Walking and Writing as Ethical and Emergent Literacy Practices of Engagement in English Language Arts

• In Event: Reading and Writing about Climate Change: Developing Teachers’ Literacies in/for a Warming World

Abstract

This paper explores teachers’ engagement with place-writing and walking curriculum in K-12 classrooms and schools as critical and relational pedagogies in/with place. Semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with educators who had (1-6 years prior) participated in a Summer Writing Institute (SWI) at a western-Canadian university, designed to engage teacher-writers in/with issues of place, power, and pedagogy. With the increasing momentum and spread of prescribed curriculum, assessment, and policy that are effectively minimizing literacies (Persohn/Comber, 2022) in Canadian classrooms, the goal of this research is to mobilize literacy pedagogies outside classrooms—with examples of writing and composing emerging from engagement with issues of socio-ecological (in)justice.

As settler educators engaged in curricular and pedagogical place-work with educators on the ancestral lands, homelands, and territories of Indigenous peoples, our research is informed by critical place inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015), which calls us to teach and attend to the injustices that have been created through “long histories of hierarchical divisions among peoples, to other species, to the land” (p. 2-3). Sociomaterial, feminist, and anti-oppressive pedagogies name and acknowledge the inequities of hierarchical power structures perpetuated in education that we, and many educators we teach, have inherited and benefitted from (Chavez, 2021). In taking walks outside with a curricular purpose (Judson, 2018), we practice “new habits of noticing” with teachers “to unsettle existing frames” of academic writing and knowledge production in western colonial education “to trace the multiple relationalities that pulse through literacy” moment-by-moment in more-than-human relations and activity in place (Burnett & Merchant, 2020, p. 115). Moving and composing with bodies, materials, and place (Authors, 2024) cultivates practices of kinship with the living world —attention, curiosity, play, and gratitude (Hausdoerffer et al., 2021)—and emergent language and literacy pedagogies that contribute to relations of respect, reciprocity, and responsibility to the greater good (Roberts, 2024).

In a postqualitative approach to practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Author, 2023), we met with 17 past SWI participants for individual and/or group Zoom conversations to better understand how their SWI experiences moved with them into practice (and why, or why not). In efforts to be attentive to “complex embodied, relational, spatial, [and] affective energies” (Ringrose, 2011, p. 599) emerging through teachers’ stories, reflections, and artifacts of practice, we conducted three phases of data analysis: 1) “surrender and catch” collage/assemblage-making (Prendergast, 2015); 2) stacking stories (Burnett & Merchant, 2020) of social-material-semiotic relations and affective encounters; and 3) thinking with concepts produced through inquiry with co-researchers, writers, and teacher collaborators (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023).
With specific examples, we will share how educators’ place-writing and -walking practices have: 1) engaged issues of climate and ecological (in)justice and related social, species, and material inequities; 2) contributed to critical inquiries of place through (anti-)colonial, ecological, and relational lenses; 3) valued multimodal, embodied, personal, and creative writing as “durable” (Persohn/Comber, 2022) literacy practices for teacher- and student-writers; but also 4) created tensions for educators (en)countering oppressive public, institutional, and systemic pressures and policies.

Authors

• Michelle A. Honeyford, University of Manitoba

• Jennifer Watt, University of Manitoba