Storying the earth: decolonising literacy education through the pedagogical imagination

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.

"Stories that Matter: The Matter of Stories", held in Adelaide in June 2022.Presenters were encouraged to select a work of children's literature and respond to Haraway's invocation to "stay with the trouble", to think deeply about the matter of story and its worldmaking capacities, as well as the ways stories themselves are constituted.
I selected Leaf litter for its close attention to the earth as a pedagogical imperative and its attempt to tell the story, both visually and in print, of a small patch of earth, over a year.Thinking with posthumanist and new materialist theory, I was interested in how the text could help students become attuned to animal relatives, or oddkin (Haraway, 2016) and foreground ecological perspectives through detailed depiction of non-human bodies, in the form of plants and animals.Yet through study and closer attention, the story I tell in this article is less about the affordances of this text, and more about the "trouble" it represents, particularly in relation to race.This theoretical, conceptual and ultimately practical article engages speculatively with the prospect of Leaf litter being set as a text for reading or study in the classroom.
The article also responds to calls, in this journal, for greater critical attention to ideological representation in children's literature (Auld et al., 2021).Rather than an empirical account of how students read or respond to this text, the study is situated in the little-researched space of teacher design work, in which the performative pedagogical imagination (Green, 2003) anticipates how a text (and the teacher) will perform in the classroom.As Bill Green (2003, p. 11), reflecting on the work of Garth Boomer, says, "pedagogy involves, fundamentally, the imagination of difference, of otherness" as the teacher "images and imagines the learner, learning".It also inevitably involves potential failures of this capacity for empathy and wondering, for white teachers in a settler colonial nation, and for humans in an anthropocentric culture that devalues nonhuman others.
2 Situating the researcher I am a white Australian former English teacher and current literacy education academic with an Anglo-Celtic background; the teacher I imagine to be engaging with Leaf litter is similarly white, as are the majority of Australian teachers.This is not to elide First Nations or any black and brown teachers, but to recognise that the work of addressing white privilege is white people's work.It is to acknowledge that those with access to Indigenous knowledges and stories are potentially already expert in what is discussed here.The work of decolonising, which I came to understand is what is required for white teachers designing pedagogy around this text, is for white people to undertake, as is the work of reconciliation.I hope that any First Nations teachers reading may bring their own expertise to this discussion and publish responses and critiques.
The notion of the performative pedagogical imagination is always already raced, but this is potentially invisible to the white teacher.It is raced in the sense that the teacher imagined is the inevitably racialized self, and the student imagined is raced as well, depending on the assumptions made by the teacher about the relevant class.This study moves beyond "fixing" the curriculum by replacing a text or deploying "critical pedagogy".Instead it considers decolonisation of the white teacher's pedagogical imagination (Green, 2003).

Article structure
This article begins with a brief description of the text and related academic literature to orientate and familiarise readers.I then briefly describe my first encounter with the text and the affordances I originally imagined this text to offer, before moving into critique.This reflects the harms I have come to perceive in treating this text, in its current edition, as neutral or beneficial.As with any text, it has opportunities and issues, but close analysis has demonstrated the care needed to be taken with what may appear to be common sense ecocriticism, in purportedly postcolonial contexts.
Analysis can also remind that "English" curriculum in particular is a colonial project (Green & Beavis, 1996).What is imagined, by the teacher in designing curriculum, posits what is "natural", that is, "the normal, the fixed and unchanging" (O'Callaghan, 1995, p. 22), even though this may not be so natural after all.In imagining how to study a text, through crafting elements of any social, relational, material and discursive pedagogical assemblage, teachers need to ask what is naturalised, by both the texts themselves and the teacher's creative design labour.This study is therefore situated in the emergent literature around decolonising settler colonial literacy education, whether through the provision of programs specifically shown to be effective for Indigenous students (Scull, 2016) or through the more self-reflexive approaches described here.
