Poetry and prose as pedagogical tools for addressing difficult knowledges: Translocational positionality and issues of collective political agency

Abstract

In this paper the focus is on the possibilities that poetry and prose offer as pedagogical tools that can both accommodate and address difficult and painful knowledges. The paper presents and analyses poems and prose written by students at a non-traditional secondary school for disadvantaged girls (many of whom identify as Indigenous Australian). Through stories of grief and pain, but also hope and possibility, the poetry/prose book signifies a sense of collective political agency against oppressive relations towards the girls creating new moulds of existence. Contra to dominant approaches to recognising and valuing Indigeneity in schools, these writings represent Indigenous culture as a complex, dynamic and contingent social practice. While it is contended that a valuing of marginalised cultures is an important aspect of cultural recognition, the paper argues that a broader and more critical focus is required in beginning to address Indigenous oppressions.

Full text

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Keddie, A. (2012) Poetry and prose as pedagogical tools for addressing difficult knowledges:
translocational positionality and issues of collective political agency, Pedagogy, Culture and Society
20(2), 317-332.
Title: Poetry and prose as pedagogical tools for addressing difficult knowledges:
translocational positionality and issues of collective political agency
Author:
Amanda Keddie
Research Fellow
School of Education
The University of Queensland
Brisbane, QLD, 4072
Australia
a.keddie@uq.edu.au
Word count: 6976 (including references)

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Poetry and prose as pedagogical tools for addressing difficult knowledges:
translocational positionality and issues of collective political agency
Abstract
In this paper the focus is on the possibilities that poetry and prose offer as pedagogical tools
that can both accommodate and address difficult and painful knowledges. The paper presents
and analyses poems and prose written by students at a non-traditional secondary school for
disadvantaged girls (many of whom identify as Indigenous Australian). Through stories of
grief and pain but also hope and possibility the poetry/prose book signifies a sense of
collective political agency against oppressive relations towards the girls creating new moulds
of existence. Contra to dominant approaches to recognising and valuing Indigeneity in
schools, these writings represent Indigenous culture as a complex, dynamic and contingent
social practice. While it is contended that a valuing of marginalised cultures is an important
aspect of cultural recognition, the paper argues that a broader and more critical focus is
required in beginning to address Indigenous oppressions.

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Introduction
Our stories just need to be told … these are our stories that we need to pass on to our children
so it makes them stronger; this is where they came from and even though it is a negative past,
I think the girls should be able to speak that, and teach it, because that’s (our) culture; what
happened to us and to our parents and to our grandparents...
These words are from Sarah, a young Indigenous woman who is a former student and current
youth worker at ‘Gamarada1’ High School. Gamarada is situated in suburban Australia. It is a
non-traditional school for disadvantaged girls, many of whom identify as Indigenous
Australian. At this school there is a strong focus on positively valuing Indigenous culture and
fostering the girls’ pride in their Indigeneity through, for example, observing and learning
about major Indigenous days such as ‘Reconciliation Day’ and NAIDOC (National
Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) and participating in cultural activities
such as traditional dance, art and customs. As is suggested in Sarah’s words, such recognition
also includes telling the stories of a ‘negative past’. Like Indigenous activist, Jackie Huggins
(1998), it is Sarah’s view that these negative stories ‘need to be told’. They are stories,
however, that are difficult to recognise within the context of western schooling where painful
Indigenous knowledges tend to be either ignored or ‘whitewashed’ (i.e. sanitised) (Huggins
1998; McConaghy 2003). McConaghy (2003, 15) contends that current ways of recognising
Indigenous culture in schools remain:
...largely inadequate to the task of teaching through and about difficult knowledges [as they]
so often slide back into an easy story of binary oppositions, fantasies of benevolence and
inclusion and heroic narratives of success and tolerance.
McConaghy (2003, 11) poses a significant question here in relation to the tendency towards a
sanitising of Indigenous histories within many Australian schools – she asks: ‘Is good
pedagogy and good curriculum only that which consoles - not that which provokes?’ She
argues that ‘our ability to engage ethically with social issues in the present’ requires
pedagogy and curriculum that can ‘bear the weight’ of difficult and painful knowledges – that
can assist us to speak the unspeakable’ (18) in ways that both console and provoke.
Following this, she calls for the development of pedagogies that can accommodate these
knowledges that characterise Indigeneity past and present. She argues that engaging with and
addressing these knowledges is a most pressing issue in western contexts such as Australia
given the enduring disenfranchisement of Indigenous people. Referring to the sense of
political agency in Sarah’s words, such a pedagogy needs to support a speaking and teaching
about negative stories towards creating stronger identities. For Huggins (1998, 133) the
individual and collective political agency arising from the telling of these stories is generated
though knowing that ‘through all this destruction an [Indigenous] identity and power did
evolve’.
In this paper the focus is on the possibilities that poetry and prose offer as pedagogical tools
that can both accommodate and address difficult knowledges. Drawing on the poems/prose
written by students at Gamarada in 2009 that comprise a book entitled ‘Hanging by a thread’,
the paper highlights the girls’ similar experiences of, and struggles against, the relations of
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1"All"names"referred"to"in"this"paper"including"the"name"of"the"school,"the"poetry"book"and"the"participants"in"
the"research,"are"pseudonyms."

