Abstract
This article provides an account of a yarn between a First Nations Australian researcher and an Anglo-Celtic Australian researcher about the future of writing curriculum in subject English education, if school in its current settler-colonial form were to be abolished and completely re-imagined. Yarning is an Indigenous research method evolving from Indigenous cultures and ways of knowing; it is a form of knowledge production. The original yarn, on which this further creative dialogue is based, takes the form of a recorded podcast conversation between the authors, who are academic colleagues at the same university and former English teachers. The research focus of the conversation was what a post-Treaty, post-school writing education might be. However, rather than providing ready answers, our relational thinking foregrounds the challenges in asking this question, and in non-Indigenous Australians expecting Indigenous Australians to provide fixes for the problems engendered by the ongoing injustices of colonisation.
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1 Introduction: orientating the reader
Yarning, as a research method involving the sharing of knowledge through dialogue, starts with who we are and how we are related. Yet journal article readers may have other expectations in relation to understanding the parameters of research projects, and their “rigour” and “quality” as evidenced by explicit accounts of research questions and methods. We briefly meet those expectations here to orientate readers, then shift to give an account of our yarning about a potential, decolonised future for writing education beyond current schooling systems.
Calls for school abolition, more prominent in the USA but still highly relevant to the Australian context, invite critique of the current schooling system and also world-making based on alternative possibilities. Through considering radical change, researchers can imagine what else could be, outside of or instead of existing structures and racial injustices. In this instance, while we consider the broader possibility of school abolition, we focus on what this may mean for learning to write in Australia. Invoking abolition potentially shifts imaginations beyond the limits of progressive reforms (Rodríguez, 2019, p. 1575). It can also resist tendencies to reproduce “a totality of state-sanctioned or extra-state relations of gendered racial-colonial dominance” (Rodríguez, 2019, p. 1576). Those relations are already at work in this article, in the way we structure it to meet academic requirements as well as the emergent protocols of our intercultural, transdisciplinary inquiry.
We remain committed to epistemological rigour, which may paradoxically require us to allow space for “emergence” in our reporting, in ways that are differently structured from most academic discourses. We are responsible for ensuring appropriate discursive translation while maintaining the original logic sequences of the authors and remaining transparent rather than invoking “secret” cultural knowledge as a basis for making unsubstantiated and unverifiable claims. Our yarn is therefore available in the public domain, so that this data may be challenged, verified or falsified by other researchers as required. Our research question took the form of a provocation or thought experiment, examining what a post-school and post-Treaty writing education might be like, and whether such a thing would even be desirable.
In this conceptual research project, deconstructing the notion of “abolition”, we employed a cross-cultural yarning (Walker et al., 2014) method, using the specific form of yarning known as “research-topic yarning” (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010). Yarning as a metaphor refers to both weaving and telling stories (Christian, 2020); these are both orientations we draw on in this work; we acknowledge this is a “borrowed word” (Yunkaporta, 2021) that has relevance for many cultures, in many translated forms. These approaches offer a purposeful method for respectful collaboration drawing on Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, and our socio-cultural positionings. A cross-cultural project potentially lends itself to contemplating a reconciled future for Australia, and a more just future for literacy education in other colonial nations.
2 Yarning and knitting as method
Yarning can be informal, and our yarn takes the form of a Zoom-based podcast (Yunkaporta & McKnight, 2023) recorded for Tyson’s podcast series The Other Others for the Deakin University Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab. In this podcast, Abolish Schools!, we discuss both issues with current school writing education in Australia, and what abolishing this system might mean. The podcast recording and transcript form digital-textual field-notes that Lucinda drew on as lead author for this article; through this collaborative and distributed leadership, we enact ways to situate our cultures and expertise alongside each other, not in relations of dominance. We meet as experts in our respective and shared fields to conduct yarning as “a thought experiment” (Yunkaporta, 2023, p. 3) to produce relational and situated knowledge about the concept of abolition, not to conduct research “on” each other; as such, there are officially no human subjects in this project, and no ethics approval was sought. We are equal partners, bringing the orality of Tyson’s culture and the print-textual focus of Lucinda’s alongside each other.