The study builds on the important work combining environmental and literacy education, and Indigenous knowledges through place-based inquiry, for example through the Special Forever project jointly run by the Primary English Teaching Association (PETA) and the Murray-Darling Basin Commission (Comber et al., 2007).This work foregrounds ways Indigenous elders (p.17) and Aboriginal students (Coop, 2007, p. 28) can provide expertise informing literacy lessons and the production of texts around local issues.While similarly attending to place, in contrast, this study considers setting and reading a single published text about a single patch of earth, and how teachers might plan pedagogy around it.

Introducing the text
Leaf litter, in the edition used for this study, is a folio-sized (37 × 24 cm), 38-page, hardcover work of literary non-fiction, in the form of a children's lift-the-flap picture book with double-page colour illustrations.The book is published by Harper Collins and has an accompanying teaching guide, available online, but largely outside the scope of this study.Rachel Tonkin is both author and illustrator.The book is still in print and remains available via bookshops and my local suburban Melbourne library in 2023.Leaf litter was a Children's Book Council-shortlisted book (2007) and won The Wilderness Society's Environmental Award for Children 's Literature (2007).It can be found in The University of Queensland's AustLit (2019) database, which also notes it was included in the 2007 White Raven's Catalogue compiled by the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany, with a Special Mention for being easy to understand.It has been mentioned in several articles and studied in depth by Geraldine Massey (2009) in her thesis Reading the environment: Narrative constructions of ecological subjectivities in Australian Children's Literature.
Massey provides a detailed visual semiotic (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006) account of the text: suffice to say here, the work involves fourteen double-page spreads of artwork depicting the same cross section of earth at the base of a central tree trunk, over a year.The print narrative, located in a 4-cm deep band across the bottom of the page, describes the activities of the flora and fauna in the images; both print and visuals are highly detailed.
The images are executed in traditional, Western realist style, in muted earth colours, and dominate the page, with the print bands subsumed by the vivid and life-life salience of the images.The viewer is positioned at ground (leaf litter) level, which traverses the middle of the pages, so the viewer can see what is both above and below the ground.Each page has a flap, in a different position and of a different organic shape that can be lifted to reveal something underground, a burrow or hiding place.The flaps themselves are camouflaged and need to be sought out.The book also contains several peritextual elements, including a Glossary and list of "Things to Find" in each picture.It belongs to the genre of ecocritical and environmental books that serve to position young people as ecocitizens.

My story
Unsettling the distanced and scientific voice of the discourse analyst, I note that I fell in love with this book in 2014, when I picked it up in the National Gallery of Victoria bookshop.As a mother performing "home duties", I found reading detailed picture books with my children to be a way of passing long days.
Leaf litter is a richly pedagogical text, for competitive middle-class parents nurturing future scientists, and this no doubt influenced my purchase.Reading the book over the years, I felt admiration for the author, and her detailed drawings and meticulous text, which have no doubt inspired many children's interest in nature.This article does not mean to take away from that achievement or make any claims about the author, but to position the work, two decades on, as open to critique as a colonial text of its time.As a mother, I perceived only advantages in reading it, agreeing with Australian children's author Jackie French, quoted in the blurb: 'Leaf litter' gives children a new way to see the world, and helps them realise that each part affects all the others, and that every living thing is constantly changing.This is a glorious book.Impeccably researched, extraordinarily beautiful, and perfect in every way.
I want to avoid another recuperative tale of white awakening to everyday racial prejudice; I have discussed this phenomenon previously (McKnight, 2018b), for example, in relation to changing evaluations of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird as a secondary English text.Initially, I was excited about the pedagogical potential for Leaf litter to illustrate multi-species ethnography (Tsing, 2015), demonstrate the vibrancy of matter (Bennett, 2010) via exploding wattle seed pods and other dynamic natural phenomena, break down binaries (we are all, humans and non-humans, ultimately earth), challenge humanism's ownership of story, recuperate what has been abjectified (Kristeva, 1982) as "litter" and to attune attention to what is underneath, dark, quiet, invisible and intimate.Through this, I imagined honouring what is culturally constructed as feminine, cycles of nature, birth and death, the seasons and the earth itself (Shiva, 1988).Alas that "autumn", in the text, read to me as natural, not the imposition of a Eurocentric seasonal imaginary on the different weather patterns of First Nations country.