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oppression in their lives. Through stories of grief and pain but also hope and possibility the
poetry book signifies a sense of collective political agency. Towards the girls creating new
moulds of existence, this agency can be conceptualised as the girls’ ‘having presence (rather
than absence), as having access to a subject position in which they have the right to speak and
to be heard’, where they are ‘the author of their own multiple meanings and desires’ (Davies
2000, 66; Moreton-Robinson 2000; Tamboukou 2003). In contrast to dominant approaches to
recognising Indigeneity that tend to represent culture as a fixed and authentic entity that can
be reduced to ‘binary oppositions and fantasies of benevolence and inclusion’, these writings
represent Indigenous culture as a complex, dynamic and contingent social practice.
Importantly, these writings reflect the girls’ translocational positionality. Anthias (2002, 277)
describes translocational positionality as recognising:
...the complex nature of positionality faced by those who are at the interplay of a range of
locations and dislocations in relation to gender, ethnicity, national belonging, class and
racialization. A translocational positionality is one structured by the interplay of the different
locations and their (at times) contradictory effects.
For Anthias (2002, 276), this theorising of identity (positionality) as a complex, dynamic and
contradictory process constructed through cultures (locations) and their interplay
(translocation) ‘fissure[s] the certainties of fixed singular locations’ and draws attention to
context and the situated nature of claims. This focus supports a greater understanding of the
specific nature of specific oppressions at specific sites and promotes a critical situational
analysis of all knowledges that marginalise (McConaghy 2000). While it is contended that a
positive valuing of culture through observing Indigenous events and conducting Indigenous
activities is an important aspect of cultural recognition, the paper argues that a broader and
more critical focus on cultural recognition is required in beginning to address Indigenous
oppressions. Through pedagogies that can bear the weight of painful and difficult
knowledges, this focus must acknowledge the translocational positionality associated with
such knowledges towards supporting the creation of new moulds of existence.
Cultural recognition in schools: difficulties, complexities and possibilities
It is clear that culturally responsive teaching and learning environments can enhance the
educational outcomes of students from marginalised groups – relevant and meaningful
learning encounters can be generated within environments that are respectful of, and
responsive to, the funds of knowledge specific to these students. These environments are
especially important in destabilising the mainstream schooling patterns that silence and/or
inferiorise non-dominant culture and perpetuate inequitable understandings of difference.
Creating these environments, however, remains a fraught and difficult task for educators
especially in light of the increasing complexity of the diversity within their classrooms and
the increasing public and policy demands that they respond to this diversity in just and
equitable ways. This difficult task is compounded in western liberal contexts where
transnational migration flows and new mobilisations of group identity have generated a
concern with preserving minority cultures for fear of losing them.
A central difficulty relates to how marginalised culture is recognised. Certainly, dominant
practice within multicultural and Indigenous education (within western schooling contexts)
has tended to deploy cultural reductionism as the predominant frame around such
recognition. Here culture is seen as a knowable and bounded entity that is clearly delineable

