They create a wonderful record of your learning in ENGL C0831. The grade for this blog is an A+.
Excellent work! --B. Gleason
If I Was...or If I Were?
3 years ago
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Blog Evaluation by Professor Barbara Gleason
Viktoriia, This blog contains all of the required posts, it is easy to read, and all of your writing here is intellectually rigorous. I have enjoyed reading all of your informal comments from our course blog.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Braille Literacy
Viktoriia Dudar
Professor Barbara Gleason
Adult Language and Literacy
11 May 2010
Braille Literacy
The invention of Braille, a writing system that allows blind or visually impaired individuals to read and write through touch, gave the opportunity to millions of people all over the world to become immersed in words and the world around them. Braille literacy is an essential attribute of independence and success that eliminates the barriers to an accomplished life. However, the struggle for access to education, employment, and equality for 10 million visually impaired and 1.3 million legally blind people in the United States is far from being won and continues until today. To better understand the significance of the Braille code, it is important to analyze the historical background of the 18th century France and origins of Braille, “the war of dots,” and the current issues of literacy access for blind individuals.
The philosophical ideas of the Age of Enlightenment that first started advocating the basic human rights for every individual established the foundation for educating blind or visually impaired people. In 1749, Denis Diderot, a prominent philosopher, published Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See that expressed his belief that blind people are capable and worthy of education despite their lack of vision. He described a blind woman, Melanie de Salignac, who learned how to write and read by using cutout, curved in the wood and pinpricked letters (Rex et al. 17). His ideas were the part of the broader revolutionary argument, trying to prove that “every individual is entitled to opportunities to reach his or her own true potential” (Wittenstein 517). However, a few successful examples of wealthy and privileged people did not mean access of education for everybody. Only in 1784, Valentin Haüy, inspired by Diderot’s letter and after meeting with the blind baroness of Austria, established the first school for blind children, the Institute for Blind Youth, in Paris. In addition, he invented an embossed print reading system and a press for creating tactile books that gave the opportunity to the blind to become literate (Rex et al. 17). A few decades later, Haüy’s school became the place where young Louis Braille created his code, which is still used nowadays.
Louis Braille was born in 1809 in the family of a saddler in Coupvray, which is only twenty five miles away from Paris. He became blind when he was only three years old as a result of an accident while playing with his father’s tools. When Braille was 10 years old, his family sent him to the Institute for Blind Youth. He was distinguished as one of the most brilliant and gifted students: he excelled in his studies and played cello and piano. There he became acquainted with “night writing” or sonography that was invented by Charles Barbier, a former artillery captain in Napoleon’s Army, in order to allow solders to communicate at night. When Braille was only fifteen years old, he adapted and considerably simplified sonography that initially contained twelve dots and was very difficult to learn. His new code consisted of six raised dots that were arranged in a cell, three points high and two points wide in 63 different patterns, and it is used until today (Rex et al. 17). After becoming a teacher at the Institute for Blind Youth, Braille extended his code to include notations for mathematic and music and published the first book in Braille Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them in 1829. During his life, he continued to improve Braille alphabet and worked on the developing of Braille writing machine called a raphigraphe (needle-writer). Braille alphabet gradually replaced the old system of raised letters allowing blind students to read and to write much faster and more accurately. However, it was only two years after Braille’s death that the system became officially recognized in France. He died from tuberculosis in 1852 at the age of 43 and was buried in Coupvray. On the one hundred anniversary of Louise Braille death, his body was disinterred and placed in the Pantheon in Paris, the highest honor for a French citizen (Spungin, “Past” 5-7). Braille alphabet became widely spread in Europe and the United States of America and later, through the work of missionary teams, in Asian, African, and South American countries.
In the late 19th and early 20th century in the United States, Braille alphabet competed with other writing systems, such as Boston Line Type (an embossed print), New York Point (a horizontal array of four dots long and two dots high), Moon code (simplified raised Roman capital letters). This period was one of the most difficult in the history of literacy for the blind, referred to as the battle of the types or “the war of dots” (Rex et al. 18). Blind readers usually had to learn two or three codes in order to access different reading materials, which were printed in different codes depending on the school standards. For example, the Missouri School for the Blind used Braille, the Perkins School for the Blind preferred Boston Line Type, the New York Institute for the Blind used New York Point, and British books were printed in Moon code. Later the British and American Braille were added to the list (D’Andrea 586). Consequently, there was a great need for a uniform code as it would eliminate extra financial cost for duplication and increase accessibility of books for blind people.
“The war of dots” was over in 1918, when the American Commission on Uniform Type recognized Braille as superior to other writing systems and adopted Grade 1 and Grade 1-1/2 Braille codes (Rex et al. 18). The former consists of the twenty-six standard letters of the alphabet and punctuation, and the latter included forty-four contractions or shortcuts that increased the reading and writing speed. Children usually started from learning Grade 1 Braille until the third grade, and then they were taught Grade 1-1/2 Braille. Sometimes in high school, they moved to Grade 2 Braille, a British code that included 190 contractions. However, a great argument started and continues until today whether a contracted Braille should be introduced to small children or not, and if Grade 1 Braille should be taught at all (D’Andrea 587). The absence of the systematic approach for teaching Braille continues to be one of the problems that does not have a consensus and still needs to be resolved.
During the 1920s and 30s, a range of studies was conducted in order to determine if Grade 2 Braille was better than Grade 1-1/2 as it gained a rapid popularity in the United States. The results of the studies showed that Grade 2 Braille considerably increased the speed of reading and writing and also saved about 12 percent of space compared to Grade 1-1/2. Americans started ordering books from England as they understood the advantages of reading with greater speed. To facilitate the exchange of Braille materials between two countries, a joint committee representing England and the United States was created in order to reach some compromises. As the result of the joint conference held in London in July 1932, the Treaty of London agreement was signed. It entitled Grade 2 Braille (Standard English Braille) to become the medium for reading and writing for blind and visually impaired individuals in all English-speaking countries (Rex et al. 21). Although the Treaty of London allowed printing books in Grade 2 Braille, it was not until decades later that it was introduced to beginning readers.
In the 1940s, a new technology of using incubators for premature infants was implemented for the first time in hospitals. As the result of a lack of research on the influence of oxygen on infants and the misuse of incubators, many babies who were incubated became blind or developed severe vision impairments, such as retinopathy of prematurity or ROP (D’Andrea 590). These children entered school in the 1950s and 1960s, which created a great need for more research on Braille reading and writing instruction. As a result of different studies that were conducted during these decades, the first Braille reading series called Patterns was developed by Caton and Bradley. The series included a readiness level reader, a preprimer, a primer, and then first, second, and third level readers that taught contracted Braille in a systematic way. Furthermore, another important study was conducted by Mangold who created Developmental Program of Tactile Perception and Braille Letter Recognition that helped to decrease reading errors through a sequence of 29 lessons. The results of the study showed that about 90 percent of Braille readers benefited greatly from this program. Patterns series and Mangold’s program are widely used by teachers even today (D’Andrea 591).
The last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century brought considerable changed into the Braille literacy field. Many scholars refer to this period as “Braille literacy crisis” because according to the National Federation for the Blind only about 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind people can read Braille (Weiss1). The number of different opinions is trying to explain the possible causes of Braille literacy decline. First of all, Johnson believes that the integration of visually impaired children into regular classrooms is not always beneficial (1). As a result of the Education of Handicapped Children Act in 1975, thousands of blind and visually impaired children joined public schools. Since then, the instruction in general education classroom is provided by itinerant teachers who are usually expected to teach a dozen or more students who are spread over large areas. Consequently, they cannot dedicate a sufficient time for each student, and children are often taught by the classroom teacher or paraeducator who are often not proficient in Braille (Johnson 1).
