This account is extracted and abridged from one of a set of case studies of environmental education in
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Australia (Robottom et al., 2000).2In 1995, there were political moves in Australia to establish a ‘National Curriculum’. In this project we wrote case studies in a number of settings, focusing on the importance of local resources and local contexts. It seemed to us at the time (and still does) that environmental education is particularly dependent on local circumstances if it is to be education ‘for’ and ‘in’ the environment, and not just ‘about’ the environment. Alice on the Line was of interest because it was history-based and used the built environment, being a local project in which schools recreated the lives of the Bradshaw family who manned the Telegraph Station in the early 1900s.
The way this case was written places the observer at the centre of the story. In naturalistic enquiry, I believe, the case imposes its own authority and the researcher has to follow, even when the story might seem to be headed in unexpected directions, including here aspects of the local community and its history.
I have selected sections that cover several types of data – reflective description, reported observation and an interview.
What you will read here is a short extract from the case without the context of policy development and curriculum theorizing to be found in the full report.
This can only give a brief taste of the style and not the evidence to evaluate its effectiveness.
First images
Among the dot paintings that represent the landscape of Central Australia, a common motif is the arrange-ment of irregular shaped blocks, each of dots of a particular colour, spread across a whole canvas to give a jigaw like effect. The explanation usually given for this effect is that these images are essentially aerial views of the landscape and the different colours represent different plants and shrubs. The intricate mosaic patterns are caused by the traditional practice of patch burning, for the burning of small areas on a regular basis allowed small animals to seek shelter from fire in nearby unburnt areas, for new plants to grow after the fire and for a complex ecosystem to emerge in which there was movement and balance between recently burnt, unburnt and regenerating areas.
The decline of these traditional practices, and the loss of knowledge needed to sustain them, has led to the emergence of different fire patterns. In 1994 a fire burned unchecked in the Tanami Desert for several months, destroying an area the size of Victoria. It did
so because of the loss of the pattern of regular localized fire which used to accompany small groups of aboriginal people as they travelled through the desert. Instead, a large fuel burden accumulated and, once started in such an isolated area, the large fire could only be left to burn.
Flying into Alice Springs and looking down on a landscape that looks more and more like a dot painting than seems believable, it is difficult to resist seizing on these contrasting images of fire regimes as an appropriate way of depicting the contrast between small localized curriculum developments and the emergence of the National Curriculum. And to extend the metaphor, to see the need to attend to each class and each school in terms of a cycle of renewal and replacement as an urgent and vital task. Before we lose the knowledge to do so.
Bradshaw Primary School
The contrasts within Alice Springs are remarkable.
Looking down the tree-lined suburban streets around Bradshaw Primary School, it could, almost, be any-where in the mainstream of Australian suburban life.
But lift your eyes a few degrees and there, immediate-ly behind the green of the school oval, are the McDonnell Ranges, a wall of sandstone, orange-red in the midday sun, not a hint of a plant or of any colour but the bare rock, looking like the backdrop for a stage set . . . But once inside the building, school life takes over. Several teachers said to me how inward-looking the building was. Once you are inside you could (almost) be in a primary school anywhere . . .
Some of the children in Paul’s class have been out observing wallabies in the wild, doing transects in their habitat but especially watching how the wallabies behave and how they move. Around the class are drawings, maps, pieces of writing – a lot of research.
Some of the girls explain how, with Bronwyn’s help, they worked up dance steps from the observations they had made of the rock wallabies, how they looked for patterns and sequences in the movements that they had observed, and then tried to copy the tilt of the head that they had noticed among the wallabies when they were disturbed. Bronwyn is a dancer and singer who has just spent some time back home between work in Sydney and America.
Paul tells me a little about the children. Two of the girls, he explains, a white girl who grew up on a mission and her friend who is aboriginal, both speak Arrente, and have begun teaching the language to
children in grade two. They have been looking for a dictionary and Paul gets them to fax an agency he knows which will tell them what is available and where they can get it.
It is a remarkably talented class; some of the other children are good athletes, others academically able.
Their lives seem full of promise but Paul is aware of the shadow that looms as they face adolescence. This is especially true for aboriginal children who will encounter the risks of binge drinking, teenage preg-nancy and cultural demoralization. One of the first signs of these problems, Paul explains, is a feeling of embarrassment. Recently one of the girls, usually outgoing and extrovert, brought some indigenous plants into school, bush tucker, but instead of showing them to the class, only showed him when he was in the next room, alone at the photocopier, perhaps because of what others might say.
