Georgina Tsolidis

Transcultural literacy: between the global and the local

In this paper the authors draw on a larger project related to diasporic identification in order to explore the concept of transcultural literacy. They argue that transcultural literacy grows out of border‐crossing dynamics that extend beyond the binaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ as these are lived within and between nations. In this way it is responsive to, and reflects, the various shifts between the local and the global; between place and space. Transcultural literacy is inseparable from social and cultural practices of meaning‐ and identity‐making on the fault‐line between various and often competing cultures. This model of transcultural literacy uses theorisations of space to connect textual practices to the construction of hybrid identities. In so doing, it offers an alternative to models of literacy premised on liberal or neo‐conservative understandings of cultural difference. In this paper, we explore transcultural literacy in relation to current literacy debates.

The (im)possibility of poststructuralist ethnography – researching identities in borrowed spaces

The notion of site is critical to ethnography and provides a sense of spatial stability – somewhere the researcher enters in order to research what is contained within. Using contemporary understandings of space, the author reflects on two studies to explore the (im)possibility of poststructuralist ethnography. The first study was undertaken in a ‘real’ school utilising a multi-method approach over a long period of time. The other was conducted in community-based schools where minority language and culture are taught. Such schools operate on a part-time basis and are often referred to as ‘after hours’ schools. These operate, as if by stealth, in borrowed spaces – schools not in use by their normal classes, during normal school times. The nature of these schools necessitated utilising different research approaches. The almost transient nature of ‘after hours’ schools reinforce temporal–spatial instabilities as critical to understanding site as social rather than fixed.

Home Space: Youth Identification in the Greek Diaspora

This article draws on a larger study on schooling and diaspora using the case of the Greek community of Melbourne, Australia to examine processes of identification of young people with access to minority cultures. The Melbourne Greek community is long-standing, diverse, and well-established. Because of this, the young people involved in this study provide insights into cultural processes not related in any direct sense to migration. In most cases, it was their grandparents or great-grandparents who migrated. Many have 1 parent with no ancestral link to Greece. In this context, the motivations for and ways of expressing Greekness have the potential to illustrate identification as ambivalent. This article explores the centrality of “home” in these young peoples representations of self. Following de Certeau, the argument is made that their everyday experience can be interpreted as an act of “anti-discipline.” As “users” of the Greekness, they are bequeathed through family, community, and schooling; and they use “tactics” of cultural redeployment that allow creative resistance and reinterpretation of both “Greekness” and “Australianness.”

Being a ‘wog’ in Melbourne – young people's self-fashioning through discourses of racism

The Greek community in Melbourne, Australia, is large and has a long history in the city. It is diverse and associated with a range of cultural, social and political structures. It has strong transnational links and in many ways exemplifies ‘diasporic’ in contradistinction to ‘migrant’. This paper focuses on young people from this community, particularly those who attend schools established to promote Greek language and cultural maintenance. In this paper, we examine such students’ explorations of their cultural identifications, most specifically how they adopt the term ‘wog’. This term is complex and its place in Australian discourse has shifted over time. Tracking these shifts and considering them as a context for these young peoples use of the term allows us to consider the processes involved in their self-fashioning. We argue that their uptake of ‘wog’ involves the deployment of irony, given their awareness of its strong association with racism. We are also interested in the potential for womens experience to be silenced through the common association between ‘wog’ and protest masculinities. We argue that these students’ use of the term illustrates self-fashioning that provides insights into the complexities that surround cultural identification at the micro level, including schooling, but also in the broader context of globalisation.

‘After hours’ schools as core to the spatial politics of ‘in‐betweenness’

In this article the authors draw on a larger study in which their overall concern is to illustrate how diasporic identifications develop through a range of scales related to self, family, community, nation and beyond. They consider the Melbourne Greek community as an exemplar of diasporic experience and use it as a case study for their investigation, which is aimed at exploring how transcultural literacies relate to spaces which complicate and enrich identifications. In this article they consider the role of ‘after hours’ schools in the shaping of diasporic identities. These are community‐based schools where Greek language and culture is taught. Commonly, classes are held on Saturday morning or in the evenings during the week. Such schools operate in classrooms that are rented from ‘real’ schools. By existing in spaces that are commonly occupied by mainstream day schools, students who attend ‘after hours’ schools experience a form of marginalisation that is also a right of passage. Here the authors argue that such ‘in‐between’ spaces assist with the formation of ‘in‐between’ identities that are emblematic of globalization.

Simpson, His Donkey and the Rest of Us—Public pedagogies of the value of belonging

At the heart of this paper is an exploration of belonging and how this is assumed to connect with a set of values represented as national. There is a particular interest in the relationship between these values and education. Because the significance of the learning that occurs through the public domain outside educational institutions such as schools is assumed, several cultural texts are examined in order to consider public pedagogies of Australianness including iconic displays such as those associated with the Sydney Olympics and the Melbourne Commonwealth Games. Media reports surrounding the Cronulla riots are also examined as a means of understanding the values associated with non‐belonging. These cultural texts are considered along side curriculum and policy concerned with values education. Through an exploration of the imaginary, the argument is made that in relation to ethnic difference, an hegemonic narrative has remained at the core of how Australianness is represented, despite multicultural incursions and fears about the cultural dissipation associated with globalisation and so‐called postmodern fragmentation.

