Learning phonics helps children decode texts, plausibly passing as readers due to their ability to read aloud and and score well on phonics tests, but it does not necessarily open the way for them to understand or enjoy what they are reading, or enter into that immersive and imaginative world of ideas that form one of the main reasons we value reading so highly in the first place.
I wonder whether some approaches to digital literacy, that focus on defining a set of competences with tools, are in danger of following the same path. Children may be able to plausibly appear to be digitally literate; they can write a class blog post, share a photo on a social networking site, google countless images of the latest games console. But to be (digitally) literate is not just about being able to write a blog post; it's about having something to say and someone to say it to. It's about voice – whatever medium we choose to express that voice in.
It's a common place to talk about digital literacy as digitally-mediated communication as if what we communicate is somehow secondary and just 'happens'. This is what writers and poets can teach us: what we read and what we have to say matters.
Working in schools with young people to help them express their voice sounds like something everyone can agree on as A Good Thing. But taking this seriously is actually a pretty radical thing to do. The recent 'neverseconds' blog storm-in-a-teacup attests to that.
Being literate, digitally or otherwise, is not a neutral, value-free set of technical competences, but is deeply embedded in our lives and cultures. This relates to a 'critical' view of literacy where we need to ask: “what kinds of literate practices, for whom, fitted for what kinds of social and economic formations should be constructed and sanctioned through teaching” (Luke & Freebody, 1997, p. 2).
This takes us far beyond just learning to 'do your sounds'.
Trying to step back and think about phonics and the purposes of reading. Entirely agree with your summary of the argument, and also agree that a similar question can be raised about other modes of literacy such as use of digital media. In order to avoid the nonsensical Tom and Jerriness of what are the most effective teaching methods - phonics, good, real books bad, to parody Orwell - we require the different perspective that something like critical literacy provides. It seems to me that phonics offers a necessary but insufficient way to describe the totality of what we mean by reading, and in which many of us would want to privilege the importance of communicative purpose and meaning. From this privileged perspective, one can understand why a curriculum develops into the study of texts and the producing of texts, the growing capacity to discriminate between texts, to articulate one's understanding and subjective response to them, and to develop versatility and creativity in producing and communicating in various genres and modalities. Phonics is merely a method of teaching the associations between sounds and letters and is such a tiny piece of this wider perspective that the enraged disputes about what kind of teaching of phonics is superior seem as absurd as the disputes between Big End or Little End egg-cracking in Lilliput. As most sociocultural theorists argue, what we teach children when we teach them phonics is not just the technical decoding but what we value and are concerned about about reading. So if we over-privilege decoding and make 'learning your sounds' the part of literacy that is charged with our anxieties and competitiveness, then it loses its role as a tool, a means to the culturally far more significant ends of meaning and communication, and however well our children 'perform' in tests of reading accuracy and fluency, we have missed the point and have taught them to miss the point too. Street, when he made the distinction between autonomous and ideological literacies was helpful here since he embedded the conceptualisation of literacy as about observable, measurable skills and psychological processes (autonomous) WITHIN the wider ideological conception of literacy that, like Luke and Freebody, included the social and cultural purposes and literacy practices that are also learned and valued in our communities.
ReplyDeleteSo... perhaps what we are identifying are similar tensions within education generally about what it means to teach children to become 'skilled practitioners within a culturally valued practice' between a focus on methods of improving observable sub-skills of reading and being able to wield those skills with a sense of personal ownership of what any individual might do with them, when what a skill is might mean perfect scores on a phonics test aged 5 or the skill/s employed in applying the phonic system - however developmentally imperfectly - to understanding a picture book or writing a story for your toy dog.
I have a picture in my mind of how one might need, certainly, to know the properties of a tool - a sword - its heaviness, its sharpness, what happens if I do this (thrust) or this (jab), the need to keep it clean (experience? Dad told me to?) can you dig up weeds with it (yes, but Dad says you shouldn't use your sword for that because it will get blunt and anyway it's for killing) i.e. that as I learn the properties of the tool I also learn what it's for and its significance for my social group. So the distinctions between skill and meaning/purpose made by those who hold to a model of 'autonomist'literacy (no relation to the anarchists, hilariously the opposite)don't really hold up but the problem with them is that they teach children that those distinctions are real.
My feeling with digital literacy - and you will have a much better feel for this than I do - is that there seems to be an attempt - perhaps it is how education always and ever decides what to teach - to appropriate something that began as social changes as our society began to engage in mass digital literacies - perhaps to 'control' it, to make children's experiences of it more equitable, to make pedagogy more in line with how our society makes and understands knowledge. But in the process it converts the unstoppable and uncontainable way in which digital literacy is practised into its hard to change structures of teaching and learning. To make this a coherent argument I'm drawn to applying Bernstein's concepts of vertical and horizontal structures of education but I'm rambling so I'll stop now!
ReplyDeleteOn OpenDemocracy website
ReplyDelete'Migrant Hope' versus political distrust in the UK
"...we hear some examples of how technology has helped meet the support needs of other marginalised groups, such as a mobile phone translation app for Bengali speaking parents to use at parents’ evenings, designed by a secondary school girl."
Bravo, secondary school girl. Practical, positive, useful.