Tyson scheduled and hosted the Zoom podcast, which had no prior agreed set time limit and followed protocols initiated by Lucinda, but generally unspoken; its unedited length is one hour and 13 minutes. Following the podcast, Tyson sent Lucinda the recording and transcript, which she used to develop a draft article, which was shared for feedback and further discussion, prior to development of a final draft. The article is not a reproduction or summary of the podcast but a further creative act. While Tyson provided the yarning method, Lucinda developed a further metaphorical research framing, drawing on her own cultural background, as advised by Narungga woman and poet-researcher Natalie Harkin (2020, 2021). In her creative arts-based research practice, Harkin uses Narungga basket weaving techniques, incorporating family-related paper material from colonial archives; she advocates that non-Indigenous researchers, rather than appropriating Indigenous methods, develop their own.
We therefore employ the concept of “knitting” to describe creating a textual fabric by looping a fibrous thread, as a way of guiding and elucidating the process of shifting from yarn to article. Lucinda’s mother taught her to knit as a child, and her mother learnt to knit by watching her grandmother, mother and aunties; this is a kind of knitting known formally as the “English” and “Western” style. We also here invoke aspects of common humanity (Yunkaporta, 2023, p. 119) across cultures, in this instance, familial rather than school-based learning, and weaving. Western knitting is a gendered practice, allowing the (White, Western) feminine to take a shaping role in the research. While we position Indigenous yarning and Western knitting alongside each other in our research project (and recognise diverse forms of Indigenous weaving-as-knitting), we acknowledge the tension in both honouring and wanting to challenge the limits of the domestic (white, Western) feminine.
3 Troubling “knitting”
However, all such collaborative and cross-cultural endeavours are also complicated by both Australian colonialism and intersectional feminism. In colonial society, domestic labours such as knitting were long performed by First Nations girls forcibly removed from their families and indentured to white settlers. Jennifer (pseudonym), for example, in testimony to the Bringing Them Home inquiry into stolen generations, describes being taken from her loving family as a young child in the 1950s and forced to work as a servant for a “Scottish lady” for 5 years. In this household, Jennifer survived brainwashing, beatings and rape, along with “being made to stay up late, sewing, knitting and darning that pillowcase full of endless socks” (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2021, p. 1). She was invariably tired and late for school, missing much education. School and her teacher did nothing to intervene.
Our writing-as-knitting draws not only on the podcast but also on First Nations research and stories as widely as possible; yarning is an aggregate of multiple stories (Yunkaporta, 2021), just as knitting can aggregate diverse fibres, textures and colours. Through all the above, we have sought to find a “relationally responsive” (Yunkaporta & Shillings worth, 2020, p. 11) standpoint from which to explore what ending the constraints of a colonial schooling system might mean for writing education.
4 Researcher relationality in yarning
Having provided an account of research questions and methods, we move to what may approximate as “situating ourselves in the research” but does not take the form of two individualistic author paragraphs summing each of us up in discrete boxes. Instead, we consider our relationality and also the complex asymmetries of power that shift between us. We both work on Country that was stolen and never ceded, Lucinda on Wurundjeri Country and Tyson on Boonwurrung. We acknowledge traditional custodians and pay our respects to their elders. These lands and the colonial harms inflicted on them are no backdrop, but are the integral foundations of our labours, supporting the posts and slabs of our houses, the joists and bearers and boards of our floors, our chairs and desks and computers, and our bodies. The less tangible structures of our oppressive colonial caste systems are projected over the land in the form of zoning laws, real estate and exclusionary financial instruments. Tyson belongs to the Apalech clan of far north Queensland, and Lucinda, distantly, to the clan McNaughton, of the English-Scottish border. Tyson’s name comes from the Old French and means “firebrand”. Lucinda’s is Latin and means “light”; thus we bring the similar energies of our names together in this project. The lineages of our names are appropriately analogous to our asymmetrical dynamic in relation to empire—Lucinda is like a Roman (a nice Roman, but a Roman nonetheless) and Tyson is like a Gaul (albeit a short-haired one who can often be seen walking around The Forum in a toga). Neither can ever aspire to be Consul, Lucinda because of her sex and Tyson because of his vassal status.
We are colleagues, social scientists and lab-makers; Tyson founded Deakin’s Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab, and Lucinda is creating digital writing labs in schools to study how teachers are conceptualising writing. We are interested in experimenting. We are at a similar professional level, but Tyson is the more senior, experienced and widely cited academic, having completed his thesis in 2009, some 5 years before Lucinda; she has relied on his work in her own research in curriculum studies. It would be over a decade after graduation before Tyson was able to find permanent employment, however, while Lucinda attained her position immediately after graduating. (Bloody Romans…).
