Writing words-right way!: Literacy and social practice in the Ngaanyatjarra world

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnography of literacy. It is also a study of the social process of learning. It focuses on a remote Aboriginal group in the Western Desert of Australia. Although the last out of the desert (the first wave came out in the 1930s and the last in the 1960s), the Ngaanyatjarra encountered an unusual sequence of relatively benign post-contact experiences and were never removed from their traditional country. A literacy perspective is used to trace the history of the Ngaanyatjarra encounter with the United Aborigines Mission and with the state. This historical perspective underpins the contemporary ethnography. A generational approach is taken to analyse the impact on literacy of differing developmental trajectories-the post-1930s mission-educated older generation, the assimilation-influenced generation who were educated by the state in the Eastern Goldfields during the 1960s and the current generation of young adults who are influenced by myriad intercultural connections. It is proposed that literacy processes cannot be understood simply in terms of schooling or technical skills competence. literacy is also a cultural process and cannot be analysed in isolation from circumstances and conditions that precipitate the development of literacy as social practice. literacy also cannot be removed from the cultural conceptions and social meanings that are associated with reading and writing in historical and contemporary contexts. In this newly literate group we see how oral narrative schemas and speech styles seeped into the incipient literacy practices of the older generation and how young adults are now incorporating intertextual practices drawn from eclectic influences. The generational approach exemplifies how in just three generations a literate orientation has evolved. Some Ngaanyatjarra have incorporated literacy into social practice and literacy is being transmitted as a cultural process to the next generation. Yet not all Ngaanyatjarra are literate and many literacies do not measure up to mainstream standards of competence and this has consequences. The central argument of the thesis is that if literacy is to be maintained, elaborated and transmitted in this newly literate context it must be meaningfully integrated into everyday social practice in a manner that extends beyond pedagogical settings.