Rural English Classrooms and Aussie Battlers - senior secondary students living out the myth
Submitted by:
Susan M. Hopkins
Abstract:
Rural Australian students’ minimum literacy levels tend to be three times lower than those of their urban counterparts, mirroring a broader global issue of inequality. This presentation explores my research with a small group of senior rural Victorian students and foregrounds rural student voice - an unfamiliar presence throughout the research literature. There is a tension between rural students’ varied home lives and the literacy demands of school, particularly the kinds of academic literacy encountered in senior English classes. Many students wrestle with the differences between home and classroom discourses, and where some move seamlessly across this divide others find it more difficult to navigate the shift from the discourses of their rural lives to the more formal, abstract language demands of senior English classrooms. This paper draws on this wrestling and considers the language experiences rural students; their ways with words, their lives and the ways their identities are shaped by experiences in the metro-centric English classroom. In focus-groups and interviews, the discourse of the ‘Aussie battler’ was prominent – noticeable through oft-repeated terms such as ‘work’, ‘effort’ and phrases such as ‘being productive’ – all of which invoke the idea of students as labourers. Connections are drawn and explored here through the lens of Australian colonial myths and the ways these intersect with neoliberal ideology.
Presenter biography – Susan Hopkins
Susan Hopkins is a rural Victorian English teacher and PhD candidate in the School of Curriculum Teaching and Inclusive Education at Monash University. Her interests centre on the impacts of high stakes literacy, dominant discourse requirements and rural students. Her recent research considers the ways in which spatiality, literacy and rural student identity connect.