An Interview with Frances Devlin-Glass
“Int” refers to Mary, the interviewer and “FDG” refers to Frances Devlin-Glass
Int:	I am speaking with Frances Devlin-Glass, an Associate Professor in Literary Studies in the Faculty of Arts. Welcome Frances.
FDG:	Thanks Mary
Int:	How would you describe your philosophy of teaching and learning and how have your views on this been shaped?
FDG:	I think I would start by saying what I am not and then move onto what I am. I certainly don't believe in fill them up pedagogy, although being a little anal retentive I tend to want to have a lot to fill them up with, but it is certainly not how I see myself…I like to be well briefed in my teaching area. The second thing I am not or I don't aim to be or aim not to be, is a guru or… I don't like teacher led pedagogy. So I am totally opposed to things like Mr Holland's Opus where Mr Holland somehow owns the product of his teaching labors, or Dead Poets Society, I have a particular loathing for. The Robin Williams character drives me… I think is an abuse of the powerful position that teachers hold. So what is it that I believe in then? I think I am pretty strong on the provisional nature of all learning and all forms of knowledge, so I want students to know how they know, to be very conscious of how they have come to know what they know, where they stand epistemologically, and I am really interested in them tracking how their understanding changes over time and how understandings of particular issues change over time. So an awful lot of my courses have an historical basis because that is a particular obsession and that is built over into my teaching as well. I think it is really important too, if one of the things that a university education does, I think it should be encouraging students to problematise their own culture and who they are themselves, their own sense of their identity. That is what I would see myself as being about.
Int:	In light of what you have just said, we are interested in the Yanyuwa and Metacogs websites that you have been involved in developing. Could you explain your rationale for developing them?
FDG:	Again I would have to go back to the history if that's okay. In the early 1990s I was involved in a very, very exciting and interesting team project. It was designed to be the beginnings of a linguistics major. It was basically an Australian course but it was defined fairly broadly, it was called Discourse and Culture. It was really like an Australian cultural studies course and it had lots of different involvements from linguists, historians, educationalists and literature people We had a module in that called… it was the early 1990s and that is significant I think, it was called Living in Aboriginal Australia. We decided that every text in that module had to be aboriginal authored and that was possible after 1998. There had been a flurry of probably guilt inspired publications, authored by aboriginal people. It was really the first time in Australian literary history that that was even possible. It was in that period that somebody brought along a really fascinating film, which the Yanyuwa people had made for themselves, called the Buwarrala Akarriya/Journey East. What it did was tell the story of a song line that had not been walked for twenty years and it was aboriginal people trying to explain to themselves, for the sake of the young boys who were involved in that walk because being Yanyuwa had dropped out of sight as a result of western education, so they were trying to educate their own. It happened to be a film which made it into the outside world, won awards and things. We showed that to our students. I thought it was an incredibly rich product but it did not make an awful lot of sense to them. Then the idea emerged that we would value add to it in some way. We would find out what we could about the Yanyuwa and put it alongside, so it was mainly anthropological stuff, historical stuff, put it alongside how they were all wanting to represent themselves, and get students to work at that cultural interface between the white scholars and the Yanyuwa community itself. We did that with a view to producing a CD-ROM. This is the beginning of explorations into how we could use the web and we had to put a little bit of it together before we could even talk to people in the community about doing this. We did put a little bit of it together. When the Yanyuwa community saw it they said “Wow! We want that for us and for our kids. Forget about your students”. So that is really how it began. CD-ROM turned into a website and we separated the stuff that we wanted to do with it for our students from the main part of the website. It became an archive on the web of the public parts of the Yanyuwa culture, became a mini museum on the web, which our students are free to use and the Yanyuwa people are very keen to have us use.
Int:	So it is much bigger than a teaching and learning resource at Deakin?
FDG:	Yes, but it does have a very strong teaching and learning end. There is another little site which sits on DSO called, at the moment… it's had various manifestations for purposes of different courses, I've used it to teach a feminist course in spirituality so it has had a sacred push or orientation. …at present I'm using it under the name of Metacogs 2 for first year students where we are looking at Yanyuwa meaning-making in terms of mythology and land. I can see it being pushed in many different directions in the future. There are three other people involved in it, three different universities. Two people at Queensland, one of whom is about to go to Monash and one person at ANU who've all contributed their material and fortunately for us the research that they have done is quite recent, 1980s onwards, the earliest is 1980s, so it is done with postcolonial frameworks in mind and it is very acceptable to Yanyuwa people to have that work available to a wider audience.
Int:	In respect to your students, what was the assessment approach that you used to help them interrogate the website?