The white "we"
In studying Leaf litter, through reading and rereading the text, along with researching its mentions in academic literature, I have learnt that such texts, rather than being ecological masterpieces "perfect in every way", have been convincingly critiqued.Ecocriticism itself has been described as "a predominantly white movement" (Huggan in Massey & Bradford, 2011, p. 713), informed by "Western thinking about a moral subject whose whiteness is central to formulations of relations between humans and the nonhuman world" (Massey & Bradford, 2011, p. 113).Such texts imply Western readers and also "privilege Western systems of environmental knowledge" (Massey & Bradford, 2011, p. 118).
While Massey's (2009, p. 34) thesis addresses Leaf litter as one of a group of texts that "foreground Eurocentric understandings of human interactions with the environment", she is largely positive in her descriptions, arguing that the text provides intense and authentic experience and incorporates the reader, through awe and humility, as part of an environmental "ecological sublime" (p.263).I argue instead that Leaf litter functions via fundamental binaries that enforce separation not inclusion, of nature/culture, human/landscape, Western/Indigenous and white/black, that are inextricably intertwined.This is perhaps most powerfully evidenced by the text on the introductory page: Leaves, tiny branches and bark collection on the ground in forests all over the world.We call this leaf litter, but it isn't really rubbish at all.(p.1)Similarly, the concluding page states: Leaf litter is fragile and easily destroyed, But it is vital for our survival and for the future of our world.We need to learn to look after it.(p.30) These brief lines of print manage to establish a white "we", dominant in a universalised version of "leaf litter" the same in forests all over the world, not unique to the country (Dja Dja Wurrung country in this instance).First Nations Australians have not named "leaf litter" or thought of the country as "rubbish".The news that the country is vital to survival is no news to them.The message that "we" (they) need to learn to look after the country contrasts with the truth that white colonists tried to obliterate First Nations knowledges about looking after the country, knowledges that are much more sophisticated than the mere custodianship implied here.
So it is clear that First Nations Australians are not addressed by this "we", but rather positioned outside it.In a pedagogical sense, this tiny pronoun "we", used only on these opening and closing pages, unravels the whole text and opens it up for critical engagement.If "we", the author and readers, are white, who and where are First Nations Australians in this text?This is the real lift-the-flap work of reading this text.As its opening page says, "the more you look, the more amazing things you will find".They may be "amazing", in their suddenly-revealed racism, to the white researcher or teacher, but all too familiar to an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander student.
To simply move now to further deconstruction of the text and questioning of its assumptions, however, is to misunderstand the point of the story above.The problem here is that I, with all my white privilege and education, did not perceive the exclusionary work of that "we", over many years of reading and rereading.It has been said that "teachers are often willing to examine curriculum in their classrooms honestly… yet many of these same teachers baulk when it comes to examining their own advantages as white people in the world" (Landsman, 2011, p. 13).Yet it is with self-reflexivity that is necessary, to avoid texts like Leaf litter being read and taught without awareness of the white supremacism and heroism ("we (white people) need to learn to look after it (the land)") they espouse.

Beyond the white "we"
When Leaf litter was published in 2006, Dja Dja Wurrung elders were still involved in the lengthy fight to be recognised as the traditional owners of djandak (Dja Dja Wurrung country).It was not until 2013 that they achieved this recognition (Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, 2021).There is no acknowledgement of this struggle in Leaf litter.It mentions First Nations Australians twice, once in the peritextual "Things to Find", with the yam daisy recognised as "the food of some Australian Aborigines" (p.31) and once in the "Glossary", with the "early Nancy" lily described as "once eaten by Australian Aborigines" (p.35); these references universalise and historicise Dja Dja Wurrung cultures.
This area of what is now known as Victoria was extensively cleared and logged in the gold rushes of the 1800s, with extensive environmental damage, which is not depicted or mentioned in the text.The cross-sectional structure of Leaf litter's images, and their revelatory "power", mirrors the harms done to country as the earth is cut to extract gold.With the settler understood as an extractor in a "booty or plunder economy" (O'Callaghan, 1995, p. 26) then white readers taking aesthetic delight through the exposure of "secrets" of the country feels like just another mode of exploitation in an imaginary of domination.Decolonisation is not just a conceptual metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012); the paper land Leaf litter represents is real land, that Djaara (Dja Dja Wurrung people) have rights over.