The lack of competent teachers leads to overemphasizing of teaching print to students with residual vision. Difficulty in seeing large print considerably decreases the reading speed; many students are getting tired fast, do not enjoy reading, and thus fail to establish positive life-long reading habits. This problem was addressed in a Braille Literacy Amendment, which was signed in 1994 by five national blindness organizations, promoting Braille as an equal option to print (Spungin, “Braille” 2). Furthermore, the increasing number of children with multiple disabilities, surviving because of medical advancements, is placed into the mainstream classrooms. These students are incapable of learning Braille or require special attention because the traditional teaching methods are not always successful (D’Andrea 593). As the result, the shortage of qualified teachers deepens the Braille literacy crisis as visually impaired students are underserved or even not served at all. However, a number of initiatives are undertaken in order to change the decline in Braille literacy. For example, the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), the American printing House for the Blind (APH), and the National Federation of the Blind are trying to resolve this issue by developing different teaching programs, materials, and Braille tests to facilitate Braille instruction and insure teachers’ knowledge of the code (Spungin, “Braille” 2).
Another reason for Braille literacy decline is the rapid development of new technology that offers additional access to printed materials (Johnson 1). Different audio devices and synthetic speech systems allow easy access to information. However, Doug Brent, a professor of communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, a teacher of blind students, believe that technological inventions cannot substitute Braille. The writing of one of their students who does not know Braille, but uses computer software clearly demonstrates his inferiority to Braille proficient students. His writing is disorganized, “the beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy” (Aviv 4). On the other hand, many researchers agree that technology makes Braille “more viable, relevant, and accessible than ever before in history” (Gerven and Taylor 1). The most important technological creations that increase Braille access are Braille translation software, Braille embossers, notetakers, refreshable Braille displays, Braille-capable tactile graphic printers, and synthetic speech systems. Furthermore, the first cell phone and notetaker hybrid that offers a 20-cell Braille display, a Braille keyboard, and a speech synthesizer became available to the general public in 2003 (Gerven and Taylor 1). Therefore, the rapid development of communication technology and advances in Braille production help blind and visually impaired people to become independent and self-supporting individuals.
With technological advances the definition of Braille literacy is also changing. Blake describes literacy as not only the ability to use Braille, print, and computers, but also as the ability to use readers and recorded materials in order to gain access to information (1). Furthermore, the increasing number of researches supports this integrated view of literacy and believes that communication skills, such as speaking and listening must be integrated into the curriculum for students who are blind or visually impaired in order to teach them to access data that is not presented in Braille (Rex et al. 9). Communication skills are valuable in everyday life and are often referred as literacy. As a result of including the ability to communicate in the definition of literacy, it becomes difficult to differentiate between literacy and illiteracy.
In order to develop a deeper understanding of Braille literacy, Koenig describes emergent, basic, and functional literacy (Rex et al. 9). He defines the emergent literacy as an early interaction with written language that should be facilitated by teachers and parents of blind children. He emphasizes the importance of repeated and direct interactions with Braille materials form an early age. Letting children to explore tactual books, acting out stories after reading them, making “book bags” that contain story characters, and encouraging the use of a raised-line drawing kit for scribbling help them to construct the concept of Braille (Rex et al. 10). After starting school, children are expected to develop basic or academic literacy through learning how to read and write in Braille. Only professional high quality instruction can insure students’ attaining of an adequate level of basic literacy skills. Young children need at least two hours per day of Braille reading and writing instruction on a consistent and ongoing basis that in many cases is impossible because of the lack of Braille professionals (Rex et al. 11). Furthermore, another aspect of literacy that relates to more specific everyday tasks, namely functional literacy, should be developed to insure independence of blind individuals. It is characterized by a number of factors, such as (1) performing diverse literacy everyday skills at home, in the community, and at work; (2) communicating with self and others; (3) using appropriate tools for gaining access to print independently. Communication through writing with sighted people can be a challenge because Braille cannot serve as a medium. Thus, it is important for blind and visually impaired individuals to be able to use print as a supplement to Braille or different technological devices in order to maintain a dialogue. Therefore, Rex believes that the main task of educators is “to provide ample opportunities for persons who are blind to master the functional literacy task they need for living fully” (13).
Braille literacy plays an important role in people’s lives as it helps them to become fully functional and independent adults. The study conducted by Ryles in 1996 suggests that there is a strong correlation between the employment rates and Braille literacy. A group of people who was proficient in Braille experienced a much lower unemployment rate (33 %) than the group that did not learn Braille (58%). Besides, the Braille group had better reading habits and thus, higher education achievements. For example, thirteen Braille literate individuals obtained graduate degrees and two of them had doctoral degrees that greatly contrasted with only four graduate degrees attained by members of the other group. Ryles concludes that learning Braille helps children “to develop the positive lifelong habit of reading as adults, enhance their later employment opportunities, and thereby increase the possibility of financial independence” (14).
In conclusion, the evolution of Braille literacy demonstrates the multidimensional nature of this phenomenon. Throughout decades, blind and visually impaired people have being paving the road for their independence, equality, and full integration into society. However, the recent decline in Braille literacy and an extremely high rate of unemployment indicate that the goal has not been reached yet. Although the learning processes of blind and sighted individuals are essentially the same, educators are challenged to consider the unique needs of their blind or visually impaired students and to develop special approaches when teaching Braille. Thus, more research in this field is needed as Braille literacy is an important asset that enables independence and confidence in everyday life.
Works Cited
Aviv, Rachel. “Listening to Braille.” New York Times Magazine. New York Times Magazine, 3 Jan. 2010. Web. 21 March 2010.
Blake, Sarah J. “The Importance of Braille Literacy.” Blindness Growing Strong. Web. 21 March 2010.
D’Andrea, Frances Mary. “A History of Instructional Methods in Uncontracted and Contracted Braille.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 103.10 (2009): 585-594. Education Full Text. Web. 29 April 2010.
Gerven, Clara Van and Anne Taylor. “The Information Age Braille Technology Timeline.” The National Federation of the Blind Magazine for Parents and Teachers of Blind Children 28.1 (2009). Web. 29 April 2010.
Rex, Evelyn L., et al. Foundations of Braille Literacy. New York: American Foundation for the Blind Press, 1994. Print.
Ryles, Ruby. “The Impact of Braille Reading Skills on Employment, Income, Education and Reading Habits.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 90.3 (1996). Web. 21 March 2010.
Spungin, Susan Jay. “Braille and Beyond: Braille Literacy in a Larger Context.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 90.3 (1996). Web. 21 March 2010.
---. “Past and Present Remembrances of Louis Braille.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 103.1 (2009): 5-7. Education Full Text. Web. 29 April 2010.
Weiss, Ray. “Blind Still Rely on Braille: High-Tech Advances Can’t Entirely Replace System.” Daytona Beach News-Journal. Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 Jan. 2010. Web. 21 March 2010.
Wittenstein, Stuart H. “Braille and Revolution, Diderot and Enlightenment, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 103.9 (2009): 516-518. Education Full Text. Web. 29 April 2010.
Professor Barbara Gleason
Adult Language and Literacy
11 May 2010
Braille Literacy
The invention of Braille, a writing system that allows blind or visually impaired individuals to read and write through touch, gave the opportunity to millions of people all over the world to become immersed in words and the world around them. Braille literacy is an essential attribute of independence and success that eliminates the barriers to an accomplished life. However, the struggle for access to education, employment, and equality for 10 million visually impaired and 1.3 million legally blind people in the United States is far from being won and continues until today. To better understand the significance of the Braille code, it is important to analyze the historical background of the 18th century France and origins of Braille, “the war of dots,” and the current issues of literacy access for blind individuals.
