From the Margins to the Centre: Reflections on the "Past-Present-Future" of Literacy Education in the Academy

This paper engages with the central theme of this special issue, “From the Margins to the Centre,” as a particular kind of narrative that occupies the imagination of literacy educators in the academy, particularly those who are located in the “centre,” but whose experience ironically finds them “pinned to the margins” (Stevenson & Kokkin, 2007) of mainstream teaching and learning. Writing primarily from an Australian perspective as an educator experienced in attempting to embed authentic literacy education into the curriculum (from the centre) (Skillen, Merten, Trivett, & Percy, 1999), as a researcher attempting to make sense of the nature of change agency this requires (Percy, 2011a, 2011b), and as an academic leader developing policy at the institutional level in an attempt to legislate embedded practices into existence (Percy & Taylor, 2015), in this paper I briefly explore the seduction and frustration of the “margins to centre” narrative and provide an overview of a selection of literature that illustrates the ways in which we have imagined this trajectory. I then discuss how these narratives can be seen to be bracketed within an era where the discourses of standards and skills became privileged over other ways of thinking about education, and on the one hand created a space for the literacy educator to emerge, but on the other hand tended to derail our more progressive desires by their capacity to invoke their twin discourses of decline and transparency. The paper ends by providing one brief and new example of how we are attempting to put the discourses of standards and skills to work through policy and course review procedures at one Australian university.