In our first conversation, at the outset, we established that we have a shared colleague and friend, Awabakal, Gumaroi, and Yuin researcher Dr Anthony McKnight at the University of Wollongong; he may be distantly related to Lucinda. We have both been parenting for the last 20 years and we have school-aged children, which has an obvious bearing on our yarning about school. We also have partners and other relations, Tyson in a much broader network, Lucinda in a nuclear and (slightly) extended family. We both have neurodiversity in our families and Tyson suffers from Bipolar Affective Disorder.
We both know we deal in borrowed words from cultural and intellectual lineages we respect: Tyson from Bama, Murri and Nungar Lore along with standpoint, decolonial and mad studies theorists, and Lucinda informed by post-structural theorists in particular Bakhtin (1981) and posthuman theory (Braidotti, 2013, 2019; Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2015). Our narratives begin to knit together historically as former high school English teachers lamenting the loss of the criticality promoted in English in the 1990s through programs in Australia such as Productive Pedagogies (Luke, 2000) and Multiliteracies (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000). These approaches very abruptly gave way to back-to-basics curricula following the culture wars of the late 90 s, and the “freedom fries” backlash against all things post-modern, deconstructivist (and therefore French) following 9–11 and the invasion of Iraq. We also share an interest in the impact of the fascist turn in education, with Tyson tracking the new backlash against “wokeism” in curriculum and media through weaponised disinformation (Yunkaporta, 2022), and Lucinda drawing on Pinar’s (2011) warnings of this growing threat.
5 Why abolition?
We turn now to storying a genealogy of the research question; this was a key element of the early part of our podcast. How did we come to be working together? How did we come to countenance the abolition of school and school writing? Lucinda is undertaking a 3-year Australian Research Council project Teaching Digital Writing, studying how teachers are conceptualising writing. As a stage of this project, she worked with the National Textbook Archive, studying teacher-facing curriculum materials about writing from the 1960s to 1990s. On her first orientation day in the stacks, she read Tyson’s (Yunkaporta, 2019) Sand Talk: How Indigenous knowledges can save the world (subsequently referred to as Sand Talk). While she had been primed to think about writing as a colonial act, by academics in her field (Green & Beavis, 1996), and by Cara Shipp, the First Nations representative on the project’s national relevance group, the serendipitous and early reading of Tyson’s book shifted the framing of the archival work. The project had been initially predicated on frustrations with the narrowing of the English curriculum for writing due to the impact of a competitive, measurement-based, data-fetishising masculinist education regime (McKnight, 2016). The project passed a stringent national interest test. Yet the funding application said nothing about First Nations Australians, except for the plan to recruit a First Nations adviser.
In her notes from that first day in the archives, Lucinda copied out Tyson’s observation that “the ability to write fluently in the language of the occupying power seems to contradict an Indigenous author’s membership of a community that is not supposed to write about itself at all” (Yunkaporta, 2019, p. 4). In our yarn, Tyson questions Lucinda about her lack of criticality in relation to what was, for her, “outsider thinking”, in the book. He wondered if she had not been unduly influenced by persuasive devices and the “ancient wisdom” allure of the text, to have been so powerfully affected. However, Lucinda felt that Tyson’s writing worked on her not so much rhetorically, but through spirit, fundamentally opening her heart to attend to what was missing in the archive, not the planned hunt for what was present. After reading Sand Talk, it was impossible for Lucinda to ignore the overwhelming whiteness of English education evidenced by the National Textbook Archive. After writing Sand Talk, Tyson on the other hand developed a highly sceptical view of most spiritual claims but remained unchanged in his life-long awareness of overwhelming whiteness in Education.
Lucinda’s original research question for her Australian Research Council study was “Where can this intellectual and pedagogical labour [of conceptualising digital writing] be located in the history of the teaching of writing in secondary English?” After reading Sand Talk, she could not ignore that this project, while aspiring to intercultural co-authorship and equal partnership was, and still is, situated within territories illegally occupied by an Anglo-dominant population, that has largely whited-out, ignored, genocided and excluded the First Peoples of this land. Countless images in the materials in the archives showed white faces or hands. No obviously black or brown students, or their writer hands, were depicted. On the rare occasions First Nations peoples were mentioned, it was in terms of “the shadow people” (Keyte & Baines, 1982, p. 96); this was from a ubiquitous textbook Lucinda herself studied and enjoyed in school English.