The philosophical ideas of the Age of Enlightenment that first started advocating the basic human rights for every individual established the foundation for educating blind or visually impaired people. In 1749, Denis Diderot, a prominent philosopher, published Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See that expressed his belief that blind people are capable and worthy of education despite their lack of vision. He described a blind woman, Melanie de Salignac, who learned how to write and read by using cutout, curved in the wood and pinpricked letters (Rex et al. 17). His ideas were the part of the broader revolutionary argument, trying to prove that “every individual is entitled to opportunities to reach his or her own true potential” (Wittenstein 517). However, a few successful examples of wealthy and privileged people did not mean access of education for everybody. Only in 1784, Valentin Haüy, inspired by Diderot’s letter and after meeting with the blind baroness of Austria, established the first school for blind children, the Institute for Blind Youth, in Paris. In addition, he invented an embossed print reading system and a press for creating tactile books that gave the opportunity to the blind to become literate (Rex et al. 17). A few decades later, Haüy’s school became the place where young Louis Braille created his code, which is still used nowadays.
Louis Braille was born in 1809 in the family of a saddler in Coupvray, which is only twenty five miles away from Paris. He became blind when he was only three years old as a result of an accident while playing with his father’s tools. When Braille was 10 years old, his family sent him to the Institute for Blind Youth. He was distinguished as one of the most brilliant and gifted students: he excelled in his studies and played cello and piano. There he became acquainted with “night writing” or sonography that was invented by Charles Barbier, a former artillery captain in Napoleon’s Army, in order to allow solders to communicate at night. When Braille was only fifteen years old, he adapted and considerably simplified sonography that initially contained twelve dots and was very difficult to learn. His new code consisted of six raised dots that were arranged in a cell, three points high and two points wide in 63 different patterns, and it is used until today (Rex et al. 17). After becoming a teacher at the Institute for Blind Youth, Braille extended his code to include notations for mathematic and music and published the first book in Braille Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them in 1829. During his life, he continued to improve Braille alphabet and worked on the developing of Braille writing machine called a raphigraphe (needle-writer). Braille alphabet gradually replaced the old system of raised letters allowing blind students to read and to write much faster and more accurately. However, it was only two years after Braille’s death that the system became officially recognized in France. He died from tuberculosis in 1852 at the age of 43 and was buried in Coupvray. On the one hundred anniversary of Louise Braille death, his body was disinterred and placed in the Pantheon in Paris, the highest honor for a French citizen (Spungin, “Past” 5-7). Braille alphabet became widely spread in Europe and the United States of America and later, through the work of missionary teams, in Asian, African, and South American countries.
In the late 19th and early 20th century in the United States, Braille alphabet competed with other writing systems, such as Boston Line Type (an embossed print), New York Point (a horizontal array of four dots long and two dots high), Moon code (simplified raised Roman capital letters). This period was one of the most difficult in the history of literacy for the blind, referred to as the battle of the types or “the war of dots” (Rex et al. 18). Blind readers usually had to learn two or three codes in order to access different reading materials, which were printed in different codes depending on the school standards. For example, the Missouri School for the Blind used Braille, the Perkins School for the Blind preferred Boston Line Type, the New York Institute for the Blind used New York Point, and British books were printed in Moon code. Later the British and American Braille were added to the list (D’Andrea 586). Consequently, there was a great need for a uniform code as it would eliminate extra financial cost for duplication and increase accessibility of books for blind people.
“The war of dots” was over in 1918, when the American Commission on Uniform Type recognized Braille as superior to other writing systems and adopted Grade 1 and Grade 1-1/2 Braille codes (Rex et al. 18). The former consists of the twenty-six standard letters of the alphabet and punctuation, and the latter included forty-four contractions or shortcuts that increased the reading and writing speed. Children usually started from learning Grade 1 Braille until the third grade, and then they were taught Grade 1-1/2 Braille. Sometimes in high school, they moved to Grade 2 Braille, a British code that included 190 contractions. However, a great argument started and continues until today whether a contracted Braille should be introduced to small children or not, and if Grade 1 Braille should be taught at all (D’Andrea 587). The absence of the systematic approach for teaching Braille continues to be one of the problems that does not have a consensus and still needs to be resolved.
During the 1920s and 30s, a range of studies was conducted in order to determine if Grade 2 Braille was better than Grade 1-1/2 as it gained a rapid popularity in the United States. The results of the studies showed that Grade 2 Braille considerably increased the speed of reading and writing and also saved about 12 percent of space compared to Grade 1-1/2. Americans started ordering books from England as they understood the advantages of reading with greater speed. To facilitate the exchange of Braille materials between two countries, a joint committee representing England and the United States was created in order to reach some compromises. As the result of the joint conference held in London in July 1932, the Treaty of London agreement was signed. It entitled Grade 2 Braille (Standard English Braille) to become the medium for reading and writing for blind and visually impaired individuals in all English-speaking countries (Rex et al. 21). Although the Treaty of London allowed printing books in Grade 2 Braille, it was not until decades later that it was introduced to beginning readers.
In the 1940s, a new technology of using incubators for premature infants was implemented for the first time in hospitals. As the result of a lack of research on the influence of oxygen on infants and the misuse of incubators, many babies who were incubated became blind or developed severe vision impairments, such as retinopathy of prematurity or ROP (D’Andrea 590). These children entered school in the 1950s and 1960s, which created a great need for more research on Braille reading and writing instruction. As a result of different studies that were conducted during these decades, the first Braille reading series called Patterns was developed by Caton and Bradley. The series included a readiness level reader, a preprimer, a primer, and then first, second, and third level readers that taught contracted Braille in a systematic way. Furthermore, another important study was conducted by Mangold who created Developmental Program of Tactile Perception and Braille Letter Recognition that helped to decrease reading errors through a sequence of 29 lessons. The results of the study showed that about 90 percent of Braille readers benefited greatly from this program. Patterns series and Mangold’s program are widely used by teachers even today (D’Andrea 591).
The last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century brought considerable changed into the Braille literacy field. Many scholars refer to this period as “Braille literacy crisis” because according to the National Federation for the Blind only about 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind people can read Braille (Weiss1). The number of different opinions is trying to explain the possible causes of Braille literacy decline. First of all, Johnson believes that the integration of visually impaired children into regular classrooms is not always beneficial (1). As a result of the Education of Handicapped Children Act in 1975, thousands of blind and visually impaired children joined public schools. Since then, the instruction in general education classroom is provided by itinerant teachers who are usually expected to teach a dozen or more students who are spread over large areas. Consequently, they cannot dedicate a sufficient time for each student, and children are often taught by the classroom teacher or paraeducator who are often not proficient in Braille (Johnson 1).
The lack of competent teachers leads to overemphasizing of teaching print to students with residual vision. Difficulty in seeing large print considerably decreases the reading speed; many students are getting tired fast, do not enjoy reading, and thus fail to establish positive life-long reading habits. This problem was addressed in a Braille Literacy Amendment, which was signed in 1994 by five national blindness organizations, promoting Braille as an equal option to print (Spungin, “Braille” 2). Furthermore, the increasing number of children with multiple disabilities, surviving because of medical advancements, is placed into the mainstream classrooms. These students are incapable of learning Braille or require special attention because the traditional teaching methods are not always successful (D’Andrea 593). As the result, the shortage of qualified teachers deepens the Braille literacy crisis as visually impaired students are underserved or even not served at all. However, a number of initiatives are undertaken in order to change the decline in Braille literacy. For example, the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), the American printing House for the Blind (APH), and the National Federation of the Blind are trying to resolve this issue by developing different teaching programs, materials, and Braille tests to facilitate Braille instruction and insure teachers’ knowledge of the code (Spungin, “Braille” 2).
Another reason for Braille literacy decline is the rapid development of new technology that offers additional access to printed materials (Johnson 1). Different audio devices and synthetic speech systems allow easy access to information. However, Doug Brent, a professor of communication at the University of Calgary, and his wife, Diana Brent, a teacher of blind students, believe that technological inventions cannot substitute Braille. The writing of one of their students who does not know Braille, but uses computer software clearly demonstrates his inferiority to Braille proficient students. His writing is disorganized, “the beginnings and endings of sentences seem arbitrary, one thought emerging in the midst of another with a kind of breathless energy” (Aviv 4). On the other hand, many researchers agree that technology makes Braille “more viable, relevant, and accessible than ever before in history” (Gerven and Taylor 1). The most important technological creations that increase Braille access are Braille translation software, Braille embossers, notetakers, refreshable Braille displays, Braille-capable tactile graphic printers, and synthetic speech systems. Furthermore, the first cell phone and notetaker hybrid that offers a 20-cell Braille display, a Braille keyboard, and a speech synthesizer became available to the general public in 2003 (Gerven and Taylor 1). Therefore, the rapid development of communication technology and advances in Braille production help blind and visually impaired people to become independent and self-supporting individuals.
