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February 18, 2008
Ilana Snyder, the author of The Literacy Wars: Why teaching children to read and write is a battleground in Australia, has an op-ed in in the Canberra Times on the public debates around literacy. This literacy--it stands for the ability to use language in its written form----is not placed in the context of the way that computers, are destabilizing the authority of the printed word, or the way that digital technology taking us into a new world where the emphasis is on an awareness of other people and our expanded ability to contact them to discuss issues and get help.
Snyder says that debates in the media over different aspects of literacy education about the teaching of grammar, reading and the canon, about the place of popular culture in the curriculum and the role of testing, about the use of new technologies and the introduction of a national curriculum are not new. However, in recent years the debates have become so heated and emotional that to characterise them as the literacy wars captures their force and intensity. She adds:
In their attacks, the conservative critics have accused literacy teachers of lowering standards by using child-centred approaches that do not provide children with a strong foundation in literacy learning. They have sought to discredit a literacy curriculum they believe is afflicted by relativism, fragmentation and a fixation on contemporary social issues. They have poured scorn on the teaching profession and institutions of teacher education, accusing them of damaging traditional educational values. Their mission has been greater emphasis in schools on cultural literacy, the literature of the Western canon and traditional values.
In response, literacy teachers and educators have argued that we can't turn the clock back, nor should we want to. There have been enormous changes in the world of ideas since many of the critics went to school in the 1950s due to science, but also due to feminism, multiculturalism and social justice. These ideas cannot be ignored and giving attention to them in the literacy classroom does not mean that there is no place for the enduring values and traditions of the classics and Australia's cultural heritage.
She observes that at the heart of these battles are competing definitions of literacy, and that this conflict around definitions contributes to the debate.
Traditionally literacy has been thought of as a cognitive ability. Being literate has been seen as a matter of cracking the alphabetic code, word formation skills, phonics, grammar and comprehension skills. By contrast, more contemporary views see literacy as a social practice that takes place in different settings not only the classroom, but also the workplace and the other locations of everyday life. Reading or writing always involves reading or writing something with understanding.
The lack of a single, correct definition of literacy that would be universally accepted, helps explain the conflict between the conservatives who want to preserve valued traditions and the literacy teachers who are caught somewhere between the legacy of the past and the imperative to prepare children for the demands of the future.
Snyder is right here as the concept of literacy goes beyond simply being able to read; it has always meant the ability to read with meaning, to interpret texts and to understand the different perspectives and diverse meanings.
The 'demands of the future' takes us into digitial literacy and visual "literacy". The capacity to read images questioning whether literacy is the right word. Digital literacy' would be more than cracking the alphabetic code, word formation skills, phonics, grammar and comprehension skills that implies a Victorian model of schooling.The Internet requires the ability to access networked computer resources and use them because the Internet has grown from a scientist's tool to a worldwide publishing and research medium open to anyone with a computer and modem.
The Internet model diverges from the conservatives Victorian model of education in that it places greater responsibility in the hands of the individual. Rather than being spectators - information consumers - we become Internet users, people who discover and evaluate content before deciding how to put it to work.(i.e. we're content creators). Content on the Internet is not a static thing. Instead, it is fully interactive, and it requires that we understand it as a combination of all the traditional forms of media, and several other forms that change the way we seek out information.
Secondly, personal publishing means that there is no peer review, no filtering, etc. Therefore we have a need for critical skills perhaps not taught explicitly previously. It requires a set of core competencies dependent on critical thinking. The most essential of these is the ability to make informed judgments about what we find on-line,to assemble diverse knowledges from different media and idea caches
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Gary
I haven't read Snyder's The Literacy Wars. All I've read are read are comments in the media, and the Australians strong attack on the text. But she does seem to be looking back to a pre-digital age.