This past week saw a story in the media of profound importance. Rather than let it quietly slip by, I want to call it out as remarkable! I am stunned by the bravery of abuse survivor, Catherine Daniels who chose to tell her story to the Royal Commission of Inquiry Disability, Deaf and Mental Health Institutional Care through sculpture.
The appropriateness of doing so is obvious. Viewing the artwork is confronting, harrowing, and deeply moving. They say vastly more about her childhood trauma than the use of more conventional forms of communication.
It is a reminder of the power of the arts in cutting through and as critical literacy.
I see it too as a legitimisation of the arts in a culture that increasingly seeks to privilege science. Isn’t it a shame that these two powerful disciplines have been pitted against each other?
We have a propensity to consider science as the big brother of the arts. There are many fallacies. For example, science is considered dependable, the artistic process not. Science is viewed as cognitive, the arts emotional. Science is considered teachable, the arts require talent. Science is testable, the arts a matter of preference. Science is useful and the arts are ornamental. Science is empirical and the arts a whimsy.
We see such an approach in the advocacy of the Science of Reading and its supporters some of whom are campaigning on the debasement of contextual rich approaches to language acquisition.
Claims that the empirical evidence (read science) supports a Science of Reading only approach is the catch-cry as if contextual rich approaches to the teaching of reading are somehow less empirically defensible. Every academic will tell you that there is research worth paying attention to and there is research worth ignoring. The usefulness of research pertains to whether its conclusions are valid and defensible not that it is simply research.
Evidence-based is a ‘buzzword’ that rarely gets interrogated. It is being used by those that judge the Science of Reading as somehow more truthful, reliable, and appropriate than approaches that embrace teaching to need and the role of context and meaning-making in reading.
There is a vast empirical base around the importance of meaning-making, comprehension, and context in the teaching of reading and in learning per se.
It should not escape the teaching profession that the Science of Reading is strongly supported by Dr Michael Johnston, a senior fellow at the NZ Initiative (formerly the Business Roundtable) who argued this week that we should be restructuring primary literacy in order to improve ‘economic productivity’.
Economic productivity is certainly not the high-tide mark for primary education nor the core purpose of literacy practice in primary school. Leading a fulfilling life and realising one’s own aspirations is a more appropriate counter-narrative.
Stanford Professor Elliot Eisner puts it well, “When the public and politicians are concerned about the educational productivity of its schools the tendency, and it is a strong one, is to tighten up, to mandate, to measure, and manage. The teacher’s ability to exercise professional discretion is likely to be constrained”.
The proponents of Structured Literacy and the Science of Reading have a point in emphasising the need to build the capability of the workforce to teach phonics. It is almost entirely absent in Initial Teacher Education. This needs remedy.
But this is being communicated as the wholesale restructuring of the teaching of reading rather than the strengthening of teachers’ adaptive expertise so our young people do not all receive the same reading diet but one that is customised to need.
The example of the Royal Commission gives us all hope that we can avoid the awful binary arm-wrestle between science and the arts. Science unfairly won this nonsense arm-wrestle a long time ago with the most recent example of politicians’ propensity to want to assuage public concern about achievement through the introduction of the National Education Standards, a measurement regime that saw national achievement rates decline over its lifecycle.
Education is a complex enterprise and complexity never translates well in this world driven by soundbites and claims of magic bullets. The perfect storm of concern about achievement and the impact of a generic National Curriculum is being used to undermine trust in the core of primary education—the teacher as an adaptive expert empowered to deploy the most appropriate teaching strategy to meet the needs of the vastly different young people in their care.
This narrative proposes solutions that cast teaching and learning as systematic, controllable, and measurable—only a science, nothing else!
Teaching is as much an art as it is a science and language acquisition, and the teaching of reading will always be a balance between the two. If there is a pressing and urgent need confronting educators, it is to examine and agree on the cause of underachievement rather than proposing solutions in the absence of a clear and agreed understanding of the problem.
It may surprise you to know that despite the clamber of those who want to talk down our literacy achievement, New Zealand holds a higher PISA reading ranking than the UK which implemented a wholesale phonics approach to reading many years ago.
Ireland which has rejected a wholesale phonics approach holds a higher ranking again than New Zealand. Ireland holds to a balanced literacy approach, encouraging teachers to combine phonics, sight recognition, rhymes and initial letters, pictorial cues, and the sense and meaning of texts. Phonics is embedded in real uses of literacy.
The profession needs to protect adaptive teacher expertise and guard against being slow walked into a future of unintended consequences.
Teaching is not a technical act, it is a human act.