For the moment though the children have that feeling of being a special group which you sometimes find in a successful grade six class. I discover there is a history in this. Previously many of these children, especially the aboriginal children, attended another school in the town, Traeger Park, an aboriginal school that no longer exists. In 1991 the government announced the school was to close, arguing that ‘it was not in the long-term interests of Aboriginal children, who have to learn to take their place in the wider community – they have to learn to compete, and they are going to compete with white children and white adults’ (Northern Territory Education Minister Shane Stone on ABC Radio, 28 July 1991).
Despite resistance from parents and others in the community and a Human Rights Commission report, the school was closed.
When people tell this story (not just the teachers but the town librarian and various other people in the town) one of the things that you cannot help notice is the distance they put between Darwin (where the government is located, far to the north) and Alice Springs. Not just the obvious physical distance, but in their intonation and phrasing there is an undeniable sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’.
First reflections: the recent history of environmental education in Alice Springs Lesa Cornock, the librarian/teacher at Bradshaw Primary School, told me about Alice on the Line. This project was based on the Old Telegraph Station, a collection of buildings just north of the town which,
at the turn of the century, was the home of the Bradshaw family. The Telegraph Station was a key relay in the overland wire which linked Australia to the world when long-distance communications were limited to transmissions in morse code. In the 1960s Doris Bradshaw Blackwell, who as a child had lived at the Telegraph Station, wrote an autobiography of her childhood which described day-to-day life on the Station and which became the main source document for the Alice on the Line Project.
The project was encouraged and promoted by the Conservation Commission, the organization respon-sible for the Telegraph Station site, especially through the involvement of its Education Officer, Stuart Traynor. In a small town, a single project of this kind can have a significant impact, and one of the long-term consequences of Alice on the Line has been to disrupt any assumptions that social history and environmental education are divisible. Teachers in Alice Springs talk of social education and environ-mental education as closely associated, even as vir-tually interchangeable terms . . .
Stuart Traynor’s story
Stuart’s name comes up in every conversation. Over the last twenty years he has been closely involved with all the key environmental education projects in Alice Springs. The ‘best and worst’ thing he ever did, he says, was get involved in starting up Alice on the Line.
‘Best’ because it has had a bigger impact on Alice Springs schools than anything else he has ever been involved in. ‘Worst’ because stress of this kind, plus another major project he began in 1988, ‘turned his hair grey’.
I asked Stuart the question that Paul and Lesa had raised earlier: ‘Does the Living History approach risk exposing children to racist views and attitudes that are no longer acceptable?’ Stuart responded:
The Bradshaws were unusually enlightened for the time. Thomas Bradshaw succeeded Frank Gillen, who had a great interest in anthropology and had established a climate of enlightened attitudes and good relations with the local Arrente people. One of Thomas Bradshaw’s responsibilities was to act as the local magistrate and protector of aborigines.
The record shows that he tried to be fair. If the case was built around Barrow Creek Station (where two whites were speared in the 1870s), ‘it would be a lot harder’ to sustain this case.
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Part of the aim of the programme is to reveal what attitudes and values were at the time and to help children explore these and come to terms with them. So confronting racism is an important part of the curriculum, which of course some teachers will find easier to do than others. On the whole, teachers are not trained to handle values and feelings in the classroom, and many find this difficult. They are good at teaching skills and knowledge, but values and emotions are more difficult.
Role play was intended to be the key teaching strategy for the programme. For instance at one point two aboriginal girls are arguing in the laundry and a copper of hot water is knocked over (not really!) badly burning one of them on the arm. (. . .) The telegraph officer (using morse code) asks a doctor for medical advice (. . .) The family comes with ironwood root (Acacia estrophiolata) (. . .) to administer traditional healing. This sets the scene for an exploration of alternative values.
Stuart sees the need to explore attitudes and values as a gap in the conventional curriculum. What Alice on the Lineoffers is the opportunity to ‘feel’ history rather than just learn about it. The project found that some teachers did this very well but others were content to engage more superficially. Some taught ‘only the historical facts, not getting into attitudes and values’.
This he feels is where the real impact on children lies – ‘I hadn’t realized what an effect it had until my own daughter, now in year 7, went through the programme and I saw how excited and involved in it she was’.
But some years on Stuart sees other questions:
Seeing your own children going through school, you realize that schools cannot do everything you would like them to do. I have come to see that what they do very well is give children basic knowledge and skills. This means that some things
are best approached by educating the family, or the child in the context of the family, rather than the child in a class. We began to do this in Alice on the Line, because each class had to involve four adults, who were usually parents. But I began to see the need to develop this approach to community education more systematically.
. . . At this point the extract stops rather than ends.