How might this all come across to a First Nations student, who encounters this text, described as "meticulously researched" and "perfect in every way"?Its message seems to be that white stories count, white lives matter, and white perceptions and discursive constructions of country are what matter.The insights purportedly provided in Leaf litter visually reference the historical and intertextual ballast of geological and botanical drawings (like those of Joseph Banks, the botanist on Captain James Cook's (in)famous 1778 voyage of "discovery"), and zoological taxonomies and labels.Yet these are superficial compared to Dja Dja Wurrung beliefs that expose the limits Western culture's dominant visuality.As the Djaara website says, telling giyakiki (story): For us, djandak is more than just a landscape, it is more than what is visible to the eye -it is a living entity, which holds the stories of creation and histories that cannot be erased.Our Martiinga kuli [ancestors] looked after this Country and we are duty bound to do the same (Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, 2021.)Bangerang artist Peta Clancy's contemporary photographic representations of the relationship she develops with the Dja Dja Wurrung country bear this out.What cannot be seen, but felt at a visceral and affective level, is just as important as trees, sky and water; see for example, her series of photographic works Undercurrent (images can be accessed via Clancy, 2019), which honours a massacre site now underwater, below a horizon line in the middle of the "page", like Tonkin's.Clancy (2020) is motivated to evoke, without articulating, what is submerged, or "under water"; she considers this to be a metaphor for knowledge about Australia's history that is repressed.
Tonkin, instead, offers a handy hint in the "Things to Find" section: "A magnifying glass will help you find everything" (2006, p. 30).Understanding that First Nations knowledges often escape documentation (Barrett, 2015) immediately puts the lie to this claim and foregrounds a different epistemology, one that would never be satisfied with mere looking.And much of Australia's brutal colonial history has been deliberately hidden or "romanticised" (Carter, 2020); the Uluru Statement from the Heart (First Nations National Constitutional Convention, 2017) calls for a national project of "truth-telling" about history.Pedagogy needs to consider what the "mysteries of a hidden world", in Leaf litter's title, might suggest to First Nations students.

Performative pedagogical imagination: First Nations first
As a first move, the concept of performative pedagogical imagination can come into play.I use the word "play" deliberately here, as postcolonialism calls for playful "possibilities for innovation" (Pieterse & Parekh, 1995, p. 11).Such possibilities go beyond merely replacing a text like Leaf litter with, for example, a First Nations-authored text, or using critical literacy approaches that focus on "the ability to continually ask questions of the text" (Lohrey, 1998, p. 9) rather than the teacher-self.In an act of decolonisation, teachers can recognise the concept of a pedagogical imagination that is culturally constructed and culturally limited, as an aspect of personal and professional subjectivity.
In a further act of decolonisation, and of empathy, the first student imagined by the (white) Australian teacher in designing curriculum (including the selection of texts) needs to be a First Nations student, irrespective of whether such a student is in the class.Designing a unit of work, inventing, selecting structuring, sequencing, timing-work that is described as "programming" (Green, 1990) needs to address this student; language is inevitably addressed to someone (Bakhtin, 1981), as is pedagogy (Ellsworth, 1997).This deliberate addressivity centralises respect and reconciliation in the design process.First Nations come first.Recognising, respecting, supporting, validating and inspiring First Nations students need to be at the forefront of teachers' minds, when selecting texts, for example.It would also be appropriate to reflect on the modality of address in imagining pedagogy, and to take an "ask don't tell" approach that invites dialogue from the outset in curriculum decisions or lesson plans, through an orientation towards questioning, rather than disseminating knowledge.
Yet there is a major risk in this process: that "imagining" and addressing a First Nations student falls short, essentialises and assumes, especially if the teacher has had little or no contact with First Nations Australians.It is merely a contingency that may suffice where other initiatives are not possible, and it requires further reflexivity and honesty about limitations to white imaginations.A better, if less readily accessible and practical alternative, first principle would be to share and discuss suggested texts and pedagogies, with the relevant and/or local First Nations community/communities, including students, parents, families and carers.