With technological advances the definition of Braille literacy is also changing. Blake describes literacy as not only the ability to use Braille, print, and computers, but also as the ability to use readers and recorded materials in order to gain access to information (1). Furthermore, the increasing number of researches supports this integrated view of literacy and believes that communication skills, such as speaking and listening must be integrated into the curriculum for students who are blind or visually impaired in order to teach them to access data that is not presented in Braille (Rex et al. 9). Communication skills are valuable in everyday life and are often referred as literacy. As a result of including the ability to communicate in the definition of literacy, it becomes difficult to differentiate between literacy and illiteracy.
In order to develop a deeper understanding of Braille literacy, Koenig describes emergent, basic, and functional literacy (Rex et al. 9). He defines the emergent literacy as an early interaction with written language that should be facilitated by teachers and parents of blind children. He emphasizes the importance of repeated and direct interactions with Braille materials form an early age. Letting children to explore tactual books, acting out stories after reading them, making “book bags” that contain story characters, and encouraging the use of a raised-line drawing kit for scribbling help them to construct the concept of Braille (Rex et al. 10). After starting school, children are expected to develop basic or academic literacy through learning how to read and write in Braille. Only professional high quality instruction can insure students’ attaining of an adequate level of basic literacy skills. Young children need at least two hours per day of Braille reading and writing instruction on a consistent and ongoing basis that in many cases is impossible because of the lack of Braille professionals (Rex et al. 11). Furthermore, another aspect of literacy that relates to more specific everyday tasks, namely functional literacy, should be developed to insure independence of blind individuals. It is characterized by a number of factors, such as (1) performing diverse literacy everyday skills at home, in the community, and at work; (2) communicating with self and others; (3) using appropriate tools for gaining access to print independently. Communication through writing with sighted people can be a challenge because Braille cannot serve as a medium. Thus, it is important for blind and visually impaired individuals to be able to use print as a supplement to Braille or different technological devices in order to maintain a dialogue. Therefore, Rex believes that the main task of educators is “to provide ample opportunities for persons who are blind to master the functional literacy task they need for living fully” (13).
Braille literacy plays an important role in people’s lives as it helps them to become fully functional and independent adults. The study conducted by Ryles in 1996 suggests that there is a strong correlation between the employment rates and Braille literacy. A group of people who was proficient in Braille experienced a much lower unemployment rate (33 %) than the group that did not learn Braille (58%). Besides, the Braille group had better reading habits and thus, higher education achievements. For example, thirteen Braille literate individuals obtained graduate degrees and two of them had doctoral degrees that greatly contrasted with only four graduate degrees attained by members of the other group. Ryles concludes that learning Braille helps children “to develop the positive lifelong habit of reading as adults, enhance their later employment opportunities, and thereby increase the possibility of financial independence” (14).
In conclusion, the evolution of Braille literacy demonstrates the multidimensional nature of this phenomenon. Throughout decades, blind and visually impaired people have being paving the road for their independence, equality, and full integration into society. However, the recent decline in Braille literacy and an extremely high rate of unemployment indicate that the goal has not been reached yet. Although the learning processes of blind and sighted individuals are essentially the same, educators are challenged to consider the unique needs of their blind or visually impaired students and to develop special approaches when teaching Braille. Thus, more research in this field is needed as Braille literacy is an important asset that enables independence and confidence in everyday life.
Works Cited
Aviv, Rachel. “Listening to Braille.” New York Times Magazine. New York Times Magazine, 3 Jan. 2010. Web. 21 March 2010.
Blake, Sarah J. “The Importance of Braille Literacy.” Blindness Growing Strong. Web. 21 March 2010.
D’Andrea, Frances Mary. “A History of Instructional Methods in Uncontracted and Contracted Braille.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 103.10 (2009): 585-594. Education Full Text. Web. 29 April 2010.
Gerven, Clara Van and Anne Taylor. “The Information Age Braille Technology Timeline.” The National Federation of the Blind Magazine for Parents and Teachers of Blind Children 28.1 (2009). Web. 29 April 2010.
Rex, Evelyn L., et al. Foundations of Braille Literacy. New York: American Foundation for the Blind Press, 1994. Print.
Ryles, Ruby. “The Impact of Braille Reading Skills on Employment, Income, Education and Reading Habits.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 90.3 (1996). Web. 21 March 2010.
Spungin, Susan Jay. “Braille and Beyond: Braille Literacy in a Larger Context.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 90.3 (1996). Web. 21 March 2010.
---. “Past and Present Remembrances of Louis Braille.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 103.1 (2009): 5-7. Education Full Text. Web. 29 April 2010.
Weiss, Ray. “Blind Still Rely on Braille: High-Tech Advances Can’t Entirely Replace System.” Daytona Beach News-Journal. Daytona Beach News-Journal, 27 Jan. 2010. Web. 21 March 2010.
Wittenstein, Stuart H. “Braille and Revolution, Diderot and Enlightenment, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness 103.9 (2009): 516-518. Education Full Text. Web. 29 April 2010.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
My summary of the article from JBM
Viktoriia Dudar
Professor Barbara Gleason
Adult Language and Literacy
20 April 2010
Zamel, Vivian. “Engaging Students in Writing-To-Learn: Promoting Language and Literacy Across the Curriculum.” JBW: Journal of Basic Writing 19.2 (2000): 3-21. Print.
Engaging Students in Writing-To-Learn is a version of the talk about what writing-to-learn pedagogy represents that Vivian Zamel, Professor of English and Director of the English as a Second Language Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, gave at a faculty development event. She was invited to advise the faculty of the City University of New York about the writing-across-the-curriculum initiative that they undertook for the first time in the 1999-2000 academic year. In her article, Zamel addresses difficulties with writing that diverse students face because they are not native speakers of English, and/or they are unfamiliar with academic writing discourse. She describes the range of different writing activities that can help students to acquire the content of a subject through writing and to develop students’ writing and reading skills. Also, she emphasizes the importance of the helpful feedback to the students’ writing assignments that should be an effective vehicle of improvement, but not a destructive critique.
Zamel is trying to dismiss the widely accepted assumption that English or other writing based courses are designed to teach language and writing in order to prepare students for other disciplines. This belief indicates that many professors do not recognize their courses as meaningful contexts in which language can be acquired because they think that students should have learned a language before. Zamel believes that students can acquire a language and develop their writing and reading skills only if they are engaged in the complex ideas of the course, are invited to participate in discussions, and are given opportunities to use different kinds of writing for reflection, articulation of their ideas and thought, and trying out the academic language. Consequently, she regards each classroom as a separate culture with its own expectations and conventions that can be acquired only through meaningful work that is built on students’ experiences and knowledge(8). Thus, Zamel encourages the faculty to look at learning as an ongoing and evolving process that can be supported by a meaningful course work, allowing students to grow through writing.
To better understand students’ needs and challenges with writing, Zamel asked students to reflect on their difficulties while composing in English. Students’ responses indicated that they were well aware about their needs as writers and pointed out the range of typical issues with writing, such as being too careful with choosing words, inability to express their thoughts, intrusion of other language when thinking about a given topic, and unfamiliarity with a given topic. Besides, students identified patience and encouragement of their teachers as the key factors of their success and asked for more explicit directions for assignments and course expectations. Students were afraid that their learning progress was underestimated because of their writing, sometimes confusing and full of errors (5).