There is not enough information here to begin thinking about an ending or conclusion or to draw lessons from the case. To do this requires more description, more comparison and contrast with the other cases and a better explication of the curriculum problem. What I have tried to provide is a sense of the narrative structure of naturalistic enquiry. This is what I take ‘putting the researcher squarely at the centre of the research act’ to imply in practice. Pursuing the logic of enquiry, understanding the nature of the case and relating it to the research question all takes more time and more space than is available.
Notes
1. The term ‘naturalistic’ has not always been used in the way that we now associate with naturalistic enquiry. In the past naturalism was used by some to imply the unity of science and the appropriate-ness of the scientific method for the study of the social world, and humanistic phenomena were contrasted with natural phenomena and human-istic researchers were contrasted with naturalhuman-istic scientists (Znaniecki, 1927; Znaniecki, 1934).
2. I have used the real names of people and places, with their consent. Alice Springs is a one-off town that is hard to anonymize and if you live and work there then there is little privacy for those in public positions as everyone knows everyone else.
Annotated bibliography
Becker, H. (1998) Tricks of the Trade. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
This is a delightful book about ways to think about research. Becker says that in a certain way the book is a homage to the people who taught him, people like Everett C. Hughes and Herbert Blumer. The book covers such things as, imagery, sampling, concepts and logic. It is also a book about how to solve research problems.
Coffey, A. and Atkinson, P. (1996) Making Sense of Qualitative Data. London: Sage.
This book offers practical advice on the many ways to analyse qualitative data and construct research accounts.
Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. (1995) Ethnography, 2nd edn. London: Routledge.
This is a key explanatory text covering the principles and practice of ethnography. It is an excellent and accessible review of the methodological territory of contemporary ethnography.
Schatzman, L. and Strauss, A. (1973) Field Research: Strategies for a Natural Sociology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
This is a short, easy-to-read book which focuses on practical strategies for doing field-based enquiry, including a consideration of the self as researcher.
Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Van Maanen says of Tales of the Field that it is about ‘how one culture is portrayed in terms of another in an ethnography’. The book explores the narrative conventions and literary devices associated with writing about culture. It identifies three main types of story: realist tales, confessional tales and impressionist tales.
Further references
Anderson, N. (1923) The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Barker, P. (1973) ‘The life histories of W.I. Thomas and Robert E. Park’, American Journal of Sociology, 79(2):
243–60.
Becker, H.S. (1999) ‘The Chicago School, so-called’, Qualitative Sociology, 22(1): 3–12. Also available at::http://
home.earthlink.net/hsbecker/9
Becker, H.S., Geer, B. and Hughes, E.C. (1968) Making the Grade. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Cooley, C.H. (1926) ‘The roots of social knowledge’, American Journal of Sociology, 32(1): 59–79.
Cressey, P. (1932) The Taxi-Dance Hall. Chicago: University Chicago Press.
Denzin, N. (1971) ‘The logic of naturalistic inquiry’, Social Forces, 50(2): 166–82.
Fielding, N. (1993) ‘Ethnography’, in N. Gilbert (ed.), Researching Social Life. London: Sage, pp. 154–71.
Glaser, B. and Strauss, A. (1968) The Discovery of Grounded Theory. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Goffman, I. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Gold, R.L. (1958) ‘Role in sociological field observations’, Social Forces, 36(3): 217–23.
Hammersley, M. (1989) The Dilemma of Qualitative Method. London: Routledge.
Junker, B.(1960) Field Work: An Introduction to the Social Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lincoln, Y. and Guba, E. (1985) Naturalistic Inquiry. London: Sage.
Lindner, R. (1996) The Reportage of Urban Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lohman, J. (1937) ‘The participant observer on community studies’, American Sociological Review, 2(6): 890–7.
Kluckhohn, F.R. (1940) ‘The participant-observer technique in small communities’, American Journal of Sociology, 46(3): 331–43.
Reis, H. (ed.) (1983) Naturalistic Approaches to Studying Social Interaction. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Robottom, I., Malone, K. and Walker, R. (2000) Case Studies in Environmental Education: Policy and Practice.
Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press.
Shaw, C. (1930) The Jack Roller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Thomas, W. and Znanieki, F. (1918–20) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 5 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Vidich, A. (1955) ‘Participant observation and the collection and interpretation of data’, American Journal of Sociology, 60(4): 354–60.
Vidich, A. and Lyman, S. (2000) ‘Qualitative methods: their history in sociology and anthropology’, in N. Denzin and Y. Lincoln (eds), Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd edn. London: Sage. pp. 37–84.
Wolcott, H. (1995) The Art of Fieldwork. London: AltaMira Press.
Znaniecki, F. (1927) ‘The object matter of sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 32(4): 529–84.
Znaniecki, F. (1968 and 1934) The Method of Sociology. New York: Octagon Books.
Zorbaugh, H. (1929) The Gold Coast and the Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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