In describing Quandamooka and PeeWee poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal, in a chapter called “The Commentator”, the book says, “her poems all have aboriginal (sic) themes, though her outlook is not narrowly racial. She believes in the brotherhood of man. She writes of the passing of the old aboriginal customs with sadness. Sometimes she is angry. Sometimes she is funny. She is never bitter.” (p. 96) [capitalisation in original]. This conveniently elegiac and patronising tone, positioning Noonuccal as passive onlooker, is reinforced by the inclusion of Noonuccal’s poem “We are going”. Yet listening to Noonuccal read the poem online (1986), it is anything but acquiescent. Noonuccal was an activist, not a “commentator”. Anglo-Celtic and other non-Indigenous English teachers like Lucinda, now in their 50s and in positions of power in schools, departments of education and subject associations, have likely been enculturated by similar items, or by their absence in the covertly instructive occlusions of silent curricula. Perhaps this may be one reason for the reluctance to include First Nations perspectives in the English curriculum (Bacalja & Bliss, 2019).
The experience of reading the archive, through Sand Talk, intensified Lucinda’s disillusionment with the technical narrowness of curriculum and emphasised the racism integral to the history and present of the teaching of English. For example, English is still routinely referred to as Australia’s mother tongue, its “L1”, or first language, when it is really “LC”: the language of the colonisers. Australia’s L1s are the more than 250 Indigenous languages, and their 800 dialects. Shipp (2023) has recently addressed, in her book Listening from the Heart, the multiple reasons non-Indigenous teachers give for not including Indigenous voices or issues in their curricula. Lucinda has taught First Nations students who have been made to stand outside classrooms in which First Nations-related materials are discussed or taught. All of this led Lucinda to wonder about whether schools, with their focus on reproduction and perpetuation of colonial systems, including via an increasingly ventriloquised writing education taught by largely non-Indigenous teaching staff, are fit for purpose.
Tyson has publicly denounced mass schooling. He has said that “formal education is a horrific thing… I think it’s just the dumping ground for everybody’s narcissistic fantasies of what they want to get up on the board as important and [then they] inflict it on our children” (2021). He has decried the “horrendous, weaponised boredom and preparation of workers to be able to focus on the task directly in front of them and ask no questions… not producing knowledge, but workers, job-ready for crappy jobs” (2021). He has previously specifically critiqued the shortcomings and harms of a “back to basics” literacy approach for Indigenous children (2019). He has analysed the lack of foundational First Nations consultation in the development of Australia’s first national curriculum, and its ensuing harms (Lowe & Yunkaporta, 2013). He has pointed out that even when First Nations pedagogies are brought into schools, they can further essentialise the diversity of First Nations peoples (Yunkaporta & Kirby, 2011).
So Lucinda thought he may be prepared to discuss what a praxis of abolition might open up for educational possibilities, and invited him to co-author an article on what else might be possible for a writing education beyond school. While “abolition” has more resonances in the USA and Canada, with the ending of formalised enslavement of African Americans and Canadians, and Indigenous peoples, the term is generative for us, in that it frees us from having to tinker around the edges of colonial, fundamentally British and “English” curriculum.
Instead, we might imagine what learning to communicate might have been, had white immigrants arrived in 1788 with humility and curiosity, aware of their own ignorance in new contexts and their need to understand Country. What if they had made a Treaty up front? What would writing education be, if it was not grounded in the flawed assertion that Australia was “terra nullius”, and uninhabited, prior to European invasion? What if it could be based, from the outset, on, for example, Indigenous pedagogies, incorporating story sharing, community links, deconstructing and reconstructing, non linearity, land links, symbols and images, the non verbal, and learning maps (Yunkaporta, 2009, p. 8). What would it mean for writing, “eschewing an English that “inevitably places settler worldviews at the centre of every concept, obscuring true understanding” (Yunkaporta, 2019, p. 21). Lucinda anticipated yarning to be doing what she thought of as radical re-imagining, as a placeholder for a future that needs to be thought before it can be pursued. In this future, a more First Nations-centred pedagogical imagination (McKnight, 2023) could transform the teaching of writing.
6 Broader context
A further rationale for the abolition of schooling and other carceral systems in Australia comes from the broader context. We define Australia’s British-model schooling as a carceral system, often conscripting the classroom-as-cell-bound bodies of children to the chair and desk-bound postures, the submissive demeanours and the thinking routines required of industrial economies. School confines them for long days in de-natured environments of concrete, asphalt and glass, in mod-grass monocultures (Shiva, 1993) and in rooms where it is difficult to breathe due to the poor quality of the indoor air (Andamon et al., 2023). Yet for many First Nations young people, school and prison are literally the same thing- calls to abolish prisons, defund the police and abolish school are therefore intimately linked.