Suggestions and strategies
In relation to Leaf litter, there are ways to imagine a white teacher-self teaching, and students learning, that respect First Nations students.There are also ways to follow Haraway's advice to "stay with the trouble" and think about all manner of multispecies interdependencies; to focus solely on race would be to reinstate humanism and its preoccupation with humans above all else, including the many species on which survival on Earth depends.
The following list provides a stark contrast to the Leaf litter teacher notes (Sarandis & Stannard, 2006) provided online by the publisher.These notes suggest, for example, extending study of the text by considering the late nineteenth century Heidelberg School of white Australian landscape artists who were influenced by French art; this would perform a further whiting out of the country.The following suggestions would need to be adapted for different year levels but contain consistent critical and creative principles: that pedagogy needs to address First Nations students first, to be grounded in country and to affirm the resilience, courage and wisdom of First Nations peoples.  1) and ( 2) above.After reading the text, allow this orientation to suggest questions (to be adapted for different year levels).Who is the author?What does the description of her as living "in Castlemaine in rural Victoria" and belonging to "the Friends of the Ironbark Forest" suggest (explore the concept of the "white saviour", although the reader ultimately does not know the race of the author)?Why is the Ironbark Forest endangered?What is missing from this text, based on previous research?Is there an Acknowledgement of Country?Why or why not?Where and how is (Indigenous) language used in the text?Where are some further places it could be used?How are Dja Dja Wurrung people described?How does this attempt to make the reader imagine them?What's missing from this text?Where is there evidence of white, Western ways of thinking and knowing replacing First Nations knowledges (see the use of European seasons and labels such as "daisy" and "lily").And most importantly, who does "we" refer to, when this pronoun is used? 4. Recognise this text as a historical as well as a contemporary document in current use and explore its contexts both in 2006 and today.Map the timeline of the text's creation and dissemination on to Dja Dja Wurrung and broader Australian First Nations history and activism.5. Consider the following statement, from Dja Dja Wurrung artist and curator Natasha Carter: We call Dja Dja Wurrung Country upside down Country because of the rotation of soil as a result of mining.What should have been below now sits on top, and so many of our artefacts can be found sitting close to the surface, instead of the layers and layers that should be on top (in Needham, 2020).
How does this immediately unsettle the layers of earth storied in Leaf litter and the white colonist imaginary of its author?What might a representation of this "upside down" country be like?Sketch some possibilities.Why is there no evidence of this history in Leaf litter?6. Emphasise the specificity of the location depicted in the text, as not just a single tree, but a single instance of diverse country both within and beyond djandak, to avoid the universalising potential of the text which seems to suggest that Leaf litter is the same "in forests all over the world".Use the AIATSIS (2022) map of Indigenous Australia to illustrate the diversity of language groups living on the diverse country.
Use multimodal literacy and research skills to design more respectful and inclusive texts about the country for other places.7. Creatively intervene with this text, rather than allowing it to position the reader as separate and transfixed by awe.Add images and flaps, break down the human/nature binary and the fantasy of pristine country despite the impacts of colonisation, recreate parts of the text mural-size on the walls and consider what aspects of Dja Dja Wurrung and other Australian history and present, too, might be represented there.Bangerang artist Peta Clancy (2019), for example, in returning repeatedly to a photographic site on the Dja Dja Wurrung country, is conscious of "the layering of stories that exist in the landscape and different time frames that overlapped" (in Needham, 2020).Dja Dja Wurrung curator Natasha Carter, in displaying Clancy's photographs, introduces a scar/seam of gold into the installation (described in Needham, 2020), for example.8. Write to the author and the people or organisations listed in the Acknowledgements at the start of the text, including Parks Victoria, the Department of Zoology at Latrobe University, Newstead Natives Nursery, Melbourne Museum, Sky Dancers Butterfly House, and the North Central Catchment Management Authority, and ask them how this text might be different if written today.9. Consider how arts-based practices might facilitate listening to the voices of non-human bodies as well, through tracings and rubbings, overlaid with other text and drawings to think through how the multispecies entanglements of life can be more productively and inclusively represented.Exhibit this work as a form of activism.10.What are other ways stories about the earth can be told, beyond visual representation?
