Encountering Literacy with/in Country

Abstract This article traces encounters with Country to reorient understandings of what it means to be literate. As a settler Australian educator, I am led by the leadership of First Nations voices that seek to challenge the dominance of the European schooling system. I map three stories of teaching and learning on Country, passing through the stories as analytical sites to re/view how students and teachers can reconfigure ways of speaking, listening, reading and writing in order to connect to Country, and therefore community. The research is approached through postqualitative inquiry, understanding stories as entanglements of humans and more-than-humans that surface tensions, possibilities and provocations for literacy in environmental education. This article moves beyond literacy-as-acquisition to that of literacy-as-relationality with/in the places we live and learn. Storied reflective practice of what it means to be Country-literate is proposed as a method of professional development for non-Indigenous educators and their contexts.