Songlines of Learning: The Establishment of Shearwater The Mullumbimby Steiner School as a Centre of Place Conscious Education

Abstract

This thesis, 'Songlines of Learning: The Establishment of Shearwater The Mullumbimby Steiner School as a Centre of Place Conscious Education' is about the intersection of dual crises of people having lost their core capacity as place-makers and their relation to place in post-modern society. It examines the moment where (auto)biography and ethnography cross paths with educational theory and practice to derive potent alternatives, and employs an archaeology that leads back to the primordial and forward to new potential. The education of children is at the centre of this research because it provides the opportunity to examine how these all-important intersections occur, and how the living relation to place and place making can be recovered. In this sense the thesis is also a story about finding a new way of seeing, about finding or rediscovering identity in relationship to landscape, in this case to the Australian landscape.