One - The word on the street
Power to the Poor poster on a main road in my suburb today.
The word on the street….
I was driving my youngest (17 year old) daughter to the bus stop this morning, on the day of one of her senior English exams, and we spotted an A4 poster on a lamp post. It said Power to the Poor in capital letters with a smaller header saying Silent No More. No image. Just black words on a white page. It was not there yesterday (we drive the same route everyday at 7.30am) and I’ve never seen anything like it around our reasonably affluent suburb before. But the lamp post is outside a public hospital, opposite the Centrelink building where people on welfare are made to queue up and fill out enough paperwork to make even the most dutiful public servant weep. I said out loud: How did that text get here, now? I wonder who printed it and put it there? Whose voice does it privilege? What does it say about people in my community/city? My critical literacy lens is always on high alert (insert eye roll by daughter).
I was transported back to 1988 when my inner city area was gentrified in preparation for Expo ‘88 when the world came to town and our streets had to be “cleaned up”. Mass evictions occurred as rents soared, deliberately flushing out the poor, migrants, the elderly. They protested, of course, and my friends and I joined them in trying to reason with landlords to not take vulgar advantage of the opportunity to make big money from international visitors needing accommodation, but to take care of the needs of the most vulnerable in our own backyard. Power to the Poor resonates with the 1960s slogan Power to the People used by some young American groups (Black Panthers) to protest domination of society by the rich. Pro-democracy students used it to protest US involvement in the Vietnam war. Thatcher criticised the use of it in the mid 1980s under her regime which introduced a crippling poll tax.
So these words have a history and invoked certain meanings for me. If I had a classroom of young English learners today, I would be asking them to notice such posters around their neighbourhoods - or graffiti on bridges, local newspaper headlines, fliers, television ads, community notices - for traces of what’s going on locally; compile a weekly collection of language from around their ‘hoods. Rich discussions can follow about the power of language to make people (motorists like me) stop and think about how life might be for someone else. The aim is not to take sides with “the rich” or “the poor”- rather arbitrary designations these days given one who is rich can quickly become poor and vice versa; think how online influencers are suddenly earning a fortune - but to probe happenings in our communities (indicated through multimodal signs - language, symbols, graphics - the stuff of English teaching) through some critical reflection and responding.