English Teaching: Practice and Critique

Embodied literacies and a poetics of place

Volume 10 Number 3 September 2011

Lyn Kerkham (University of South Australia)

In this paper I explore the interconnected nature of literacy and the body, and the relation between bodies, landscapes and literacies. I draw on interview data from my doctoral study, the central problematic of which is to provide a rich account of the ways in which teachers' embodied histories, multiple identities and out-of-school lives relate to their environmental communications curriculum. I engage with the narratives of Toni, a primary-school teacher, and show how she constructs multiple selves in relation to the places where she lives and teaches. My interest here is in how these multiple selves shape, and are shaped by, the actualities of her everyday life and her environmental communications curriculum. I use the feminist poststructuralist notion of body/landscape relations (Davies, 2000; Somerville, 1999) to argue that literacies are intimately tied to bodies and bodies are always somewhere: bodies and landscapes are shaped through acts of reading and writing them. I follow this line of thinking in a discussion of Toni's environmental communications curriculum and the ways of perceiving and acting in the world that curriculum makes possible for her students as they reinscribe relations of selves and the environment.

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