VATE Conference: Ruminating on What It Means to Reclaim Our Stories

Teaching subject English is complex and important work. Through the subject, students are also learning about different worlds, ways of being and perspectives on life. In a rapidly changing world, teaching English is only becoming more challenging – but also more exciting. The 2024 Victorian Association for the Teaching of English (VATE) Conference will be held on the 21^st and 22^nd of November and is seeking to investigate these challenges and opportunities.  

This year’s theme is ‘English at the intersection: Reclaiming our stories’, and Ngarrngga Director Professor Melitta Hogarth is delivering the keynote address alongside Professor Larissa McLean Davies on ‘Restorying English at the intersection’. 

The Ngarrngga Curriculum Team are also presenting in the Teaching First Nations Perspectives’ program which is designed to support English teachers to build cultural competency in engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander content in order to provide their students with accurate, informed and culturally responsive context, knowledge, skills, language and pedagogies. 

In this blog, Curriculum Writer Steven Kolber will outline some of the key ideas from the Ngarrngga curriculum presentation at the VATE conference, which aims to support teachers to showcase Indigenous content in their English classrooms and provide a suggested reading list of texts teachers can engage with to deepen and expand their knowledge. 

Not just more texts, but more knowledge

From the viewpoint of a longtime English teacher (although admittedly not currently in a classroom), the approach of including First Nations knowledge within our subject seems limited by a ‘more texts = more better’ approach. Which can often lead to this content being "taught to death, but not in much depth" (Clarke, 2008, 67). The move to include Indigenous knowledge more broadly has been ongoing for 20 or more years (Hogarth, 2022), but a renewed focus on this work is required. While English teachers are accustomed to recognising and highlighting biblical or intertextual references in texts with their students, they may be less aware of, or confident to engage with, Indigenous Knowledge when teaching Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander authored works. 

Indeed, even when specific reference to Aboriginal knowledge is not made within an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander authored text, it is still beholden upon the teacher to take this opportunity to begin to showcase this thinking. A great deal of weight is placed upon ‘Subject English’ to deliver on this focus, containing as it does a large number of curriculum descriptors within the Australian curriculum calling for teachers to do this work.  

For English teachers looking to engage with Indigenous knowledge, Ngarrngga’s organising ideas are a useful starting point or jumping-off point, for further learning.  

Does the text you are studying engage more with:  

• Country / place 

• People 

• Culture 

• Identity?   

Starting with this question, you can make one of these the focus of your deepening learning, exploring it through the curricula content available on the Ngarrngga website and supporting materials provided. This knowledge can then begin to inform your reading of texts, and you can then begin to showcase this knowledge within your learning sequences.   

This is crucial, as an approach to Aboriginal knowledge accessed only through a narrow Western literary lens will almost certainly only produce a limited understanding of the depth and breadth of Indigenous knowledge. This is because an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Worldview (or epistemology) is different to a Western one, meaning that there will be a disconnect between these two ways of viewing the world. A focus on the richness of Indigenous ways of knowing counters the idea of “intellectual nullius” (Rigney, 2001), or the ‘great Australian silence’ (Stanner, 1968) that pervades Australian society.  

With this approach in mind, the texts provided here are not all literary, or classroom-ready, rather they are tools to inform your understanding of central concepts of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge.  

The importance of Text selection

The importance of text selection within English faculties has received a great deal of focus, but to put it plainly, text selection is “quintessential to maintaining the status quo and assumed power of the coloniser in subject English.” (Hogarth, 2022, pp.6). 

As an example, a research project led by Tim Dolin and John Yiannakis, explored text lists from senior years’ English curricula in Victoria, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales from 1945 to 2005. It allows us to analyse the most popular texts set for study between 1966 and 2005 and includes The Crucible by Arthur Miller; Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy; and Hamlet by William Shakespeare as its top three. With the remainder of the list being populated by Twain, Bronte, Dickes, Austen, Fitzgerald and Shakespeare.  

