Literacy and environmental communications: Towards a 'pedagogy of responsibility'

In this paper I take up the challenge framed by Martusewicz and Edmundson (2005) and ask whether teachers in primary school classrooms can work to produce a sustainable community through pedagogical practice that links literacy and the environment. Within the framework of the River Literacies project, I outline a call for the development of an eco-ethical consciousness among the population as a whole, and ask how teachers can foreground place-conscious curriculum in their work to encourage their students to examine local knowledges and relationships within their communities around problems that are of concern to the community itself. Questions of situated pedagogy and teacher accountability in terms of literacy learning in relation to the environment are raised.