Even while we wrote this article, the United Nations was again alerted to the Queensland government’s continued serious human rights abuses against children, many of them Indigenous, in “watch-houses” designed to hold adults for short periods. These watch-houses, staffed by police and attached to police stations, are tiny, have no sunlight, lack privacy and although meant for one-person, are often shared. In these watch-houses, children as young as 10 years of age are given limited access to poor quality education (Amnesty International Australia, 2023). Australia’s colonial education system has contributed, in its design of future subjects, to creating a nation and society in which this is possible.
Also fundamental to the broader Australian context for this article are the grievous facts that First Nations Australians are the most incarcerated peoples in the world, and that this is the result of “processes of criminalisation, segregation and subjugation of First Nations peoples more or less up to the present day” (ANTAR, 2022). More than 30 years ago, another Royal Commission, into Aboriginal deaths in custody, emphasised the importance of education in acknowledging the past and achieving understanding, so Australians could move towards reconciliation.
On the day after our podcast yarn, the media contains an article, the latest in serious of countless similar articles, titled “Grieving family pushes for wider bail reform” (Eddie, 2023). This article describes the death of vulnerable Gunditjmara, Dja Dja Wurrung, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta woman Veronica Nelson in custody, alone in a cell, from a rare gastrointestinal condition, along with opiate withdrawal and malnutrition. Nelson, whose calls for help were ignored, had been imprisoned for shoplifting and not appearing on bail. The article quotes advocate Nerita Waight: “We can’t fix a disaster with a bill that only cherry-picks and does half the job”, in relation to inadequate changes proposed. When reform is insufficient, abolition may be more readily contemplated, whether of the prison system, or the education system that has not changed a society that continues to incarcerate and kill First Nations peoples, despite the hopes of the Royal Commission.
This is also an education system, or at the very least a part of the societal curriculum of Australian schooling (Cortes, 1981; Moodie et al., 2019) exhibiting bias and racism. Seventy-two percent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples feel not enough is being done to close the gaps in achievement with non-Indigenous students; these gaps persist in school readiness, early childhood education (especially for children in remote locations), school attendance, literacy and numeracy, finishing school and tertiary qualifications (Australian Institute of Health & Welfare, 2021). The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated all these inequities for vulnerable children (Drane et al., 2020). There is reason to believe Australia’s education system is dysfunctional and harmful.
In Sand Talk (2019), Tyson describes the first and most enduring Australian educational practices of drawing in the sand that began tens of thousands of years ago (this was not on Lucinda’s radar when preparing her grant application for a project exploring the history of the teaching of writing in Australian coloniser schools). However, he warns that the less ephemeral print-based coloniser writing quickly goes out of date (p. 20). This applies to our academic writing and recorded public commentary too. In our podcast, Tyson’s thinking had already changed from his previous published positions, and Lucinda’s changed in the course of our dialogue. We turn now, in this knitted story, to the knots that quickly emerge in our yarn. The word “knitting” comes from the old English “cynyttan”, meaning to knot, yet one of the earliest known examples of knitting is an ancient pair of Egyptian socks (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2023). Stories and histories have unexpected twists and turns.
7 Yarning
While we have woven through, above, multiple reasons for abolishing existing school education, our yarn takes us in other directions. Tyson first acknowledges his previous critiques of schooling. He describes the conflicts experienced by First Nations parents as they drop their children off at school, with its bells, bars and fences, given the grievous situation we describe briefly above, in relation to First Nations deaths in custody. However, he expands on this to recognise that for children with specific neurodiversity needs, including those in his own family, those bars and fences and routines of formal, regular, systemic schooling can be beneficial. Safety becomes paramount, and for children who are “flight risks”, school is a safe haven, in a city of six million people. Lucinda’s imagined First Nations-led freedoms begin to unravel against the reality that abolishing school and learning in communities or with significantly more freedom and room to move may not work for all children.