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to a particular identity group (McConaghy 2000; Benhabib 2002; Moreton-Robinson 2000).
Practices aligning with this frame tend to reflect what Rasheed Ali and Ancis (2005, see also,
Sleeter 2005; Garcia 2002) refer to as a ‘holidays and heroes’ approach to multicultural
education where there is a superficial engagement or additive approach to addressing
culturally diverse knowledges and identities. Through these lenses assumptions of cultural
authenticity produce and naturalise the ‘other’ – which can have the effect of reducing all
modes of struggle faced by a particular identity group to problems of the ‘cultural’. In
relation to Indigenous education, such reductionism has tended to represent all Indigenous
matters as problems of race and/or racism – isolating these problems from other political
struggles, for example, those associated with class, ethnicity, rurality/geographical location
and gender (McConaghy 2000). This has led, for McConaghy (2003, 17), to a situation where
‘culture has become code for what is difficult in Indigenous education’.
Certainly, this reductionism disregards the complex, dynamic and contingent ways in which
cultures are constructed and re-constructed within particular contexts and historical periods
and in relation to the cultures of other identity groups. Ignoring within group diversity –
including within group relations of domination and oppression – these assumptions set up
binaries such as Black/White, Indigenous/non-Indigenous, traditional/non-traditional,
authentic/inauthentic (McConaghy 2000; Anthias 2002). Within these binaries, ‘other’
cultures tend to be either unproblematically celebrated and idealised or denigrated and
condemned against a dominant white middle class norm. Along these lines, Anthias (2002,
276) cautions against ‘museumising’ cultures – she argues that such stereotyping:
...fixes them in stone and can lead us on a number of false trails. Firstly, it can lead us to over-
celebrating cultures, as though they exist in little boxes and these are to be cherished and
fostered, whatever their contexts and whatever the social practices/outcomes that are
‘claimed’ for them ... Secondly, it can lead us to condemning cultures, particularly the
cultures of those we see as the ‘other’, as ‘different’, as not like ours, those of foreigners, the
‘traditional’ groups as we might stereotype them...
Towards a more inclusive and generative recognition of culture, it is imperative to initiate
theory about minority culture from the social location of minority group (rather than majority
group) experience (see hooks 1994; Mohanty 2003). Minority groups have long been critical
of western imperialist and paternalistic representations of their culture – where they are
objects of a white gaze (Moreton-Robinson 2000; Mohanty 2003; Tuhiwai Smith 1999). To
be sure, fixing and ‘museumising’ minority cultures tends to be the province of dominant
cultures – who have the power to set the terms of the agenda in relation to issues of cultural
recognition (Anthias 2002). Initiating theory from the social location of the ‘other’ goes some
of the way to remedying the misrecognition arising from this inequity. However, it does not
reconcile questions such as whose knowledges and which knowledges should be privileged?
Who can know and speak with respect to these knowledges? and Are these knowledges just
(McConaghy 2002; Anthias 2002)? The project of centring marginalised voices is thus
fraught with complexities, difficulties and uncertainties – it can never be definitive and
requires ongoing reflection and critique.
Responding productively to these questions necessitates an understanding of culture and
identity – not as entities but as aspects of negotiated social practice. The notion of
translocational positionality offered by Anthias (2002) is useful in theorising the interlocking,
shifting and complex positionalities relating to social identities where matters of context and
situatedness, rather than static identity markers, are foregrounded. Importantly, a focus on the