Australian Multicultural Education: Revisiting and Resuscitating

Australia considers itself as a successful multiethnic society. Since the significant demographic shifts that occurred after World War II, the social cohesion that is accounted for with great pride is often linked to the policy of multiculturalism. Increasingly, politicians are describing multiculturalism as a core Australian value (Sheehan, 2005; Silkstone, 2005). In this chapter, Australian multiculturalism will be considered in relation to imperatives triggered by an increasingly globalized world (Appadurai, 1996; Castells, 1996; Robertson, 1996). Can a social policy that some have described as assimilationist in intent (Castles et al., 1988; Jakubowicz, 1981) foster global citizenship? Can a policy designed to manage intranational cultural difference dovetail successfully with transnational belongings, which are arguably the hallmark of contemporary social existence? These issues will be considered with specific reference to education, which in Australia continues to be emphasized in debates about multiculturalism. Education has been called upon to enact shifting policy emphases related to values, citizenship, and social cohesion. In the context of current debates about the so-called culture wars, the place of multiculturalism within Australian schools takes on added significance, particularly given the nation’s historic reliance on immigration for population growth. In broad terms, the education of Australian school students is divided between government and nongovernment schools, with the latter comprising systemic Catholic schools, and what are known as independent schools. Within each of these sectors there is great variation. Within the nongovernment sector there are elite Catholic and independent schools as well as parochial Catholic schools, often underresourced. The independent sector also contains schools associated with less mainstream ethnoreligious communities. In Melbourne, for example, there are Islamic, Jewish, and Greek Orthodox schools that are full-time day schools. The nongovernment sector also includes schools associated with particular pedagogies including, for example, Steiner schools.

Re‐deploying Techniques of Pastoral Power by Telling Tales on Student Teachers

This paper draws on interviews undertaken with second year student teachers. They describe their motivations for wishing to enter the profession and imagine the type of teacher they wish to become. These student teachers express a desire to make a difference as strong motivation for wanting to enter the profession. This is not uncharacteristic. Here we explore this motivation as possibly illustrative of an uncritical adoption of teacher subjectivities underpinned by notions of pastoral power. The argument is made that current debates that reinscribe the binary between teacher as ‘moral’ and teacher as ‘market‐orientated’ may make teacher subjectivities premised on pastoral power a more intuitive and attractive choice. The desire to make a difference can be worthwhile. However, if read as a non‐reflexive expression of pastoral power, it can also risk consolidating teachers as knowing what is best for students and students as disempowered. In this context, these interviews are used as a means of telling tales on student teachers in order to reflect on our own practices as teacher educators. What do their words tell us about the ways the profession is being imagined in the current social context? How do students’ tales reflect the messages transferred through our own classes? And finally, how can retelling these tales help to create practices that are more responsive to students’ motivations and imaginings and the current professional contexts? We argue that it is important to explore techniques of pastoral power and the potential for these to delimit rather than expand multiple subjectivities within teacher education. Telling tales on student teachers, in this context, is a means of reflecting on our own practices as teacher educators and is an apt beginning and integral part of this redeployment of techniques of pastoral power.

Learning Difference in the Diaspora—Sharing Sacred Spaces

In the immediate post World War Two period, Australian nation building relied on immigration to enact industrialisation. The place in contemporary Australia, of those whose families came from southern Europe during this period is a gauge for the success of an immigration programme that contributed to enormous demographic shifts. The experiences of the Melbourne Greek community represent the place of cultural diversity in the Australian social imaginary. Public pedagogies of belonging and how these manifest through spaces that link with national representations are examined. The Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance is positioned as a sacred space. It is symbolic of Australian nationhood through its links with the ANZAC tradition. Processions to the Shrine occur regularly and young people, through their schools, participate. The Melbourne Greek community marches to the Shrine to mark Greece’s National Day. On these occasions, young people become the focus of commemorative activities, thus the Shrine becomes a sacred space for inducting students into various national narratives. Here the focus is on how such occasions engage with the social imaginary of Australianness and through it, diasporic students’ identification.

Does the New Doxa of Integrationism Make Multicultural Education a Contemporary Heresy

Contemporary understandings of integrationism as the bulwark of social cohesion have been particularly influential, including in Europe. This has both reflected and promulgated a backlash against multiculturalism, which has come to represent a threat subsequent to the events of September 11th, 2001. Cultural difference is taken to be dangerous and multiculturalism with its strong association with such difference is understood to challenge social cohesion. There is a certain irony in this, given the common academic depictions of multiculturalism as conservative. Thus integrationism has become the new doxa, while multiculturalism is decried by conservatives and reformists alike. Multiculturalism, even a liberal rendition, has become a heresy and in this context it behooves us to revisit what is involved. By doing so we can perhaps reflect on the current state of affairs and consider the place of cultural difference in how Australianness is constituted in public discourses, including those related to education policy and curriculum.