Storying the earth: decolonising literacy education through the pedagogical imagination

Abstract

This article engages speculatively with Rachel Tonkin’s award-winning work of children’s literary non-fiction Leaf litter: Exploring the mysteries of a hidden world as a potential text for study in the primary or secondary literacy/English classroom. It considers the affordances and issues that may accompany teaching this text, and the pedagogical moves that might make it useful in contemporary times and in pursuit of racial and planetary justice. This work foregrounds the role of the pedagogical imagination in curriculum design, in anticipating how teachers, students and texts perform in the classroom. A more inclusive pedagogical imagination might be pursued, not through reliance on white, Western epistemologies, but through a First Nations First dialogic approach that recognises the intimate entanglements of human and other bodies and matter. This also includes identifying the ubiquity of the white “we”, a coercive pronoun that literacy classrooms can challenge.