What oral narratives, for example, do you know about the earth?Research, share and create further versions of these stories.
These are just several suggestions of ways this text might be approached that do not simply reproduce its writing out and whiting out of First Nations knowledges and ownership of country.These suggestions fold racial, cultural and ecological literacies into print literacies.However, the question remains as to whether this text in its current edition should be set at all, or whether a more hybrid, collaborative text that blends black, white and non-human voices might be more useful in working towards reconciliation.One example of such a text is Wilam: A Birrarung story (Murphy & Kelly, 2019) which describes the Yarra (sic) River; Lisa Kennedy's illustrations combine both cross sections of the earth, for example, showing a platypus with her babies in a burrow below the earth, and the people and other animals above.The text, written by Wurundjeri elder Aunty Joy Murphy and Riverkeeper Andrew Kelly, seamlessly integrates Woiwurrung words.
As Haraway (2016) suggests, we need to think about becoming with one another, all together, in and as compost, both literally and figuratively, not as elite (white) human observers distinct from nature.How literature can support this is a conversation for Literacy teaching teams and for English faculties, ideally in consultation with relevant elders.

Conclusion: staying with Haraway's trouble
Leaf litter is a problematic text, as a reading of country, and as a "classic" work of Australian children's literature.It ignores the realities of how white colonists have actually not "read" the country at all, or read it only in the limited and deeply flawed ways available to them.Through fundamental ecological illiteracy, white colonisers have stripped the topsoil, removed vital vegetation, increased salinity, misunderstood food sources, introduced pests and plagues and threatened the survival of species.White teachers need to stay with this trouble, and to do this, we need to first be able to perceive it!In this article, I have suggested a First Nations First approach, limited as it may be, as a deliberate intervention in the pedagogical imagination.Through this, as teachers design pedagogy, we imagine ourselves teaching those who are different from ourselves.Specifically, white teachers need to imagine teaching First Nations students first and picture ourselves reading aloud to them statements like "we call this leaf litter" as if they are neutral and inclusive, and as if leaf litter is just stuff.Echoing this, pedagogy that flows on from a reading of the text needs to start with the country.
"Trouble", in this sense, can also mean white shame and guilt, and the reality that it is easier to just pretend invasion, genocide and all their ensuing harms did not happen and lose ourselves, as white readers, in that ecological "sublime" (Massey, 2009, p. 263) Leaf litter effects so well.It is a challenge, while indulging ourselves in apparent respect for the oddkin others of the earth, to perceive the exclusionary force of the white "we", the designated-ancient Aborigine and the (white) detective and scientist, and all figures invoked by this text.This rhetoric is that of supremacism; it "arranges and disperses consciousness to call up and naturalise as the real-as history itself-a "dream"… that once lived out… insinuates domination into personal, family, cultural and political relations" (Sandoval, 1997, p. 87).
Such a "dream" makes it possible for a wide range of (white?) readers including the judges of the prizes Leaf litter has won, to read the following as benign: Animals move to new places too.House mice came to Australia on early sailing ships.They compete with native Australian mice for the same food, so now there are not as many Australian mice left (Tonkin, 2006, p. 13).
The narrator's tone, all factual accuracy and omnipotent distance, provides an extraordinary gloss to not only the extent of the ecological harms house mice have caused and white humans' role in this, but also the tragic echoing of this narrative for First Nations peoples.Leaf litter's blurb addresses the reader and suggests "have fun testing your detective skills", with close examination of the country posed as a cheerful puzzle, not the actual ongoing attempt to find out where the Dja Dja Wurrung people died in massacres on djandak or what the enduring impacts of the gold rushes are, on both human and non-human bodies (Needham, 2020).Leaf litter, with no signs of Dja Dja Wurrung history in its stratified drawings, is not non-fiction, but colonist fiction.Without reference to the damage to the environment degraded by the gold rushes and by colonist agriculture, it is also humanist hero fiction focused on colonists' "achievements".
