Literacy, places and identity: The complexity of teaching environmental communications.

In this article we explore the relationship between literacy, place, and teacher identity as they intersect around Special Forever, a professional learning program with a focus on environmental communications and place based education. Teachers participating in Special Forever speak from different positions, histories, and alliances as local landowners, farmers, users of Murray-Darling Basin resources, and environmental activists; they teach in places to which they are connected in multiple ways and in which they have particular investments that shape the design of their environmental communications curriculum. We draw on an analysis of the Special Forever Guidelines for schools to discern how the Murray-Darling Basin is represented within the program, and read this alongside interview data in which teachers speak about the complex relationships they have with ‘their place’ in the Murray-Darling Basin. We suggest that the interrelationships between the politics of places, the politics of literacy pedagogy, and the multiple subject positions that teachers negotiate deserve closer attention if we are to develop more grounded approaches to critical literacy and place-based pedagogies. Furthermore, we argue that an important element for making literacy critical is attending to the politics of the places that are important to children and their teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]