These findings were supported and deepened by two case studies of students whom Zamel followed through the courses across the curriculum. For example, Martha, a student from Columbia who majored in biology, suffered because writing was not a part of her science courses. Consequently, she could not express her thoughts, questions, and confusions about the content, and that undermined her learning of the new subjects and interest in them. “There was not a drop of motivation to enjoy my journey of learning. I felt illiterate at the end of the semester. I did not learn a single new word,” (6) reflects Martha on her experiences. On the other hand, Motoko, a student from Japan who majored in sociology, had a successful experience in her philosophy course where a professor used writing assignments extensively. Although she was still making mistakes in her writing, Motoko felt that she was given an opportunity to build her knowledge on the previous experiences and to actively engage into subject discourse through writing (7). Zamel’s research demonstrates that writing is an effective tool that helps students to acquire academic vocabulary as well as the content of the courses across the curriculum.
Zamel argues that the multiple opportunities for writing help students to explain the course material to themselves, to establish connections between their experiences and learned information, and to discover their own thinking. She proposes a range of writing-to-learn assignments that can be easily incorporated into different classrooms. For example, a “one minute paper” written at the end of the class describing learned topics and points of confusion can be a source of establishing students’ needs and direction of future instruction. Also, journal assignments can help students to develop their critical thinking and active reading when they are responding in written form to course readings or particular questions. Another way to engage students in the meaningful use of language is a double-entry journal that gives an opportunity to respond to the passages that drew students’ attention. Through copying short passages of text in one column and writing their responses in another, students connect to their readings, learn academic language, and compile different course readings together. Besides, ungraded in-class writing can help students to construct their point of view and become an active participant of a class discussion. As a result of writing-to-learn assignments, students begin to understand that reading is not a passive activity, but rather “literally a process of composing” (13).
In addition to writing-to-learn assignments, the teacher’s explicit expectations about the course and a constructive feedback to students’ writing can promote learning. Zamel suggests teachers to test their assignments by asking questions about the purpose of writing or reading, expectations about the students work, the extend of guidance provided to students. The deep analysis of the task and explicitly stated requirements can prevent assignment ambiguity and students’ difficulties with writing. Furthermore, the opportunity to draft and revise allows students to think and to write about their ideas in complex ways. On the other hand, it helps teachers to give profound feedback that serves to improve students’ writing (15). Zamels states that teachers’ responses to students’ writing in the form of error correction are ineffective and do not contribute to their progress over the period of time. She believes that the teachers’ goal is the reduction of mistakes (that very often are the signs of progress), but not their entire elimination because language acquisition is a multi-dimensional, complex, and context-dependant process. The mistakes can be reduced through error instruction, and the writing can be improved thorough asking students to review their own writing and clarify their ideas and thoughts rather than simply insert teachers’ markings in their work (16). For example, the samples of Edwin’s writing clearly show his progress as a writer as he is able to articulate his ideas more clearly while using academic language discourse.
In conclusion, Zamel’s article emphasizes the importance of writing across the curriculum as it engages students into the rich and interesting world of ideas, allows them to take risks with learning, promotes their growth as critical thinkers and active readers, and helps them to acquire the language of academia. Furthermore, professors’ understanding of learning as an ongoing process, multiple opportunities to write for understanding and sharing ideas, time for drafting and revising, instructive and meaningful feedback can greatly contribute to students’ academic success. Martha highly appreciated and supported the importance of writing in her own learning, “[w]riting about all these experiences helped me be a resilient learner and to reclaim my voice and love for learning in a foreign country. It is like a metamorphosis with no ending…” (20).
Professor Barbara Gleason
Adult Language and Literacy
20 April 2010
Zamel, Vivian. “Engaging Students in Writing-To-Learn: Promoting Language and Literacy Across the Curriculum.” JBW: Journal of Basic Writing 19.2 (2000): 3-21. Print.
Engaging Students in Writing-To-Learn is a version of the talk about what writing-to-learn pedagogy represents that Vivian Zamel, Professor of English and Director of the English as a Second Language Program at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, gave at a faculty development event. She was invited to advise the faculty of the City University of New York about the writing-across-the-curriculum initiative that they undertook for the first time in the 1999-2000 academic year. In her article, Zamel addresses difficulties with writing that diverse students face because they are not native speakers of English, and/or they are unfamiliar with academic writing discourse. She describes the range of different writing activities that can help students to acquire the content of a subject through writing and to develop students’ writing and reading skills. Also, she emphasizes the importance of the helpful feedback to the students’ writing assignments that should be an effective vehicle of improvement, but not a destructive critique.
Zamel is trying to dismiss the widely accepted assumption that English or other writing based courses are designed to teach language and writing in order to prepare students for other disciplines. This belief indicates that many professors do not recognize their courses as meaningful contexts in which language can be acquired because they think that students should have learned a language before. Zamel believes that students can acquire a language and develop their writing and reading skills only if they are engaged in the complex ideas of the course, are invited to participate in discussions, and are given opportunities to use different kinds of writing for reflection, articulation of their ideas and thought, and trying out the academic language. Consequently, she regards each classroom as a separate culture with its own expectations and conventions that can be acquired only through meaningful work that is built on students’ experiences and knowledge(8). Thus, Zamel encourages the faculty to look at learning as an ongoing and evolving process that can be supported by a meaningful course work, allowing students to grow through writing.
To better understand students’ needs and challenges with writing, Zamel asked students to reflect on their difficulties while composing in English. Students’ responses indicated that they were well aware about their needs as writers and pointed out the range of typical issues with writing, such as being too careful with choosing words, inability to express their thoughts, intrusion of other language when thinking about a given topic, and unfamiliarity with a given topic. Besides, students identified patience and encouragement of their teachers as the key factors of their success and asked for more explicit directions for assignments and course expectations. Students were afraid that their learning progress was underestimated because of their writing, sometimes confusing and full of errors (5).
These findings were supported and deepened by two case studies of students whom Zamel followed through the courses across the curriculum. For example, Martha, a student from Columbia who majored in biology, suffered because writing was not a part of her science courses. Consequently, she could not express her thoughts, questions, and confusions about the content, and that undermined her learning of the new subjects and interest in them. “There was not a drop of motivation to enjoy my journey of learning. I felt illiterate at the end of the semester. I did not learn a single new word,” (6) reflects Martha on her experiences. On the other hand, Motoko, a student from Japan who majored in sociology, had a successful experience in her philosophy course where a professor used writing assignments extensively. Although she was still making mistakes in her writing, Motoko felt that she was given an opportunity to build her knowledge on the previous experiences and to actively engage into subject discourse through writing (7). Zamel’s research demonstrates that writing is an effective tool that helps students to acquire academic vocabulary as well as the content of the courses across the curriculum.
Zamel argues that the multiple opportunities for writing help students to explain the course material to themselves, to establish connections between their experiences and learned information, and to discover their own thinking. She proposes a range of writing-to-learn assignments that can be easily incorporated into different classrooms. For example, a “one minute paper” written at the end of the class describing learned topics and points of confusion can be a source of establishing students’ needs and direction of future instruction. Also, journal assignments can help students to develop their critical thinking and active reading when they are responding in written form to course readings or particular questions. Another way to engage students in the meaningful use of language is a double-entry journal that gives an opportunity to respond to the passages that drew students’ attention. Through copying short passages of text in one column and writing their responses in another, students connect to their readings, learn academic language, and compile different course readings together. Besides, ungraded in-class writing can help students to construct their point of view and become an active participant of a class discussion. As a result of writing-to-learn assignments, students begin to understand that reading is not a passive activity, but rather “literally a process of composing” (13).
