(thoughts from the general session of the National Writing Project convention in Nashville today. Education )
Not long ago, I read an article about education in Weekly Standard that used quote marks to drip sarcasm on phrases such as "educator" and "creating knowledge" and "constructing understanding." I suppose that the same author, mocking trendiness in education, would mock the National Writing Project (though it's remained consistent in its principles through more than thirty-five years' growth) and would also snicker at the mention of "new literacies" in an address by Katherine Yancey, the chair of National Council of Teachers of English.
But the "constructivist" theory of teaching is no goofy innovation. When I was a student at Oxford, I attended just a few lectures, about which my professors were apologetic. To them, lecture was the unwelcome innovation, borrowed from American universities -- to have an expert stand up for an hour to present knowledge. The better model, used for centuries, was the tutorial, in which the experienced scholar converses with the younger one, considering questions about what they've both read. The tutor assigns, questions, listens to answers, and critiques those answers, challenging the student to articulate his opinion more clearly, changing the student's understanding in the process. In case the "instructivists" miss the point, that time-honored method is to use questions, various readings, and the students' own words to "construct" knowledge. Research, essay-writing (essay meaning "trial"), and debate -- these are all instruments of the best education because they engage the students in acquiring information, weighing opinions, and synthesizing it all. That's reading critically, the real aim of education.
"New Literacies?"
So what's to fear in "new literacies?" Yes, it's a clumsy phrase, knowing that "literacy" never had a plural form before, being literally the acquisition of "letters." Worse, from the point of view of the scoffers, the "new literacies" include images, sounds, and mixed-media.
But the old literacy was pretty limited in scope. It's only recently that a sizable proportion of the world's population could read at all, and more recently still that a sizable proportion had access to inexpensive books; and it's only a small proportion of that population who ever did read critically.
I suppose that the Weekly Standard guy thinks that time spent in front of a screen is time better spent in front of printed paper. But what inherent quality do books have to make them superior to any other "literacy?" Readers can take time to read, mark, and consider with a book, not so easily with video. Also, the writer must construct a book with logic to make sense, left to right, page to page, building an argument or story with some kind of sequence and meaningful connection from one paragraph to the next. Yes, it's true: interactivity disrupts all that.
But what proportion of adults ever learned to read critically? It was always small. And a small proportion of books were ever so good -- Mein Kampf springs to mind as the example of a tome without reason.
The era of books may have been a brief interregnum between times when learning and communication involve images and sounds. Long before the books, there were oratory, drama, graphics, song, and open conversation, all with the potential to influence citizens' hearts and minds.
The essential thing is, as always, that the largest possible proportion of our population learn that a "critical view" simply means that the viewer is aware of a message's form and context as well as its content.
Constructing Knowledge?
Let's acknowledge that critical readers are always choosing what they value most from the text (or picture, or movie, you name it) according to their own interest, prior knowledge, and intentions -- "constructing" their own meaning of the text.
Another speaker (Sheridan Blau, 28 years the director of the South Coast Writing Project in CA) used Adam and Eve to mock the traditional "instructivist" approach. What was the snake but a pedant who saw knowledge as something that could be consumed? Rather, emphasizing this year's theme of "Writing for a Change," Blau used examples to show what every writer knows: that putting one's thoughts and experiences into words always transforms how we think and sometimes transforms how others think and act. If only Adam and Eve had been writing reflectively in the Garden, he mused, they would have responded differently... and we'd be meeting comfortably undressed.
Mock This!
With alarm, I heard some teachers yesterday tell how their school system has forbidden instruction in writing because it's detracting from instruction in reading, and students' reading scores have been dropping. Now, that's an educational innovation that's worth mockery.
The teacher who told us of this had in hand data obtained from comparisons of similar classrooms with similar teachers who differed only in their approach to teaching writing. The ones who treated writing as a way to learn (by constructing) instead of just as a way to assess what kids have learned, had students who scored higher on reading, too.
Yes, let's be critical of "new literacies" -- in exactly the way we're critical of books, of oratory, and of editorial writers.
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