Each of these texts is a ‘classic’, very old, and features predominantly Anglo-English, European characters. Teachers of ‘subject English’ need to consider the way that they are assessing a narrow form of Standard Australian English (SAE) at the expense of all other language varieties, as well as what texts are included on book lists.  

Choosing texts that contain the diversity of humanity, including First Nations faces and voices, Asian Literature (Davies & Buzacott, 2022), and to understand racism (Gannaway & Hogarth, 2021) and LGBTQI voices (McGraw & van Leent, 2024) is a key choice that English teachers and leaders can make.  

A simple lens to consider text selection is as: 

• Mirrors 

• Windows 

• or Sliding Doors 

This approach is supported by Thomson (2024) and Worrell (2024) and means simply that mirrors are texts where readers see themselves, windows are where they view into other worlds, and sliding doors are where they can see an alternate, or alternative world.  

The role of the library  

There have been important movements to ‘decolonise the library’ alongside considerations of text selection. You may want to ask yourself how might close analysis of the ‘stacks’ within your school or municipal library survive this lens? Would removing those texts that contain damaging and dangerous depictions of Indigenous Australians leave your library better off? Almost certainly. Alongside this type of work, a refreshing of the collection by adding some of the wonderful books showcased below would allow for a library that any school or community could truly be proud of.    

Cleaning up your own bookshelves 

In addition to libraries, you might start to consider the way that your own bookshelves are representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives.

Are your books outdated and problematic?

You might also like to use the book list provided below to start to consider a refresh.  

Our recommended book list 

In line with this approach, the book list below is not a collection of books that might be used for English teachers tomorrow, but rather a collection of largely non-fiction books that can be used to supplement students and teachers’ understandings of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ knowledge systems. We hope that these books allow teachers to more effectively showcase Indigenous knowledge in their work. 

Drawing on the organising idea of Country, we explore examples from: sky, land and water.  

Discover Ngarrngga’s English curriculum resources here: https://www.ngarrngga.org/curriculum?subject=English 

You can learn more about the VATE Conference on their website: https://www.vate.org.au/2024-vate-state-conference. 

References 

• Clark. A. (2008). History’s children history wars in the classroom. University of New South Wales Press.  

• Davies, L. M. (2012). Auditing subject English: A review of text selection practices inspired by the National Year of Reading. English in Australia, 47(2), 11-17. 

• Davies, L. M., & Buzacott, L. (2018). Re-forming the nation: Curriculum, text selection, and Asian literature in subject English in Australia. In Literature education in the Asia-Pacific (pp. 29-45). Routledge. 

• Hogarth, M. (2019). Y is standard oostralin english da onlii meens of kommunikashun: Kountaring White man privileg in da kurrikulum. English in Australia, 54(1), 5-11. 

• Hogarth, M. (2022). An analysis of education academics' attitudes and preconceptions about Indigenous knowledges in initial teacher education. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education (Online), 51(2), 1-18. 

• Hogarth, M. (2022). Smoke and mirrors: 2021 Garth Boomer address and reflection. English in Australia, 57(2), 5-12. 

• McLean Davies, L., Truman, S. E., & Buzacott, L. (2021). Teacher-researchers: A pilot project for unsettling the secondary Australian literary canon. Gender and Education, 33(7), 814-829. 

• McLean Davies, L., & Buzacott, L. (2022). Rethinking literature, knowledge and justice: Selecting ‘difficult’stories for study in school English. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 30(3), 367-381. 

• McGraw, K., & van Leent, L. (2024). Queerying the Queensland senior English prescribed text list. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 68(1), 37-49. 

• Rigney, L. I. (2001). A first perspective of Indigenous Australian participation in science: Framing Indigenous research towards Indigenous Australian intellectual sovereignty. 

• Thomson, A. (2024). Intergenerational strength: How to showcase Indigenous resilience when reading First Nations literature in subject English. Metaphor, (3), 20-26. 

• Worrell, T. (2024). Positionality, relationality, mirrors and windows: Prioritising blak voices through texts. Metaphor, (3), 16-18.