FDG:	The website itself puts together knowledge in a Yanyuwa way and for students to understand that is quite a big journey. The website requires active connecting of the bits if a European student is to make sense of it. One of the ways that we get them to interrogate the website is through the Metacog site and by making comparisons with their own culture. So, when we're talking about performance we look at a western genre, which is the closest to it. Although it might seem a bizarre comparison, it actually works fairly well. That genre is opera, except that the huge differences between what happens in an opera house and what happens in the open air at big, important sites in the Yanyuwa country, are obviously very different. Audience participation is utterly different in those two cultures. But just even raising the question is important. Another way in which we do it is to look at the Yanyuwa song cycles, for their similarities and differences with European song cycles like the Arthuriad where it is many intertwined stories, interlocking stories, and the ways in which that kind of body of mythology that is utterly different from modern forms of story telling. So there are links that we can make into our own culture and of course the similarities are as important as the differences. They're the kind of bridges that we see ourselves as building through Metacogs, that process of building those bridges through questioning, wider reading and so forth, probably more important than assessment tasks actually. I certainly don't tell them how to think about the site but direct them to different parts of it and suggest ways in which they can make links between that part and another part of the website and their own experiences as westerners in a very different culture.
Int:	What do you think is the learning value of the different digital media and what are the cross cultural implications of media choice?
FDG:	We've had to be really careful on the main site, the Diwurruwurru site, to make sure that the language isn't academic. It is pitched at the lower end of secondary school. Linguistically, that has been a very important thing. You don't want academic speak happening in the main site. That can happen in Metacogs quite happily, but certainly not on the main site because what we keep in mind very, very, strongly is that… in putting the main site together, we are the servants of the Yanyuwa site. They own the site, there is no question about that. As soon as it can be mounted in the Yanyuwa country with a Yanyuwa webmaster, the happier we'll be. That is still a way off because of educational disadvantage in the town. Now having said that about language issues, it's also very clear to me from working with these people, that oral and visual materials are terribly important. So we put interviews on the site. We would like to have a lot more video but of course that's very costly. We have some video on the site and certainly lots of pictures. Pictures are really important for this community, but mostly the older people, who are very revered, they're quite keen to have on site. Pictures, we have been really lucky with. Of course, that could change at any time. I think too for our own students it's good to have a variety of ways in which they can learn and the evaluations we have done make this fairly clear too. We're dealing with a more visually literate generation than I certainly was. I didn't have the access to films and TV that these kids have, that students today have I mean, so as many forms of information input as you can contrive and of course the web is ideally placed to do that. I think it is valuable to meet a range of learning styles.
Int:	What have been your experiences with the online environment? If you could talk both in terms of the teachers' experiences and the learners' experiences, what impacts do you think your teaching has had on students' learning?
FDG:	We have done evaluations at different levels with this material and it is pretty clear to me… I was looking over them just the other day and it is fairly clear to me that on the whole it has been an extremely positive experience for the students, but it is also clear to me that it works a lot better with senior students and post grads than it does with the under grads.
Int:	Why do you say that?
FDG:	Well we have got it placed at first year, fairly early in first semester at the moment. They are dealing with so much and this is challenging material. It is also something that my colleagues find hard to get their heads around. I am not sure that it ought to be placed in a team taught course for that reason. I think it needs to be driven a bit and for instance, I have spent a couple of years away and during that period people went around it rather than teach it. So that is a difficulty. It was extremely difficult in the production phases. I was so lucky to have as my web designer and right hand, Adrienne Campbell, because as a web designer she is fantastic, very visual and practical and her heart was fully in this project. I was so, so fortunate to have her. She was also extremely good at understanding where the people we were pitching it at within the Yanyuwa community were coming at the material. She really helped to get the picture at the right level for those students. The thing that such a website I think actually does is, and this is again why it is difficult to put in front of first year students, I am happy to do it, but it is the kind of thing that destabilizes their views of their own culture, in pretty powerful ways. A lot of them haven't thought very deeply about cultural difference or they have done it in a liberal minded, new age way. Ours is a culture which does not think about the sacred in the same way and it is unavoidable when you are talking about this stuff. The other thing I find is, and this comes up in the evaluations too, that a lot of middle class students have a very impoverished sense of Australian history. So you're having to do a lot of that through the site and no personal experience of aboriginal culture, generally speaking. In fact until I was involved in this project, and I started it in my middle age, I'd never met an aboriginal person in anything like an intimate way. Suddenly you are living in the second most remote place in Australia under the most appalling conditions of poverty and you are faced with all the challenges of remote aboriginal communities.
Int:	It is really brought home to you.
FDG:	Absolutely, and we try to get a balance there on the website too. This is an old proud culture. It is a culture that nobody expected to survive and here they are with a website with epic films, with TV programs, commandeering any form of media communication they can in order to ensure that their identity has a place on a world stage.
