Recently, a teacher told me that her colleagues believe a mandated early reading test I critiqued is necessary because “the parents of these kids don’t get them ready to learn to read in school.”
Too often we expect urban youngsters to be low achievers. My years of research have convinced me that “these kids” are just as capable of learning to read and write as all the others. But if we make the old mistake of confusing difference with deficiency, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
John Dewey advised us to “start where the learners are.” Dewey also said that we can make kids fit into a fixed and inflexible curriculum or we can fit the school to the learners. Human beings have a universal ability to learn and use language. Our job as educators is to know our multilingual, multicultural students and build on their strengths and experiences.
In my article, “Do you have to be smart to read? Do you have to read to be smart?” I concluded from my reading research with urban and rural children that any child who has learned an oral language is capable of learning written language. Children who have learned two or more oral languages without professional help are often strangely treated as “disadvantaged”. These successful language learners can all learn to read, regardless of the social status of their first language or the dialects of English they speak.
The answer to my article’s first question is, “No, you don’t have to be smart to read.” The answer to the second question is a bit more complex. Speaking at the International Reading Association Conference in Atlanta, Alice Walker cautioned against assuming illiterate folks are unintelligent and don’t care about their children. Being illiterate in modern societies is a disadvantage, but illiterate people often show great wisdom, and being literate doesn’t guarantee that people will act intelligently.
When I was a beginning teacher I discovered a conundrum. In my eighth grade classroom my students seemed to be inarticulate and weak in language learning. Yet on the playground and just outside my classroom they were articulate, effective, and inventive in their language. They played with language, knew all the words of popular songs, and communicated successfully with their friends, families, and neighbors. Today, young people also text message and engage in internet interactions that involve complex uses of written language not learned in school.
I learned early in my career that the reason why learners don’t do as well in school is not their fault but ours, their educators. In our zeal to teach them what they need to know, we have made it harder. Language, including written language, is easy to learn when it is authentic and whole, within a real linguistic context, has a real purpose for the learner, and makes sense. All of us learn language easily as we use language to communicate, to think and to learn. It is hard to learn when it is decontextualized, broken into pieces, and meaningless and irrelevant to the learners.
Educators do not intentionally make literacy hard to learn. They think they’re making it easy. They teach letter-sound correspondences, word identification, decontextualized spelling, and grammar rules that don’t fit the learner’s dialect. And they postpone getting the learners into real language until they prove they know all of these disconnected skills. Such teaching disadvantages all learners but is particularly hard for kids whose home language or dialect is not valued in school.
Nothing I’ve said so far is particularly new. Dedicated professional administrators, curriculum directors, teachers, and teacher educators have learned over many decades that virtually all kids can learn if they feel accepted and supported in school and if the experiences they have in school build on and accept those they have outside of school. When we work with our students rather than at cross purposes to their natural development and when we respect them as learners they show remarkable ability. The key of course is compassionate, knowledgeable teachers and administrators who trust and support their teachers. Tragically almost all of our urban school districts have shortages of certified teachers.
Unfortunately, there is also a long simplistic tradition in education that periodically gains control. The assumption is that all children need to learn the same body of knowledge, in the same way, in the same sequence and at the same pace. In this view, if kids don’t learn in school it is their fault for not trying hard enough, their parents’ fault for not be being strict enough, or because their teachers don’t make them learn. In this simplistic view they will all learn if we break all content down into bits and pieces which are tightly sequenced and taught directly. If they don’t succeed they are made to repeat the same content over and over again until they have mastered it all and can demonstrate that through “objective” tests. And those who fail are punished with retention.
I believe there is a continuous struggle in education between those who trust children to learn and those who do not, those who trust professional teachers to teach and those who do not. I’m an optimist. I see a progression with two steps forward and one back until there is a wide recognition by educational decision makers and the public that all children can become literate if they have interesting relevant programs and teachers who trust them to learn.
Comments:
Kristine Bentley
kbent03@aol.com
Submitted on 2011/09/25 at 6:02 pm
I agree completely. I am a 7th and 8th grade special education teacher. Our students are testing Far Below Basic(FBB) and Below Basic(BB). My district thinks that because the students are struggling on the state tests they need an intervention. I agree that an intervention is needed but the program that the district uses is not high interest or at grade level. If we expect these students to learn and be motivated to learn we need to interest them and hook them in highly interesting material. I get comments all day from the students, “Why are we doing baby work?” I feel that my students are capable to learn and can be very successful. I believe this program is holding them back.
Author Biography: Kenneth Goodman is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona. His work as a practical theorist, researcher and teacher educator has changed our understanding of literacy processes, how they are learned and how best to teach them. His sociotransactional theory of the reading process is the most widely cited in the world. This research based theory demonstrates that reading is a unitary process in which readers actively construct meaning. It is a practical theory because teachers who come to understand this view of reading and the related view of writing can understand what it is that learners are doing as they develop literacy.