Having never been employed as a regular classroom teacher, I have never looked upon myself as a teacher of literacy. In this light, I have never had to apply as much thinking to what literacy entails. This is why I am enjoying this course, despite some of the awkward moments.
As a specialist teacher who works with severe Learning Disabled students, part of my course focus has been to assist these students with skills that will better allow them to break the code (graphophonemic system). In both feeling and seeing how sounds are physically made, we focus on 28 consonant sounds (including the borrowers: c, qu, x and y). We track these sounds by way of mouth pictures, colored blocks and letter symbols. They are introduced to the 15 vowel sounds (vowel circle) and associated mouth picture labels that then lead to CV, VC and CVC tracking of syllables, by way of mouth pictures, colored blocks, letter symbols. Such is applied to both spelling and reading activities. There are also orthographic expectancies to be taught. For each student in question, both Psycho-Educational and S/L assessments indicate a weakness in the area of phonemic awareness/segmentation and pseudo-word decoding; hence, they become a recipient of this program. Generally, they are quite apt with regards to the text participant, text user and text analyst modes of the same model. I enjoy knowing that I am assisting with the remaining piece of the Four Resources Model puzzle, put forth by Peter Freebody and Allan Luke, that they have great difficulty with. In this way, I hope that I am serving to add to their overall literacy education.
Freebody and Luke write that “literacy education is ultimately about the kind of literate society and literate citizens that could and should be constructed”. The emphasis here is my own. A profound statement of this caliber continues to take me back to Paulo Friere and his strong belief system regarding the poor living in Brazil. At some point, I fully intend to do research with regards to Canadian classrooms that may well be applying this model to their classroom teaching.
It is my belief that many individuals do not accurately understand literacy and literacy education, for it is this very segment of the population that believes teaching and learning are mere matters of skill acquisition and knowledge transmission. Therein lies the problem. The question that we must begin asking of ourselves becomes how does one educate individuals to the reverse?
Freebody and Luke state that literacy education is all “about building identities and cultures, communities and institutions ... about access and apprenticeship into institutions and resources, discourses and texts”. The Four Resources Model speaks of four practices (code breaker, text participant, text user and text analyst), with each “being necessary for literacy, but in and of themselves, none is actually sufficient for literate citizen/subjects”.
I see this statement as serving to further the job that I am doing. Becoming a better code breaker, in and of itself, will not allow my students to become more literate, but it does build upon the specific area of practice that they show deficiencies in so that they will be able to better round out their overall repertoire of literacy skills.
In Examining Our Assumptions: A Transactional View of Literacy and Learning, the authors make mention of functional language situations where all components (namely, the graphophonemic, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic systems) are allowed to transact with other systems (such as art, music, math, gesture, drama) which naturally co-occur. This is the state of the world in its reality. This is what needs to be fully realized by the multitude as literacy. I fully appreciated the fact that these authors also took the time to compare/contrast/define the term ‘scaffolding’ (where one assumes the adult is in charge, simplifying, manipulating, structuring the environment for learning) with ‘tracking’ (processes or strategies actively engaged in by both participants who are seen as actively structuring the event). They also made mention of Vygotsky as having helped individuals see that thought and language transact, together becoming more than their individual and independent selves.
Vygotsky was also referenced in the online article, Further Notes on the Four Resources Model by Freebody and Luke ... “all teachers should have a training in: critical discourse analysis and critical literacy, second language acquisition, related critical social theory and Vygotskian sociocultural learning theories” reiterating that the four resources model is “one way of gluing together these approaches.” Just enough to tweak my interest in wanting to do some further research on Vygotsky.
The criteria we hold for what makes a literacy experience good for us cannot be used to judge the value of a literacy experience for another. This must be done by each language learner on his or her own terms. This cannot be stressed enough. Likewise for the fact that the process children engage in is not a pseudo form of the “real” process; it is that process.
In Parallels Between New Paradigms in Science and in Reading and Literary Theories by
Constance Weaver, she writes that modern subatomic physics speaks of transactions between entities. What a reader brings to the text (schemata: lifetime of knowledge and experience) is crucial in determining the meaning. Meaning is the continuous process of transaction between the individual and the environment, between old schemata and new. Due to the fact that there exists constant interplay between and among levels, processing being as much (or more) top-down (schemata to words or letters) as bottom-up (letters or words to schemata), each level potentially affects all other levels at the same time. When the reader interprets a text in a particular way, he or she simultaneously negates, for that particular moment in space/time, all other literary works. This is what they refer to as the “quantum leap”. Thus concepts from science parallel a model of language processing.
In Toward A Unified Theory of Literacy Learning and Instructional Practices by D. Taylor, it bothered me to read that “when an individual does not fit the instructional training program, “problems” are diagnosed and “remediated,” using more intensive doses of linearly sequenced decoding skills. Children are labeled and pigeon holed, and their own learning is denied” (page 33), for this has been my experience as a Special Education teacher. They go further to say that we must “give up the security of prepackaged programs built upon stage theories and stop trying to fit children’s early reading and writing experiences into some model or other. This is the only way that we will ever be able to see how language is both constructed and used by children when adults are not blatantly distorting the process” (page 34). This seems to say, to me, that all children will progress at their own pace, if they have not been disenfranchised, if their experiences have not been marginalized. The development of reading and writing is very complex. As educators, we must try to understand literacy from the child’s perspective, as has been clearly evident in the provided examples of literacy biographies that show the functions, uses, and forms of written language in very personal ways.
This article also makes mention of three key questions to ask children in the evaluating of their own literacy development; namely, (1) How have you changed? (2) What do you do well? (3) How do you want to improve?
I appreciate these questions, and see the validity to their very asking, in that serve to show that children and their experiences are valued and have merit. We need to see more classrooms where teachers and children work together, becoming co-informants, as the reading and writing strategies of the “one serve to inform the other”. This particular approach clearly enables teachers to rethink the ways in which they can provide realistic instruction that make sense to the children and to themselves. It also enables the children to become involved in personal evaluations of the ways in which they are becoming literate.
When we arrive at the fork in the road, unsure of which direction to take, clearly, this is the road (approach) that must be taken.