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interplay of social relations/identities shifts attention to addressing problems of ‘hierarchical’
difference and power asymmetries both within and between groups (Anthias 2002).
Importantly, such understandings do not delimit the ways in which culture and identity can be
used as an organising principle of political solidarity – as hooks argues (2003; see also
Spivak 1990), recognising group identity around a specific culture (for example, gender or
race) is an important political strategy for minorities to generate collective agency and
solidarity in struggles against oppression. It is such collectivity that is necessary for
transformations of the self – where individual agency is connected to larger political struggles
against repression (Alexander & Mohanty 1997; Wekker 1997). The key here, as Anthias
(2002, 286) argues, is mobilising collective agency around these struggles rather than a
reductionist identity category – as she contends ‘it is clear that organisation on the basis of
identities appears problematic, while organisation on the basis of struggles and the formation
of solidarity is more useful’.
The importance of such theorising in framing generative approaches to recognising
marginalised culture in schools is well established especially within the critical and reflexive
multicultural education literature (see Banks & Banks 2010; Nieto 1999; Gay 2000).
However, illustrations of how this theorising might be articulated through specific schooling
practices are less apparent especially in relation to exploring difficult or traumatic
marginalised knowledges and experiences. It is contended here that the poetry book at
Gamarada represents a useful pedagogical tool in this regard – especially in reflecting the
translocational positionality of the girls’ disadvantage and the capacity to mobilize collective
political agency against this disadvantage. The next section provides an account of the
research context and processes upon which this paper is based followed by a presentation of
data and analysis associated with the poetry book.
The research context
Established in 1997, Gamarada High School was driven by one woman’s passion to provide
quality education for disadvantaged girls. The school is officially classed as independent – its
supporting body is the Baptist church, however, the school does not explicitly affiliate with
Christianity. The school was initially housed in a three bedroom premise in suburban
Queensland with an enrolment of seven young women (aged 13-16). Over the years, this
number has gradually increased to over 100 in 2009. In 2002, the school relocated to its
current, much larger premise. The students are aged between 12-28 years – most of them
identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Many have experienced educational exclusion
from mainstream schools and come from troubled family backgrounds. Some students are
from violent or sexually abusive personal backgrounds with many in and out of foster care.
Some are homeless and many are living in very undesirable conditions. Many have attended a
number of previous schools and have long been disengaged from education. A number of the
girls are partnered or single mothers. Some who are pregnant have been asked to leave
mainstream schools while others have returned to education after some years. Many of the
students have come to Gamarada disengaged and insecure in their sense of self with a lack of
confidence and self esteem. For many the school is, as the current principal indicated, the
girls’ ‘last opportunity to have a chance of a real education’.
Within the local Indigenous and broader education communities, the school is renowned for
its excellence in supporting Indigenous education. The school is well recognised for its

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‘holistic’ approach to assisting students to overcome barriers that impede their educational
success and for its inclusive practices in relation to issues of gender and cultural identity
(D’Angelo & Zemanick 2009; Malin & Maidment 2003). For example, it offers a crèche for
the young mothers; it liaises and connects students with appropriate community and
government agencies to assist economic, health and social needs; and it provides transport
and financial services to support the girls’ school and work experience attendance. A third of
staff identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander including several teacher assistants/youth
workers, a community liaison worker and a teacher. As noted in the introduction, the school
is committed to supporting the girls’ to develop pride in their Indigeneity and confidence as
Indigenous women.
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The research process
The paper draws on a broader case study of Gamarada that sought to articulate productive
approaches to addressing issues of cultural diversity and marginality in schools. The core data
for this study were generated from in-depth interviews and follow up conversations with six
key Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff (who were responsible for addressing equity at the
school) and three students (two former students and current youth workers at the school and
one Year 11 student). Aside from a few comments deriving from these interviews that relate
to the poetry book (that appear throughout this paper), these data are not the focus of this
paper. The main focus of this paper is the data gathered from the poetry book – which were
derived from a cultural audit of the school. The purpose of this audit was to ‘paint’ a
comprehensive social picture of the school within which to locate the interview data. This
audit involved consulting demographic information about the school and the broader
community as well as information to do with the school’s philosophies and policies
particularly in the area of equity and diversity. The poetry book was an artefact presented to
me as reflecting the key issues of relevance and importance to the student body.
The poetry and prose within the book are the core data presented in the following section.
While some of these writings are abbreviated for the purposes of this paper (for brevity and to
foreground the conceptual and theoretical issues under analysis), they are reproduced as they
appear in the book. The writings were analysed drawing on the theories outlined in the
preceding sections. Anthias’ (2002) notion of translocational positionality drew attention to
the complexities of the girls’ disadvantage – as arising from locations of gender, class, race
and youth and their interplay. These lenses revealed the significance of context and the
situated nature of oppressions, and generated a focus on the dominant themes in the girls’
lives, namely, relationships with families and intimate partners, that both undermined and
supported their sense of wellbeing and agency. Thus, the poetry book was interpreted as
supporting a better understanding of the specific nature of the girls’ oppressions rather than
fixing such oppressions to issues of Indigenous culture. Following this, the book was
analysed in relation to its capacities to act as a useful pedagogical tool for both addressing
and moving beyond difficult knowledges. The poems and prose were theorised as enabling
the girls to speak the unspeakable in a context that provoked (in the telling of traumatic
experiences) and consoled (in the sharing of these experiences) (McConaghy 2003). Against
this backdrop, the analysis foregrounded the capacity of the poetry book to position the girls
with agency – with access to subject positions in which they have the right to speak and be
heard (Davies 2000) – and to foster a sense of collective solidarity where individual agency
can be connected to larger political struggles towards transformations of the self (Alexander
& Mohanty 1997).