Int:	Frances, from your experiences, what have you learned about designing and constructing content and working effectively online, within and outside DSO?
FDG:	One of the things a web interface offers that DSO doesn't is a much sexier, visual interface. The standard DSO interface is pretty, jolly boring. The most important thing of course is the content, not just the packaging obviously, but the packaging is important, particularly for those who learn visually. The other thing I think is important is that whatever materials you have got up there… I have been really shocked by the amount of ongoing work that a website is. Being the kind of person who is productive in print based ways, as a researcher for instance, once you have done a print base, then it is done, it's out there and you might want to change it but of course you can't. One of the powerful things about website is that you can, it can be responsive, it can be made up to date very easily, but it is a huge amount of work. It's something you have to factor in to your work program. The other thing I think has happened a lot over time for me is, and this is something I want to learn a lot more about in relation to website and DSO in general, is I think I've got a fair bit more to learn about encouraging students to work collaboratively. I have recently spent a year in Japan where students learn hugely better in groups than they do as individuals, and I've observed some amazing forms of collaboration there. I'm sure that there are people around the ridges and some collective wisdom somewhere, about how to do collaborative stuff online, and that's the next direction I want to push the Metacogs stuff. At the moment it asks questions designed for individuals, whereas I think there is a lot to be gained by having a group of students work on a single problem. It doesn't happen easily or quickly and particularly, as it is not culturally natural for us, it probably has to be… careful ground work prepared for it, if it is going to happen at all in this culture.
Int:	How might you further develop the learning materials?
FDG:	You mean on the Diwurruwurru site itself…
Int:	Do you have some ideas about how you might want to…
FDG:	Yes I do, I have a very exciting idea and it remains to be seen whether it has institutional legs because it is quite challenging and difficult. When the website was first set up, we had this really wild and exciting meeting on the phone. We linked up all the academics with the Yanyuwa community. They were sitting on a conference phone in the school and they developed, in no time flat, a mission statement. I couldn't believe the speed with which it was done. Again it is collaborative, consensus, mode of operation which operates in that community too. One of the things they wanted to do was to do what they do at Queensland University, which is to come down and teach our students directly. Anyway, when it came to… I got national approval from the two Heads of School and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts that this would be a good thing to do and that we could find ways of having the Yanyuwa women teach into other programs of the university as well. That was all fine but it fell in a heap because I went away. But when I was back up there in September, the elders who I am working with made a counter offer which was far more exciting, I nearly fell off my perch. What they said was “why don't you bring students up to the Yanyuwa country?” and it was so obvious and so brilliant. Lots of practical difficulties, it's 3,500 kilometres away, that's three and a half days of traveling before you even get down, that's without stopping, or else you are going through Darwin and it's still a day and a half traveling. You can make opportunities of those. You could do lectures on the way, you could do some very interesting cultural tourism, museums and stuff on the way. But once in Borraloola, what I would love to happen is to have little teams of students working collaboratively developing web pages, little web pages in consultation with people, “how do you want such and such an issue to be represented on your website? Let's work together and get something up”. I think it is a perfect opportunity, it's a way of getting some real cross cultural communication going on and it's a way of keeping the website going and hopefully building… what you are wanting to do is to build expertise within the Yanyuwa community as well.
Int:	So it's a two way thing?
FDG:	Absolutely, we serve their needs and they help us to understand them, which they badly want to do. This is not a separatist community, it's a community that is very much reaching out to a wider world wanting to be understood, wanting to have their identity issues up there and out there. I think it is a fantastic opportunity that they are offering us and I hope that somehow the university will find a way of running with it.
Int:	Okay Frances, do you have any other comments you want to make?
FDG:	One thing that I would want to say…one of the real difficulties of the website, and this is something I have to be very careful about teaching, is that because of the way it is organized and it is organized in ways that the community wanted it organized, is that the most important stuff is at very deep levels on the site. You only get to what deeply matters, which is Country, after a lot of probing of the site, and the site design suggests that. If you look at the index or the page after the Yanyuwa index page, the contents page, then you will see that Country's a central big button, but you can miss it as a button because it is so much bigger than all the other buttons. That is to do with how they make meaning too. Once you get into those deep layers then you can go back and refresh your understanding of what dreamtime narratives actually…how they are performed, where they are performed. The fact that these narratives are yoked securely to place, is something I don't think we have a deep understanding of in the west. We mouth platitudes about aborigines being owned by the land, but I don't think we really understand what that means, and that is one of the major issues that the website tries to tackle.
Int:	And that's the power of it?
FDG:	Yeah, yeah, I hope so.
Int:	Thanks very much Frances.
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