Our next, and related knot, that we work this way and that, is that what constitutes education for people mostly in industrialised cities is necessary. Tyson links this to calls to defund the police, and emphasises that despite the history of First Nations and police relations in Australia, the police are necessary. He tells the story of his own recent dealings with the police, and his resulting gratitude towards and respect for them in saving both his life and the life of his son. Context is everything, and while it may be nice to dream of school abolished and learning happening in utopian homes and communities, in the capitalist world of industrialised, city-based labour where adults are largely committed to workplaces, or concentrating on work while working from home, children are bodies to be supervised and controlled. The pandemic lockdowns showed us the challenges of one kind of school abolition (Naidoo et al., 2022).
What the heart says, to defund, to abolish, cannot flourish in the intolerable conditions of the city. Transplanting First Nations’ ways of learning, for example, being outside, on Country, cannot simply be shifted into streets of speeding cars and strangers. In fact, Indigenous logics do not call for the abolition of the city but enable people to code switch to differing conditions of government and authority. In a further analogy, bush medicine does not work in congested cities, where public health is vital.
The problem emerges, in our yarn, not as schools or curriculum, but as city building and city living. Tyson describes the libertarian, anarchist, authentic ways of being that can be enjoyed by (usually male) Aboriginal individuals on Country, where these practices do not put any family or community members (or greater populations from a public health perspective) at risk. So while societies may abolish enslavement or end genocide, abolishing prisons, police and schools is a mere fantasy for the industrial, capitalist city complex.
Another knot is our shared gratitude to existing education systems. School is a contradictory concept. While we have both critiqued its narrow parameters, school is still the best existing way to “ensure that democratic governance is possible”. School is both a threat to and a defender of democracy. As Cara Shipp, the First Nations adviser on Lucinda’s national research project has reminded her, access to education in Australia, to literacy, to learning to write with relevant tools and technologies is not available to all. This is even despite the state and federal government infrastructures behind the provision of formal education and the current schooling system. Here funding is often the issue, not the need to reconceptualise what school is.
For all of public schooling’s alleged origins in Prussian eugenics and animal husbandry (Yunkaporta, 2019), and its twentieth-century mimicry of factories and their Taylorist systems (McKnight, 2021), there are other stories and other truths to be told. Schooling, in its current form, is the only way many children can access what Tyson calls “a rich inner life”, linked to the study of science, philosophy and the arts. In yarning, trying out ideas, testing and playing with them, we move beyond the written and recorded regimes of former thought, and acknowledge our gratitude to schools and to teachers for their love and care of our children and so many others.
Our yarning tugs back and forth, with Lucinda asking what could be, and Tyson strategically avoiding giving a neat answer. Behind our yarn about abolishing school is Tyson’s reluctance to impose a new master narrative for education, which is what “imagining something else” could be. It would, he believes, also be a colonising of those committed to the current project of schooling, flawed as it may be. Lucinda desires dot points, a plan, and has an earnest determination to re-imagine school, while Tyson has elsewhere signalled his intention to be as subtle as possible in his thinking; he has said, in writing Sand Talk, that he “tried to be elusive… so that nobody could grab onto it and think ‘that’s the Yunkaporta way” (2021). Even if the dismantling of schooling is already in process through the absence of funding, what would come after? Tyson perceives Western-Northern societies as preoccupied by “the return of the King”, a longing for a strong man and autocratic saviour. There seems a real risk that calls for the abolition of school to play into this, with school and curriculum in the west already having taken a fascist turn (Pinar, 2011), particularly in terms of anti-intellectualism and restriction of materials reflecting diverse ethnic, gendered and sexual realities.
Our yarn is already haunted by the “strong men” we mention at various stages, including former US president Donald Trump, political strategist Steve Bannon, misogynist influencer Andrew Tate, tycoon Elon Musk and potential Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy—for Lucinda this list includes Guugu Yimithirr man and First Nations advocate Noel Pearson; he has mounted powerful public arguments (Urban, 2021) for limiting education to direct instruction and rote learning of the basics, especially for First Nations children, even if, as Tyson reassures her, Pearson has since “recanted”.
We note the position of schooling “on the front line of the culture wars”, and the bad actors who may also call for the abolition of school, with its purported left-wing biases. Abolition, therefore, could take the form of a “wrong story” (Yunkaporta, 2023, p. 21), as a strategy “unbalanced”, un-thought-through, ignorant of context, and vulnerable to harmful forces. Lucinda may be seeking, to extend Tyson’s The Lord of the Rings metaphor (although we acknowledge the inherent racism of J.R.R.Tolkien’s oeuvre), to do what elven elder Galadriel refuses, and set up a solution-orientated “good” (white saviour) queen.