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These theoretical lenses framed the study’s approach to issues of researcher positionality. As
a white researcher attempting to tell the stories of Indigenous girls, I was acutely aware of my
‘imperial’ gaze and the potential of this gaze to misrepresent these stories (Moreton-Robinson
2000; Tuhiwai Smith 1999). The political agenda and theoretical tools framing the data
analysis subjects this gaze to critical scrutiny towards a more authentic engagement with
Indigenous priorities and concerns.
The poetry book: Hanging by a thread
The school’s focus on poetry and prose was designed to support the students’ cultural
integrity and political agency. This was an outlet for the girls to express, explore and share
their emotions about particular issues in their lives. Self-writing along these lines has, of
course, been a crucial theme in feminist explorations of the subject (Stanton 1984;
Tamboukou 2003; Moreton-Robinson 2000). Such writing can support a disruption of
positions of marginality and a negotiation of new spaces from which to understand the self
(Benstock 1988; Moreton-Robinson 2000; Stanton 1984; Tamboukou 2003). Tamboukou’s
work (2003), for example, illustrates how women’s recollections of their past can provide a
context for them to understand and challenge the very discursive relations that constitute
them. Through this process, women can resist their marginal positionings and create new
moulds of existence. Marginalised women’s stories have worked in this way to disrupt taken-
for-granted ‘truths’ about race and gender and to give voice to alternative knowledges
(Moreton-Robinson 2000; Mirza 1997; Alexander & Mohanty 1997; Mohanty 2003). One of
the teachers spoke of poetry as a useful tool to support the girls to understand and deal with
some of the issues arising from their troubled backgrounds, as she explained in an interview:
I think writing, as a tool, has a means to get things off your chest and out of your system … it
can also be a means of inspiring change and of healing … it doesn’t necessarily mean you
have to show anybody, you know, it can be something you’ve shared with yourself that you
can put away. But if you want to, it’s also a means to sharing your ideas and your feelings
with other people.
As a vehicle for sharing, healing and inspiring change, one of the school’s major projects
every year is the compiling of a poetry, prose and art book. These books are professionally
published and are distributed to the school and wider community. In 2009, the three (former
and current) students interviewed within the broader case study were responsible for creating
the theme, title and artwork for the book around a ‘Dreaming’ story. Sarah (one of the former
students) described this story in an interview as about connecting the girls to a journey of
becoming strong women that symbolised the ‘cycle’ of the students’ ‘journey’ at Gamarada
where they ‘better their culture by bettering themselves’:
There’s a really meaningful story behind the book. Ms A (original principal) was given an
egg from an Elder; it’s an emu egg, and an emu is women’s business and it connects two
journeys and our emu – she’s a strong woman and - well anyway, the story goes that when the
emu – she’s a baby when she comes here and she’s stepping out into the world, and then she’s
going through all these journeys, and her journeys are learning and caring for others around
her – she’s guiding our journeys ... throughout the poetry book and is making us stronger
because she’s been through all these events in her life … there’s a lot of negative influences
in the poetries but it’s only made them stronger … and the emu, she doesn’t walk backwards,
she can’t, so she moves forward … and it’s kind of like the emu that could fly, and at the end

