that kids aren’t very smart. But what a difference when we know and
act on the belief that kids are smart.’
The Longitudinal Impact of this Culture 2
This way of conceiving the relationship between individual development and the
recurring activities of a specific educational culture inevitably raises the question of
the impact of FCL beyond the one fifth or sixth grade year that students were in that
class. In the group and individual interviews, students mentioned several enduring
effects, including literacy competencies in both writing and reading, analytical
thinking, leadership, and (in their own words) resiliency:
Writing and Reading
Nwaoha: I know there was a lot of revision.
Hanadora: That is for sure! Like go back and rewrite this. Yea, it was frustrating.
We would write everything like 100 times.
Nwaoha: Yes, over and over again. One thing I can say though is that although
I hate writing, I am good at it, and it is probably because we had to write ten
page-twenty page papers in elementary school.
Adoaha (now training as a nurse): Yes, that is true for me too. Those were the
hardest papers I ever wrote, and in the rest of school all we ever had to write
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was one- or three-page papers, and I would always get an ‘A’ or a ‘B’, and I
could just write it out at the last minute….
Nwaoha: Because you utilised those techniques (laughs). [Rutherford (1995)
describes in detail how FCL students learned to write academic prose.]
Florencia: I remember when I was in our class and I really struggled with reading
some of the stuff we had to read… There were no kids’ books for DDT and we
would use RT to read that stuff… ‘Clarify’, that was the word, you were always
asking us to clarify… [Later] I could read chapters in books and pull out what I
need, and all that was a breeze for me because I had the experience… You’d be
surprised how many people don’t know how to read that way.
Analytical Thinking
Nwaoha: What supported that analytical thinking was we actually discussed
issues… and we learned to look at ALL of the effects, and we learned from
the endangered species case that everything had a domino effect… Instead of
just looking at something in the now, I actually had to analyse what was going
to happen in the future, and what had already happened in the past, to make
the best decision… And everything that I learned then I still use today. That is
the weird part, the uncanny thing about it… I still use the same skills and the
same tools. Since I am doing engineering, I really need to use that analytical
thinking… Nothing comes without repetition and practice, so learning those
things when I was young meant that I could practice them all through.
Leadership
Jonathan: I think that working in social groups is very good, because part of the
reason you go to school is for social development—so you can be productive in
a social setting like a group project or a group assignment and learn roles like
leadership and how to play your part…FCL was my first—I won’t say only,
because I know I had other group projects—but it was the most memorable
group project for me; it is the one that sticks out… It also helps me because I
talk to my kids and not at them—well, sometimes I do, but I always give them
a chance to respond, challenge, question and disagree with me as long as they
talk respectfully and honestly… And that is something I got from FCL.
Resiliency
Florencia spoke eloquently about how what she took from FCL sustained her during
subsequent barren school years.
Florencia: There was a time in HIGH SCHOOL where I hit a slump and I had a
moment of self-evaluation as to why I felt that way. I realised learning wasn’t
fun anymore for me; I had to sit down and remember when it was. The FCL
period was that for me. That experience gave me something to look back on to
remember and HOLD on to. I told my mother that FCL introduced me to that
state of mind that LOVED to learn. That passion and thirst for learning was
one of the many things that is still with me today…my whole thought process
was shaped from that one significant period in my life. They were encouraging
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us. They wanted us to succeed. They spoke as if we were destined to succeed.
People believed in you every step of the way, leading us to believe that the
knowledge was ours to possess. Being able to have that ‘power’ was what
made all the difference. When I would feel myself getting mentally drained or
exhausted I would remember the FCL project—the prospect and hopes I had
for myself.
To think back on FCL was a boost of learning adrenaline… I was David and
ignorance was Goliath and I knocked it stone cold.
We have access to the voices of these five students because they were the ones
Rutherford was able to contact. One must ask, therefore, how we can consider them
representative of the much larger group of FCL students over the several years
of the program. Admittedly, there would be variability among a larger group of
responses. Moreover, if we had access to a larger set of post-FCL educational and
work biographies, there would presumably be variation in the resiliency in the face of
later impoverishment that Florencia describes for herself.
My argument for representativeness rests on the unusual degree of cohesion and
coherence within the program itself—on the interlocking structures of collaborative
work and collective responsibility that was built into FCL by design. The amount of
individual variability in engagement and uptake so characteristic of most classroom
environments should, for that reason, be reduced.