In addition to writing-to-learn assignments, the teacher’s explicit expectations about the course and a constructive feedback to students’ writing can promote learning. Zamel suggests teachers to test their assignments by asking questions about the purpose of writing or reading, expectations about the students work, the extend of guidance provided to students. The deep analysis of the task and explicitly stated requirements can prevent assignment ambiguity and students’ difficulties with writing. Furthermore, the opportunity to draft and revise allows students to think and to write about their ideas in complex ways. On the other hand, it helps teachers to give profound feedback that serves to improve students’ writing (15). Zamels states that teachers’ responses to students’ writing in the form of error correction are ineffective and do not contribute to their progress over the period of time. She believes that the teachers’ goal is the reduction of mistakes (that very often are the signs of progress), but not their entire elimination because language acquisition is a multi-dimensional, complex, and context-dependant process. The mistakes can be reduced through error instruction, and the writing can be improved thorough asking students to review their own writing and clarify their ideas and thoughts rather than simply insert teachers’ markings in their work (16). For example, the samples of Edwin’s writing clearly show his progress as a writer as he is able to articulate his ideas more clearly while using academic language discourse.
In conclusion, Zamel’s article emphasizes the importance of writing across the curriculum as it engages students into the rich and interesting world of ideas, allows them to take risks with learning, promotes their growth as critical thinkers and active readers, and helps them to acquire the language of academia. Furthermore, professors’ understanding of learning as an ongoing process, multiple opportunities to write for understanding and sharing ideas, time for drafting and revising, instructive and meaningful feedback can greatly contribute to students’ academic success. Martha highly appreciated and supported the importance of writing in her own learning, “[w]riting about all these experiences helped me be a resilient learner and to reclaim my voice and love for learning in a foreign country. It is like a metamorphosis with no ending…” (20).
Monday, April 12, 2010
My Commentaries from the Course Blog
Consortium for Worker Education Class Visit
I really enjoyed our trip to the Consortium for Worker Education and our meeting with Joe McDermott. I was impressed by his liveliness, curiosity, and dedication to the people of New York. The only fact of placing seven thousand people into jobs for the last two years says a lot.
He mentioned the life-long learning movement that started in the late 1970s. I think that the philosophy of CWE is very close to what the movement advocates, namely "the freedom, opportunity and resources for self-learners of all ages, with their families and in community, to choose to learn what they want, when they want and how they want -- to self-learn" (http://www.creatinglearningcommunities.org/resources/lifelonglearning.htm). I looked at the description of the courses that are available at CWE, and they are incredibly useful and address a whole range of different needs starting form basic skills, computer literacy, service job training to French conversation-oriented classes and leadership development workshop.
Finally, it was pleasant to meet the man who helped to "save" our program. Thank you for this great opportunity.
Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose
I greatly enjoyed reading Lives on the Boundary because it is abundant in vivid images, lively and rich language, meaningful examples, and deep insights into the American education. I found many answers in Rose’s narrative about the educational opportunities for diverse student population, accessibility of education, students’ needs and the ways they can be fulfilled. The chapter on “The Politics of Remediation” helped me to understand the importance of tutorial centers and basic writing courses as effective means to address students’ difficulties with the required work of academia.
Also, I was struck by the politics of educational institutions that believed (and I suspect some of educators still believe nowadays) that “remedial “ courses and tutorial centers only waste the money on educating those “intellectually unwashed” students who do not deserve to be in college anyway. Rose describes the situation when the Tutorial center was almost closed under this assumption –it was regarded as the place unworthy to be housed in the university walls. I appreciate the struggles of many educators who for the last decades were working hard to defend students’ human right on education. It is sad that very often the ground for assumptions about diverse students with different backgrounds, languages and cultures, first generation students, adult students, single parents students is built on false believes, such as test scores and different measurements that are not properly analyzed. Besides, educators could not find a balance between the research and teaching parts of the academia and regarded the latter as a less intellectual thing to do. Thus, these attitudes created a situation in which the real needs of students – especially freshmen – are overlooked.
I agree with Rose that every person has an ability to succeed in learning if his/her needs and difficulties with academic work are understood and addressed. Rose himself is an illustrative example of that belief because he could only succeed in his studying with the help of responsive and sensitive professors that knew what he was missing, believed in his abilities, and were willing to help. So, the first step to overcome “literary crisis” is to understand the multiple reasons of students difficulties with learning, such as different belief system (Lucia’s issues with reading Szasz), misunderstanding of academic conventions (Marita’s plagiarism), fear to recognize one’s difficulties and shyness to ask for help (students that always succeeded before), loneliness and distance between professors and students (Kathy’s experience), different kind of skills that were required (thinking and applying knowledge, but not mere memorization), different from mainstream cultures, languages , and backgrounds (Rose’s own example), and different students expectations about the content of the courses. Furthermore, in order to help students to succeed, all professors should understand that they play an important and sometimes crucial role in the lives of their students who regard them as role models and are looking for help in the difficult journey of learning that they had courage to undertake.
Preparing for Success
“Adult educator Malcolm Knowles stressed the importance of providing instruction that addresses the needs and interests of adult learners. In his introduction to "Andragogy in Action" (1984), he presents an instructional model that builds on the following assumptions:
* Adults are self-directed learners.
* Adults have a rich reservoir of experience that can serve as a resource for learning.
* Since adults' readiness to learn is frequently affected by their need to know or do something, they tend to have a life-centered, task-centered, or problem-centered orientation to learning as opposed to a subject-matter orientation.
* Adults are generally motivated to learn due to internal or intrinsic factors (such as being able to help their children with homework) as opposed to external or extrinsic forces (such as a raise in salary)" (17).
I found the ideas of Knowles to be very important to keep in mind when teaching adults because his assumptions indicate how different children and adults are as students. Consequently, teaching adults requires different approaches that would take into account their experiences, needs, and motivation. The traditional content-centered classroom would not work for adults because it does not teach the skills that are needed right away in their workplace, at home, and in the community life. I think that it is central for adult education to teach how to learn, communicate, plan, organize, solve problems etc., rather than "deposit" simple and isolated facts or information. For example, we were talking already how much better the combined basic skills and vocational training programs work for adults who can see the real results in their lives.
It is interesting that adult learners are motivated by intrinsic factors rather than instrumental or extrinsic forces. I always thought that the most important reasons for learning would be to get a better job or to get a raise in salary etc., but not such personal matters as helping children with their homework.
I also looked for the definition of the word "andragogy," and found that it is defined as the process of engaging adult learners in the structure of the learning experience. The term is derived from the Greek word “andros” which is translated as “adult man” and “ago” which means “to lead." Consequently, andragogy means adult leading that is opposite to pedagogy which literally means child leading. The term “andragogy” was first used by Alexander Kapp, a German educator, in the 19th century, but only later it has been developed as a theory by Malcolm Knowles who published “The modern practice of adult education: Andragogy versus pedagogy”(1970).
It is a very interesting topic. You can find more information at http://www.uni-bamberg.de/fileadmin/andragogik/08/andragogik/andragogy/index.htm
Ruben Rangel’s Class
Thanks to Prof. Rangel for visiting us last Tuesday. I enjoyed the Freirean classroom in practice, but I found it a little intense because the True Word activity provoked us to open up and to talk about the conflicting situations in our lives. It felt like a counseling session in the positive way of the word that helped to identify where I am now and where I want to be. Besides, it created the sense of communion and made us "partners in crime" - the crime of learning together and from each other, but not individualistically.
I definitely see the place for this activity in my classroom as well as other types of Freirean exercises. I believe that any curriculum can be based on the problem-posing model of education even if some particular material is required to be taught. If a teacher believes in the horizontal dialog and sees students as partners in learning, then his/her teaching style will definitely reflect this philosophy.
Freire’s Ideas about Consciousness
Last semester I visited the Literacy Workshop, presented by Michael Orzechowski. Although we talked about Information Literacy, Freirean kinds of consciousness created a base for our discussion.
In the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," Paulo Freire talks about a lack of a critical understanding of the reality by the oppressed that makes them live in an imaginary world imposed by others. Only through the problem-posing education the oppressed can awake from that sleep in order to transform their reality and become critical thinkers with critical consciousness. Nowadays, critical thinking abilities seem to be valued in our society. However, we still hear words like "it must be true because they said it on TV" or "because it is written in that book." And how about the Internet, the reliable and unreliable sources of information?