This queen might (in collaboration, of course) secure, commodify and disseminate Indigenous epistemologies for alternative education systems and Indigenous pedagogies for writing, as purported antidotes to the harms of colonial schooling. These would potentially function as profitable and inevitably impossible placebos, instead of addressing and fixing: inadequate funding for schools; the status and workload of teachers; teacher recruitment and retention shortages; the harms of standardised testing; the pace of change accelerated by generative AI and other crises in the present, rather than in a Utopian future. Similarly, these pedagogical initiatives may function as a placebo for the work that white Angloceltic teachers need to do on themselves, in the process of decolonisation (McKnight, 2024).
This spectral figure of the good queen also raises the question of why it should be the Indigenous Knowledges that come to the rescue and help an Anglo-Celtic education system recuperate and regenerate itself, when this system has been instrumental in trying to extinguish these knowledges. This queen is an expert in continuing the extractive logics of colonisation, but cloaking them as respecting diversity and enacting inclusion; this is what Tyson has called “mining the margins of the civilisation” (2021) for exotic artefacts that might be sanitised and repurposed to further Western civilisation. In yarning and in knitting, the promise of abolition comes to have an absoluteness, and official authority; this sits uneasily with both First Nations and poststructuralist epistemologies and respect for multiplicities.
8 Conclusion: the prisoner’s dilemma
Conclusions, in the Western, linear mode of thought and journal article writing, require exactly the kind of distillation of key points that Tyson (Yunkaporta, 2023, p. 119) rejects. We have offered no perfect model for a new writing education, inside a new school education that will transform all the rest of Australian society as well. Yet at the same time, we do not advocate merely tinkering with, or “re-branding” (Yunkaporta, 2021) an existing system in the teaching of writing. This has resulted only in pendulum swings between behaviourist proscription and progressive humanism, between rigid compliance via drilled skills displayed through generic conventions and exhortations for meaningful, creative and individualistic student voice (Lindstrom, 2018).
Tyson is adamant that it is not possible to change existing Western-Northern systems into Indigenous thinking systems. An intervention, not a solution, may be to do something else, rather than designing a replacement curriculum. This would not be to abolish and replace, but to find a way for all to be heard, and for contradictory stories to exist without rancour, alongside each other; this might be an ever shifting “aggregate picture that better represents the truth” (Yunkaporta, 2021). This also reflects the guiding theories that Lucinda works with, for example, Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanist invocation that we are all in this together, but “‘we’ are not one and the same” (2019, p. 11). This orientation would also be to curriculum as “living process, not a tool for control and compliance” (Yunkaporta, 2023, p. 119); Tyson says this of government, but it can apply to curriculum as well. Lucinda has explored this through the notion of curriculum as assemblage or complicated conversation (Pinar, 2011) between human and more-than-human (McKnight, 2021). It could mean remembering and prioritising an ethics of care, towards each other and the planet, and cultivating an aversion to the cruelty of colonial systems, through story and empathy.
Tyson (Yunkaporta, 2023) has described how Indigenous Knowledges represent the diverse and interlinked knowledges of all humans, even though this has been lost to many peoples. Fundamental concepts of locatedness, relatedness, orality, narrative and image can find their way into writing, and education more broadly. Existing curriculum theory and practice are not monolithic; there are already many places where these concepts resonate and where what it means, relationally, to be human, and to be humane, are not lost.
In our yarn, a call for the abolition of schooling emerges as a “wrong story” (Yunkaporta, 2023, p. 21). A right story, as Tyson explores at length in his new book, is “not about objective truth, but the metaphors and relations and narratives and communities, living in complex contexts of knowledge and economy, aligned with patterns of land and creation” (2023, p. 21). This could be a way to move (through) the writing curriculum together, as long as participants can maintain horizontal and reciprocal knowledge exchange (Santos, 2012) or “transknowledging” relations (Heugh et al., 2021) between the South and North.
The trouble, of course, lies in the prisoner’s dilemma at the heart of all Western zero-sum economies and rivalrous relations—meaningful change towards a fantastical post-treaty reality and writing curriculum would involve cooperative relationships within a system devoid of violence and competition.
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There is no further dataset available.
References
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Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions. Lucinda McKnight’s research is funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), DE220100515.
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McKnight, L., Yunkaporta, T. Yarning and knitting words: a cross-cultural thought experiment on writing beyond school. AJLL (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44020-024-00066-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44020-024-00066-6