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of it all she takes a big leap and she wants to reach the stars … and you’d never think that was
possible.
Dreaming or Dreamtime stories represent the traditional ways in which Indigenous
Australians understand the world, its creation, their existence and their knowledge. This
Dreaming story is significant in the sense of collective agency it engenders around journeys
of struggle – where the girls can draw on the many ‘negative influences’ in their lives to
become ‘stronger’ and further to open up possibilities where they ‘reach for the stars’. In this
Dreaming Story, the girls are constituted with agency and the capacity to change their
circumstances (Moreton-Robinson 2000; Alexander & Mohanty 1997). This story was an apt
framing for the seventy works of poetry and prose in the 2009 collection (most, but not all,
written by Indigenous girls) entitled ‘Hanging by a thread’. In these writings the girls
expressed their deepest thoughts about issues of importance to them. The girls’ relationships
with their families and intimate partners revealed a common alliance around struggles against
oppressions associated with their gender, Indigeneity, class and youth.
The poems and prose reveal many disturbing accounts of pain and grief, but also hope and
possibility, in the girls’ lives associated with their gendered, classed and racialised identities.
As such the poetry book might be understood as a generative pedagogy for examining and
addressing difficult knowledges – a pedagogy that both provokes and consoles (McConaghy
2003). The writings provoke in their revealing of traumatic and dangerous knowledges while
also consoling in the sharing of this knowledge. Along these lines, Sarah referred to the
poems (in an interview) as a way for the girls to connect with and learn from each other;
gaining strength from each other through ‘sharing their stories and the burden of their pain’.
The opening quote captures Sarah’s understanding of these stories as the Dreaming stories of
her generation that ‘just need to be told ... to pass on to our children so it makes them
stronger’.
The writings in the poetry book articulated many struggles in relation to an interplay of
gender, poverty, race and youth oppressions. Struggles against gender oppression were
evident in the girls’ stories of sexual abuse and family violence. In one of the poems entitled
‘bed time terror’, for example, a girl recounts being sexually abused by her father, while
another tells of her father’s friend who ‘raped and molested’ her ‘for almost all’ her life.
Another girl writes: ‘if I could change the world, I would get rid of all the paedophiles’. For
another, her life was changed when she first saw her dad hit her mum and then ‘it wasn’t only
mum, it was me and my sister too’. In other prose a gender oppression theme characterises
the girls’ anger directed towards their fathers for being absent, alcoholic and drug dependent
– as one girl writes ‘I lost my father because he thought drugs were more important than his
own children’. For another girl her life changed in Grade Three when she and her family
began ‘running from the man who screwed our life’ while in another poem a girl expresses
anger towards her father – she writes that she will ‘never’ love or forgive her dad ‘ever, ever
again’ after being evicted from her home following family violence and being forced to
‘sleep in parks’ with her mother and siblings. In some of the writings, anger was expressed
towards boyfriends in relation to pregnancy, as one girl writes:
When I found out I was pregnant, I was so sad and very scared. I didn’t want to have this
baby. I didn’t think I was ready to be a mum. All I could do was cry. Then all I could do was
be angry at my partner. I screamed and yelled abuse at him.

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In many of the writings circumstances of poverty and disenfranchisement intersected with
these issues of gender oppression. The following example illustrates this intersection in one
girl’s account of the uncertainties of foster care following her family breakdown and the
cycle of generational violence that began with her great grandmother:
This life was given to me. It isn’t the life I chose. But now I’m fixing it. I didn’t ask for my
life to detour around the Department of Child Safety. I didn’t ask for my life to be so
confusing, having to worry about where I am staying tonight because my placement has
broken down. So because of someone else’s stuff up, my life is now stuffed up … when my
real dad cheated on my mum and they broke up, she decided to go out with a dumbarse. Then
both of them tried drugs and that was when my stepdad hit us. I then got taken away from
mum when I was 12 to the Department of Families.
In several other poems, the girls write about suicide as a form of escaping from the violence
and isolation in their lives, as one girl writes:
She was haunted by her past, the yelling and the beatings. She used to lie awake and hear her
mother screaming. She decided to end it all with a knife across her wrist. I wonder if things
would be different if she knew she would be missed.
In other poems issues of Indigenous oppression are a theme, for example, in a poem entitled
‘outcasts’, a girl writes: ‘put aside the black roses and tears, don’t beg for life, beg for death.
Dig up the grave because this is the end’.
The issues explored in these writings illuminate the complexities of the relations of
disadvantage in the girls’ lives arising from the boundaries (or locations/dislocations) of
gender, poverty, race and youth (Anthias 2002). The poetry and prose thus reflect the girls’
translocational positionality – they highlight the complex nature of the girls’ positionality in
relation to a range of locations and dislocations. In these writings the girls’ positionality is
shaped by dis/locations of gender (and oppressions of sexual abuse and early pregnancy);
gender and youth (and oppressions of family violence perpetrated by their fathers/step-
fathers); poverty (and oppressions of material deprivation); and race (and oppressions of
cultural disenfranchisement). As such, the writings illustrate the girls’ critical awareness of
some of the ways in which their disadvantaged positionality has come into existence through
these various social processes – an awareness that is crucial in supporting their capacity to
create new moulds of existence (Tamboukou 2003). The poems/prose thus draw attention to
context, the situated nature of oppression and its production in complex and shifting locales
(Anthias 2002). For instance, the accounts of homelessness and suicide are located within a
broader context of gendered (and generational) family violence, drug taking and poverty. In
these accounts oppressions occur through the girls’ dynamic relations with family and
intimate partners in contexts and situations and are shaped by discourses associated with
gender, class, youth and race. Importantly, difference through these lenses is represented in
relation to hierarchies and asymmetries of power in relation to the girls’ subordinate
positioning within these discourses – rather than in relation to one specific identity marker.
Responding to these hierarchies in ways that promoted the girls’ cultural integrity and
autonomy was embedded in the school’s holistic approach. Of course, the traumatic
knowledges revealed within the writings such as suicide and physical and sexual abuse
requires that the school engage in particular state sanctioned reporting protocols. This was