In the "Education for Critical Consciousness," he identifies naive, magical, and critical consciousness. Orzechowski gave us an interesting handout with the examples of each one.
"In magical consciousness a person tends to feel fatalistic, needing to submit to some higher power, and rational considerations of causality are ignored."
For example:
"We saw what was happening for years, for decades [referring to current economic crisis], but we ignored or shrugged it off, preferring to imagine that we weren't really had it over the falls. The US auto industry has been in deep trouble for more than a quarter century[...]Even smart, proudly rational people engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the new power of the Internet and its New Economy would miraculously make everything copacetic again. We all clapped our hands and believed in fairies." Kurt Andersen, "That was Then and This is Now," in Time Magazine, 4/6/9.
"In naive consciousness a person that he/she is superior to facts, in control of facts and free to understand them as they please."
For example:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality based community,' which he defines as people who 'believed that solutions emerged from your judicious studies of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off... 'We are an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality...We are history actors...and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do.'" Ron Suskind, interviewing an anonymous aide in Bush White House, in New York Times, 10/17/04.
"In critical consciousness a person will represent things and facts as they exist empirically in their casual and circumstantial relations. It is integrated with reality and leads to critical action."
I though it will be interesting for you to read it. Sometimes I also find myself up in the clouds. Now back to earth!
“Can Good Teaching be Learned ?”
The article that I recently read in The New York Times can give some reasoning behind the steady increase in the High School Graduation Rates. One reason is that teachers give better grades than students really deserve (Humaira was also mentioning that), another reason directly refers to the quality of teachers' instruction.
I am posting just a short excerpt from the article "Can Good Teaching be Learned?" by Elizabeth Green that I found very interesting - and controversial. The whole article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
"...Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.
This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year.
That belief has spawned a nationwide movement to improve the quality of the teaching corps by firing the bad teachers and hiring better ones. “Creating a New Teaching Profession,” a new collection of academic papers, politely calls this idea “deselection”; Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, put it more bluntly when he gave a talk in Manhattan recently. “If we don’t change the personnel,” he said, “all we’re doing is changing the chairs.”
The reformers are also trying to create incentives to bring what Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, calls a “different caliber of person” into the profession. Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests — and firing those who don’t measure up. Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year. (The average pay for a teacher in Washington is now $65,000.) A new charter school in New York City called the Equity Project offers starting salaries of $125,000. “Merit pay,” a once-obscure free-market notion of handing cash bonuses to the best teachers, has lately become a litmus test for seriousness about improving schools. The Obama administration’s education department has embraced merit pay; the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which finances experimental merit-pay programs across the country, rose from $97 million to $400 million this year. And states interested in competing for a piece of the $4.3 billion discretionary fund called the Race to the Top were required to change their laws to give principals and superintendents the right to judge teachers based on their students’ academic performance."
What do you think about firing "the bad teachers" and replacing them with better ones whose evaluation is based on their students' grades?
“Can Good Teaching be Learned ?”
Hey Jane, I read that article, and I agree that the teaching techniques sound too much as belonging to the banking model of education. It seems that there is no place for the students in there, but just the teacher's image alone is in the center of learning. Besides, the "cold call" will only create unpleasant atmosphere of fear and worries among students who do not have what to say at a particular moment. Yes, this way the class will be quiet, but not because students are afraid to miss the teacher's words, but because they feel insecure. Is this a real learning? It is definitely not a Freireian classroom.
I posted the excerpt from this article as an answer to Mighty's question about the High School Graduation Rates. You can see it above.
Integrating Vocational and Basic Skills Education
Thank you Amy and Wynne for the great presentation. It was very interesting for me to look at the GED Bridge Program at LaGuardia from a different perspective: not from the inside - the classroom point of view, but from the outside - the administrative position.
I can situate it now in the wider specter of different educational programs. The GED Bridge Program is designed not only to prepare students to pass the GED exam, but also to transition them into the post-secondary education. Thus, it is a good example of a program that contextualizes basic skills learning. Besides, different services like financial aid and career counseling are explained and presented to students, so they do not have any difficulties when seeking help in those areas. We did not talk a lot about student services, but I find them to be one of the key components of students' success because they can help to plan further career steps and, the most important, to eliminate one of the biggest barriers, namely hardship with tuition payments. So, I find this integrated system (basic skills+career orientation+student services) to be an effective mechanism that facilitates students in moving towards college credentials.
If to speak about classroom environment, student-instructor and instructor-instructor relationship, I imagine constant communication, feedback and reflection network. Only continuous interaction can build an atmosphere that is responsive to students' needs and can help them not only with the short-term plans, but also with their longstanding goals.
The Stigmatizing of Non-English Language Speakers in the USA
I strongly agree that the discussion about stigmatizing of non-English language speakers is very important, and - unfortunately - usually ignored. I think that a better word for stigmatization would be discrimination on the ground of language and culture and that is against all human rights. It seems that it is very normal for many people in the US society today to judge and categorize others because of their accent and country of origin. Many times I was asked where I got that weird/cute accent from, and when I say Ukraine, people say:"Oh, Russia!" (It is the same that to say to an American that you are a Canadian.) After that the following assumptions are common: " So you must have many brothers and sisters in your family that lives in the place where it is always cold and snowy!" There are other questions also:"Do you have cell phones there? Does everybody wear golden teeth?" I feel like I want to say:"Hey, Ukraine is on the planet Earth!" Sometimes it gets even worse. One of my friends, an exchange student from Bulgaria, was looking for a summer job a few years ago. She was refused from one of the restaurants because of "all these foreigners that come,take our jobs, and American economy is getting bad." The whole "American dream" was a nightmare for her. She does not want to come for another summer and urges all her friends to avoid it. She said that the pink glasses that she saw the USA through got stepped on. Unfortunately, this bad image of "the land of freedom" will stay with her for a long time. Unfortunately,she did not experienced that great America, those great people that are not biased against others with an accent. Damage was done not only to that person, but to the image of the US abroad, to the country that is fighting for the democracy in the whole world.
These examples are another reason to fight with the prejudice against "something different" than mainstream views and myths. Education is the strongest and the most important weapon that can bring immediate results. It might seem like an impossible task, but a long journey always starts from the first step.
National Assessment of Adult Literacy 2004
The 2004 NAAL report is another proof of the common myths, such as "the USA is a monolingual nation" and, as a result, "only English literacy is worth being measured." Like many other reports, it ignores the fact that for just the decade of 1990-2000 about 9.1 million immigrants entered the USA (according to U.S. Census Bureau, 2002). Although it is just 3.2% of the total population of the US, it is a huge number that equals the entire population of Sweden, for example. If we look closer, the other numbers in the USA today are striking: 37.7 million are foreign born, and 55.1 million speak a language other than English at home (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ ACSSAFFFacts?_submenuId=factsheet_1&_sse=on). The latter number alone - either bilingual or monolingual in a language other than English - represents 19.6 percent of the US population. It means that a "national" survey of US adults' literacies did not notice a few dozen millions people that stay "transparent" for the policy makers as well. Let's just pretend that they do not exist!
That is why I think that the numbers of US adults' literacies fail to represent the real picture, as they do not take into account the literacy level in other languages. For an ill person, a wrong diagnosis can bring great suffering or even death. Unrealistic numbers, as history shows, can only aggravate the problems that already exist and impose ineffective policies that fail to benefit the nation as well as the particular individuals.
I really enjoyed our trip to the Consortium for Worker Education and our meeting with Joe McDermott. I was impressed by his liveliness, curiosity, and dedication to the people of New York. The only fact of placing seven thousand people into jobs for the last two years says a lot.