In her own presentation of ‘theoretical and methodological challenges’ in designing
FCL, Brown argued that ‘The whole really is greater than the sum of its parts’ (1992, p.
166). Brown’s ‘whole’, FCL’s learning system, is what Bruner (1996) means by ‘culture’
and what I mean by Culture II.
The ‘Long Nails’ unit in a Yup’ik village school
What are the implications of the design features of the FCL program for indigenous
students? I will return to this important question at the end, after describing one
curriculum unit in a US indigenous classroom. This description will be much shorter
than for the FCL example because it happened just once and over a shorter time frame,
and because my knowledge about it is more limited.
For this second program example, we move from inner-city Oakland in the San
Francisco Bay area of California more than 2000 flight miles northwest to the small
Yup’ik bush village of Tuntutuliak in southwest Alaska, with teacher David Miller.
As part of their summer Master of Arts program at the Bread Loaf School of English
(Middlebury College, Vermont), Miller and a classmate who taught on the Navajo
Reservation in Arizona planned an electronic classroom exchange to be carried out
during the 2005-6 school year. Here is Miller’s account of what became for his students
a project in Yup’ik-English translation:
‘All of this began with an assignment where both Yup’ik and Navajo classes
were to select a well-liked story, true to local tradition and custom, and send it
to the other class for their enjoyment and discussion. Both groups made their
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decisions and came to agreement quickly, but there was a problem: the story
chosen for the Navajo class by the Yup’ik class did not have an adequate English
translation. All there was available was a word-by-word translation designed
for teaching Yup’ik language. The Yup’ik students knew that if they were to
send this translation to the Navajos, all the important meaning behind their
chosen story would be lost. Their Navajo partners needed a better translation.
Despite being told they could simply choose a different story with a better
translation, the Yup’ik students chose the laborious task of translating the entire
story, from beginning to end, to be absolutely sure the meaning of the story
would be conveyed as they understood it. I asked the Yup’ik language teacher at
our school, Sophie Enoch, if she would help with the translation during Yup’ik
class and she agreed. Many weeks after the exchange had ended, the student
translation of Long Nails was finally finished.’9
Concluding Discussion
I would argue that the classroom culture that developed during the completion of this
translation project had all of the characteristics of Culture II named by Bruner and
evident in the interviews with former FCL students. More generally, I argue that these
features have a universal pedagogical validity.
In their selection of the best story for their Navajo partners, and in their insistence on
doing a new translation themselves, the Yup’ik students demonstrated strong agency.
We can only imagine the intense discussions over the weeks of collaboration among
students and teachers about Yup’ik meanings and English equivalents. And we can
reasonably infer considerable reflection, specifically valuable meta-linguistic reflection
about their knowledge of both Yup’ik and English, as they struggled together to carry
out their self-assigned responsibility to their partner class. This Culture II provided
for what Bruner calls ‘the power of individual minds’ and the means of aiding their
realisation.
But the two design features added by Rutherford require more discussion in their
application in indigenous settings. First, what about the importance she gives to
learning stuff that matters? Matters to whom? In the FCL case, the curriculum content
of endangered species certainly matters to our world, and it mattered to the FCL
program developers. But what about to the students? We have one student’s answer.
In his interview but not quoted above, Jonathan remembers his initial reaction to the
first unit on the effects of DDT in Borneo:
‘[T]he DDT project when it was first presented to us, I was like, ah, this sucks.
I don’t even know where Borneo is, I could care less about mosquitoes and
malaria…For an 11-year-old boy, it isn’t your first choice to talk about DDT and
some disease you never heard of in some country you never heard of…But it
was kind of like how we did—the structure of the class made stuff interesting.’
Would those Yup’ik students—should those Yup’ik students—have been as willing
to go along and participate until ‘the structure of the class’ made DDT and malaria in
Borneo matter to them?
And what about the importance of teachers’ belief that kids are smart? In the Long Nails
case, Anglo teacher Miller, as well as Yup’ik teacher Enoch, show their belief through
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their support of the hard translation job the students undertook. Are teacher attitudes
even more important toward their indigenous students?