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one element of the school’s multi-dimensional approach that worked alongside a garnering of
financial and social support for the girls from community and government agencies.
Such broader assistance is crucial in maximising the generative potential of the poetry book
as a context that can support the girls’ capacities to think and act themselves out of their
oppressive positionalities. Certainly, the former; thinking beyond these positionalities was
central to many of the writings in accounts of hope and possibility. Just as the girls’
relationships with their families and intimate partners revealed a common alliance around
relations of oppression, these contexts and locales were also a source of inspiration, hope and
determination in relation to overcoming these oppressions. For example, in relation to the
poem featured earlier where one girl refers to the violence, drugs and reliance on community
services in her life – she goes on to write:
This is a cycle that started with my nan’s mum, then my nan, then my mum. But I’m stopping
it from coming to me
Similar resolve to create more positive futures was apparent in relation to prose that referred
to the girls’ children and their future children:
...if I ever have children of my own, I would make sure they have a good father who didn’t do
drugs and wouldn’t hit them or me. I would make sure my children were happy and safe.
I am a 20 year old mother to a beautiful little one year old. I do it on my own but I love it
because she will be growing up with me. She won’t be growing up with violence like I did …
I am going to teach her about right and wrong. I am going to teach her to have respect for
other races and cultures and people of all different shapes and sizes. All I can say is I love my
girl.
In these sections of prose there is a sense of presence and agency in relation to disrupting and
moving beyond the oppressive dis/locations of gender, youth and poverty identified earlier. In
the context of family the girls position themselves with agency – as the authors of more
positive futures for themselves and their children (Davies 2000). The writings reflect
possibility and hope that new non-violent, ‘happy’ and ‘respect[ful]’ moulds of existence can
be created (Tamboukou 2003). In another piece of prose – an adjunct to the earlier writing
about one girl’s anger towards her boyfriend in relation to her pregnancy – this sense of
possibility and hope was manifest in an alternative perspective she expressed later in her
writings when she states: ‘in a way, I’m glad this baby unexpectedly came along. I feel like a
better person’. In further prose, family as a context of support and agency was evident for
another girl who writes: ‘it’s a great feeling when I’m with my family. I don’t have a mum
and a dad for family. My family is my boyfriend, my brothers and sisters and my boyfriend’s
family’. In another poem, relationship to the land, so central to the lives of many Indigenous
people, was a source of agency and possibility:
My land and we share it, observing our beautiful land, responsible for our land and the way
we treat it, indigenous to my land...
For others, thinking beyond oppressive positionalities was more individualised in relation to
constructing the self in a positive light:

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I look in the mirror and what do I see? A beautiful girl looking back at me. Long hair, blue
eyes and a womanly body. I love the way she looks. Bright, happy in every way. Thank my
stars, I am who I am.
My future is so bright now, it’s almost blinding. Now all my tears are happy ones and I soar
through the heavens. Nothing will stop me now.
Wake up and realise, get out and live your life, strive to be the person that you see in your
dreams, connect the dots in your life, make it strong at the seams, build positively into your
armour to protect yourself from the sword of negativity, respect yourself and create your own
liberty.
In these more individualised writings possibility and hope are again reflected in the girls
positioning themselves with the capacity to construct positive futures where they have
presence rather than absence and access to subject positions in which they have the right to
speak and be heard (Davies 2000). Here new moulds of existence are about self-confidence,
beauty, happiness, aspiration, realising dreams, strength, respect, positivity and liberty.
Against the backdrop of the girls’ critical awareness of some of the ways in which their
disadvantaged positionality has come into being (in the earlier poetry and prose snippets),
these moulds of existence offer alternatives to the oppressive relations constituting the girls’
positionalities.
The capacity for the transforming of these relations is supported by the collective context of
the poetry book – as noted earlier, transformation of the self necessitate collectivity
(Alexander & Mohanty 1997). The book’s focus on sharing the burden of the girls’ pain
under the umbrella of the Dreaming Story engenders a collective sense of agency from
journeys of struggle that, as Sarah noted, ‘makes us stronger’. In this sense, the book can be
seen as promoting an alliance and solidarity around the girls’ collective struggles but also
their collective strength and agency. Such alliance and solidarity can serve as a catalyst for
organising against the dis/locations of gender, poverty, race and youth that interplay to
contribute to the girls’ positions of oppression and disadvantage (Alexander & Mohanty
1997; Anthias 2002).
Conclusion
Creating culturally inclusive schooling environments for Indigenous students is a fraught and
difficult task for educators. Dominant practice continues to deploy cultural reductionism
where Indigeneity tends to either be unproblematically celebrated and exalted or denigrated
and inferiorised against a white middle class normative frame. The urgency of creating more
productive and sophisticated strategies for addressing issues of cultural recognition is clear in
the enduring disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples. Schools must engage ethically with
this disenfranchisement towards creating more equitable social worlds. In this paper, the
importance of a critical approach to cultural recognition was advocated – an approach that
acknowledges the translocational positionality of Indigenous disadvantage, addresses difficult
and painful knowledges and supports the creation of new moulds of existence.
The poetry book at Gamarada was theorised as representing such an approach. In contrast
with dominant practices of recognising Indigeneity – that tend to fix and museumise culture –
the poems and prose reflected the complexity, fluidity and contingency of Indigenous culture
as it interplays with other locations such as gender, class and youth. Articulating the

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translocational positionality of disadvantage, the poetry book was presented as a useful
pedagogical tool for both examining and moving beyond difficult knowledges. To be sure,
many of the stories of grief and pain in the girls’ writings necessitate broader social
interventions of support and sanction than that possible through the processes of poetry/prose
writing, sharing and reflection and it is clear that such a pedagogical tool in delving into the
sorts of traumatic knowledges that featured within the girls’ stories must be supported by
these interventions. Notwithstanding these important considerations, the poetry book was
seen to be a generative forum in its capacity to provoke but also console through the telling of
stories of oppression and hope in the girls’ lives associated with family and intimate partner
relationships. Rather than emphasizing a particular identity/location, these stories drew
attention to the contexts and situations that both undermined and enabled the girls’ sense of
wellbeing and agency. As such they reflected a situated account of Indigenous femininity –
supporting a better understanding of the specific nature of the girls’ specific oppressions at
specific sites.
Organised around struggles against oppression, the poetry book promoted a sense of
individual and collective political agency – while in this forum the girls are clearly authors of
their own meanings and desires – they share similar struggles and hopes. As such the book is
a forum for the girls to, as Sarah noted, connect with, learn and gain strength from each other.
Sarah’s view that this forum will enable the girls to ‘share the burden of their pain’ towards
becoming ‘strong Indigenous women’ who speak up and teach about their cultural past –
reflects possibilities for collective political agency and solidarity. These possibilities are
evident in the capacity of the book to support the girls’ critical awareness of some of the
ways in which their disadvantaged positionality has come into existence and critical action in
transforming this disadvantage. This capacity is significant in linking struggles for individual
agency with larger political struggles against oppression – a linking that can engender unity
and networks of female support that can promote personal and collective thinking and acting
beyond racialised and gendered identities (Huggins 1998; Alexander & Mohanty 1997).
For Alexander and Mohanty (1997) transforming these positions requires both a critical
engagement with the everyday issues of domination and marginalisation in women’s lives as
well as engagement with collective emancipatory practice. The poetry book represents a
context where such critical and collective engagement can be fostered. It contains, as Sarah
noted, the Dreaming Stories of a new generation that, while difficult and traumatic, need to
be told.

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