In a broader sense, white teachers in colonist contexts also need to educate ourselves, aware that our performative pedagogical imaginations are always already flawed and needing to be challenged.Our attempts to open ourselves to ethical encounters with "others", to engage with dignity and honesty, will inevitably be partial and confounded by assumptions and ignorance.Modelling a preparedness to learn with humility is perhaps the best thing we can offer students of all backgrounds.And this learning takes time.
Researching and engaging critically with a text proposed for study, as I have demonstrated here, takes time.Connecting with First Nations knowledges, denied by colonial violence to white people as well as black, takes time.Discussing these matters as a teaching team and faculty takes time.This is the kind of time teachers need built into their timetables.This potentially transformative research, thinking and talking need to be recognised as vital components of "programming" (Green, 2003).They are integral to decolonising teacher pedagogical imaginations, just as they have been identified as integral to environmentally aware curriculum design (Reid et al., 2007).
If education systems are serious about reconciliation, then funding professional learning for teachers, and paying First Nations consultants appropriately to engage in dialogue, also needs to be prioritised.A review of senior English texts set from 2010 to 2019 has found that less than 4% of these texts have a sustained Indigenous protagonist, while only five texts of 360 sets in total were created by Indigenous people (Bacalja & Bliss, 2019, p. 18).It seems that white teachers may have trouble imagining teaching these texts at all.Merely setting such texts as a fix cannot transcend this (McKnight, 2018a).
The research story I have told in this article, about reading and rereading Leaf litter, is about what matters.When a writer tells the story of the earth, or even a story about a story about the earth, they are writing about everything, about the inextricable linking of all entities.Every body matters, including the "bodies" of plants and animals and soil.Yet hierarchical thinking, coloniser thinking, that functions on scientific logics of distance, penetration, investigation and mining the earth for both business and pleasure pretends that this is not the case.This is the thinking that has led to both climate crisis and the fourth great extinction (Braidotti, 2019), and it is thinking that has been naturalised for many.
This article has lifted the flap on white approbation of ecocritical non-fiction texts like Leaf litter.It argues that white teachers can be more inclusive by first considering themselves, and their inbuilt biases.They can be alert to how texts that purport to be inclusive (of non-human others, for example, as in Leaf litter) actually end up excluding, a phenomenon that has been described in educational literature on inclusion (Slee, 2013).Then teachers could take action, to re-make or invent or collaboratively design and teach curriculum that is worthy of the times.This means curricula that, at the least, recognise and value diverse ontologies and epistemologies.There are hopeful synergies in the awareness that First Nations languages tend to be verb-based (Barrett, 2015), and the way Garth Boomer thought of curriculum as a verb rather than a noun (described in Green, 2003).Knowing and doing are inextricably linked, in a performative pedagogical imagination that is brave enough to follow Wiradjuri English teacher Cara Shipp's advice that "true reconciliation will never happen until we break down that invisible barrier between 'black' and 'white ' Australians" (2013, p. 28).For white teachers, the first step, and what matters, is being able to perceive this barrier exists.

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1.As a first principle, start with country, not text.Or start with a different text such as the website at djadjawurrung.com.au.Research djandak (country), giyakiki (story) and Martiinga kuli (ancestors), and the thousands of years of Dja Dja Wurrung culture that both precede and continue through colonisation.Include information about massacres of Aboriginal people on djandak and images of impacts of the gold rushes.Within the school, interdisciplinary support from history staff would be invaluable here.Above all, contact, connect with and work with Dja Dja Wurrung elders, people and texts in any ways possible.Read Dja Dja Wurrung stories about djandak.Find out anything that is known and practised in relation to Dja Dja Wurrung ways of representing djandak.2. Go outside and experience the leaf litter of your own location.Touch and feel it, smell and listen, always with respect, and without removing or damaging anything.Who are the traditional owners of this country?What are the First Nations stories about the earth in relation to the country where you are located, if in a settler colonial nation?3.Only then approach Leaf litter as a settler document, in contrast to what has been researched in (