In her presidential address to the 2006 convention of the American Education
Research Association, Gloria Ladson-Billings provocatively re-conceptualises what is
commonly referred to in the US as ‘the achievement gap’:
‘I am arguing that our focus on the achievement gap is akin to a focus on the
[annual] budget deficit, but what is actually happening to African American and
Latina/o students is really more like the [cumulative] national debt.’ (2006, p. 5,
emphasis added)
In her documentation of the historical legacy of cumulative educational debt, LadsonBillings notes that ‘The history of American Indian education is equally egregious
(p. 5)’. She also documents how such blatant differential treatment was officially
rationalised. ‘The major leaders of the nation endorsed ideas about the inferiority of
Black, Latina/o and Native peoples’ (p. 6).
Because of this deliberate and cumulative debt, with its forced assimilation and
rationalised inferiority, schools (and governments at all levels) now have to plan just
as deliberately their affirmative reaction. To achieve learning stuff that matters to the
students, a study of endangered species in Alaska could start with polar bears, risking
extinction because of the melting ice floes on which they live. In other words, aspects of
Culture I can be incorporated into Culture II, especially in these small, homogeneous
indigenous communities.10 To select or develop educators at all levels who believe that
kids are smart seems to be a harder job, but arguably even more important.
1
2
3
4
5
6
This collaboration is an example of the kind of professional “distributed cognition” between two kinds
of expertise—academic researcher and classroom teacher—that seems to be especially productive.
I realised the importance of this collaboration in my own visits to Rutherford’s classroom and to
discussions with her and Brown. (See also Rutherford & Ash, in press.)
Because FCL had a strong emphasis on academic writing, this longitudinal research was funded
through a multi-year Spencer Foundation Senior Scholar Grant to Cazden for research on ‘The teaching
of writing in the English-writing world’. Rutherford and I planned the interviews together. Rutherford
is now writing a book, in which she will integrate what she learned as FCL teacher with her subsequent
experience working closely with teachers in various parts of the US, especially over several years in
indigenous (Yup’ik) bush communities in southwest Alaska.
Teachers Rutherford and Ash, and psychologists Brown and Campione are all Caucasian.
Designed as external, interactional support for the internal cognitive activities that expert readers
perform, RT discussions provide practice in four comprehension strategies: questioning the main
points; clarifying vocabulary, concepts, inferences etc; summarising what’s been learned in a paragraph
or section; and where appropriate predicting what information may be expected to follow (Palincsar
& Brown 1984). Through repeated RT experience, the discussion format became less formalised and
was appropriated by students in their individual research reading and also in their Jigsaw teaching
repertoire.
In a panel discussion at the April 2006 meeting of the American Educational Research Association
(AERA) in San Francisco, Rutherford and FCL students agreed that Cross-Talk was an example of how
the students were a third member see i above) of the collaborative design team.
Brown herself, in her 1993 presidential address to AERA, identified seven essential features:
i. ‘A great deal of academic learning, though not everyday learning, is active, strategic, self-conscious,
self-motivated, and purposeful.
ii. Classrooms as settings for multiple Zones of Proximal Development
iii. Legitimation of differences
iv. A community of discourse
v. Community of practice
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vi. Deep disciplinary understanding
vii. Developing understanding within a domain (Brown 1994, pp, 9-11)’.
Rutherford & Ash (in press) present their interview excerpts under Brown’s seven headings.
7
How ‘solo’ learning is, and therefore how individualised the orchestration of teaching should be, is
often a major divide between psychological and anthropological perspectives on education. For further
discussion, see Cazden 2001, Chapter Four, especially pp. 75-77, on Internalization, Appropriation, and
Constructivism.
8
Rutherford, e-mail communication 31 August 2005; emphasis in the original.
9
David Miller, e-mail communication, 10 July, 2006. See his website, http://lksd.org/Tuntutuliak/
htmlpages/longnailstraqnslation.html for the translated story, and Miller, in press, for a longer
report.
10
See the Alaska Native Knowledge network for a wealth of resources for such planning: www.ankn.uaf.
edu.
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Bureau of Statistics and the TVW Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, Perth.
Zubrick, SR, Silburn, SR, Lawrence, DM, Mitrou, FG, Dalby, RB, Blair, EM et al. 2005a, The
Western Australian Aboriginal Child Health Survey: The social and emotional wellbeing
of Aboriginal children and young people, Curtin University of Technology and Telethon
Institute for Child Health Research, Perth.
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Index
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Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention
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