He mentioned the life-long learning movement that started in the late 1970s. I think that the philosophy of CWE is very close to what the movement advocates, namely "the freedom, opportunity and resources for self-learners of all ages, with their families and in community, to choose to learn what they want, when they want and how they want -- to self-learn" (http://www.creatinglearningcommunities.org/resources/lifelonglearning.htm). I looked at the description of the courses that are available at CWE, and they are incredibly useful and address a whole range of different needs starting form basic skills, computer literacy, service job training to French conversation-oriented classes and leadership development workshop.
Finally, it was pleasant to meet the man who helped to "save" our program. Thank you for this great opportunity.
Lives on the Boundary by Mike Rose
I greatly enjoyed reading Lives on the Boundary because it is abundant in vivid images, lively and rich language, meaningful examples, and deep insights into the American education. I found many answers in Rose’s narrative about the educational opportunities for diverse student population, accessibility of education, students’ needs and the ways they can be fulfilled. The chapter on “The Politics of Remediation” helped me to understand the importance of tutorial centers and basic writing courses as effective means to address students’ difficulties with the required work of academia.
Also, I was struck by the politics of educational institutions that believed (and I suspect some of educators still believe nowadays) that “remedial “ courses and tutorial centers only waste the money on educating those “intellectually unwashed” students who do not deserve to be in college anyway. Rose describes the situation when the Tutorial center was almost closed under this assumption –it was regarded as the place unworthy to be housed in the university walls. I appreciate the struggles of many educators who for the last decades were working hard to defend students’ human right on education. It is sad that very often the ground for assumptions about diverse students with different backgrounds, languages and cultures, first generation students, adult students, single parents students is built on false believes, such as test scores and different measurements that are not properly analyzed. Besides, educators could not find a balance between the research and teaching parts of the academia and regarded the latter as a less intellectual thing to do. Thus, these attitudes created a situation in which the real needs of students – especially freshmen – are overlooked.
I agree with Rose that every person has an ability to succeed in learning if his/her needs and difficulties with academic work are understood and addressed. Rose himself is an illustrative example of that belief because he could only succeed in his studying with the help of responsive and sensitive professors that knew what he was missing, believed in his abilities, and were willing to help. So, the first step to overcome “literary crisis” is to understand the multiple reasons of students difficulties with learning, such as different belief system (Lucia’s issues with reading Szasz), misunderstanding of academic conventions (Marita’s plagiarism), fear to recognize one’s difficulties and shyness to ask for help (students that always succeeded before), loneliness and distance between professors and students (Kathy’s experience), different kind of skills that were required (thinking and applying knowledge, but not mere memorization), different from mainstream cultures, languages , and backgrounds (Rose’s own example), and different students expectations about the content of the courses. Furthermore, in order to help students to succeed, all professors should understand that they play an important and sometimes crucial role in the lives of their students who regard them as role models and are looking for help in the difficult journey of learning that they had courage to undertake.
Preparing for Success
“Adult educator Malcolm Knowles stressed the importance of providing instruction that addresses the needs and interests of adult learners. In his introduction to "Andragogy in Action" (1984), he presents an instructional model that builds on the following assumptions:
* Adults are self-directed learners.
* Adults have a rich reservoir of experience that can serve as a resource for learning.
* Since adults' readiness to learn is frequently affected by their need to know or do something, they tend to have a life-centered, task-centered, or problem-centered orientation to learning as opposed to a subject-matter orientation.
* Adults are generally motivated to learn due to internal or intrinsic factors (such as being able to help their children with homework) as opposed to external or extrinsic forces (such as a raise in salary)" (17).
I found the ideas of Knowles to be very important to keep in mind when teaching adults because his assumptions indicate how different children and adults are as students. Consequently, teaching adults requires different approaches that would take into account their experiences, needs, and motivation. The traditional content-centered classroom would not work for adults because it does not teach the skills that are needed right away in their workplace, at home, and in the community life. I think that it is central for adult education to teach how to learn, communicate, plan, organize, solve problems etc., rather than "deposit" simple and isolated facts or information. For example, we were talking already how much better the combined basic skills and vocational training programs work for adults who can see the real results in their lives.
It is interesting that adult learners are motivated by intrinsic factors rather than instrumental or extrinsic forces. I always thought that the most important reasons for learning would be to get a better job or to get a raise in salary etc., but not such personal matters as helping children with their homework.
I also looked for the definition of the word "andragogy," and found that it is defined as the process of engaging adult learners in the structure of the learning experience. The term is derived from the Greek word “andros” which is translated as “adult man” and “ago” which means “to lead." Consequently, andragogy means adult leading that is opposite to pedagogy which literally means child leading. The term “andragogy” was first used by Alexander Kapp, a German educator, in the 19th century, but only later it has been developed as a theory by Malcolm Knowles who published “The modern practice of adult education: Andragogy versus pedagogy”(1970).
It is a very interesting topic. You can find more information at http://www.uni-bamberg.de/fileadmin/andragogik/08/andragogik/andragogy/index.htm
Ruben Rangel’s Class
Thanks to Prof. Rangel for visiting us last Tuesday. I enjoyed the Freirean classroom in practice, but I found it a little intense because the True Word activity provoked us to open up and to talk about the conflicting situations in our lives. It felt like a counseling session in the positive way of the word that helped to identify where I am now and where I want to be. Besides, it created the sense of communion and made us "partners in crime" - the crime of learning together and from each other, but not individualistically.
I definitely see the place for this activity in my classroom as well as other types of Freirean exercises. I believe that any curriculum can be based on the problem-posing model of education even if some particular material is required to be taught. If a teacher believes in the horizontal dialog and sees students as partners in learning, then his/her teaching style will definitely reflect this philosophy.
Freire’s Ideas about Consciousness
Last semester I visited the Literacy Workshop, presented by Michael Orzechowski. Although we talked about Information Literacy, Freirean kinds of consciousness created a base for our discussion.
In the "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," Paulo Freire talks about a lack of a critical understanding of the reality by the oppressed that makes them live in an imaginary world imposed by others. Only through the problem-posing education the oppressed can awake from that sleep in order to transform their reality and become critical thinkers with critical consciousness. Nowadays, critical thinking abilities seem to be valued in our society. However, we still hear words like "it must be true because they said it on TV" or "because it is written in that book." And how about the Internet, the reliable and unreliable sources of information?
In the "Education for Critical Consciousness," he identifies naive, magical, and critical consciousness. Orzechowski gave us an interesting handout with the examples of each one.
"In magical consciousness a person tends to feel fatalistic, needing to submit to some higher power, and rational considerations of causality are ignored."
For example:
"We saw what was happening for years, for decades [referring to current economic crisis], but we ignored or shrugged it off, preferring to imagine that we weren't really had it over the falls. The US auto industry has been in deep trouble for more than a quarter century[...]Even smart, proudly rational people engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the new power of the Internet and its New Economy would miraculously make everything copacetic again. We all clapped our hands and believed in fairies." Kurt Andersen, "That was Then and This is Now," in Time Magazine, 4/6/9.
"In naive consciousness a person that he/she is superior to facts, in control of facts and free to understand them as they please."
For example:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality based community,' which he defines as people who 'believed that solutions emerged from your judicious studies of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off... 'We are an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality...We are history actors...and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do.'" Ron Suskind, interviewing an anonymous aide in Bush White House, in New York Times, 10/17/04.
"In critical consciousness a person will represent things and facts as they exist empirically in their casual and circumstantial relations. It is integrated with reality and leads to critical action."
I though it will be interesting for you to read it. Sometimes I also find myself up in the clouds. Now back to earth!
“Can Good Teaching be Learned ?”
The article that I recently read in The New York Times can give some reasoning behind the steady increase in the High School Graduation Rates. One reason is that teachers give better grades than students really deserve (Humaira was also mentioning that), another reason directly refers to the quality of teachers' instruction.
I am posting just a short excerpt from the article "Can Good Teaching be Learned?" by Elizabeth Green that I found very interesting - and controversial. The whole article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
"...Some teachers could regularly lift their students’ test scores above the average for children of the same race, class and ability level. Others’ students left with below-average results year after year. William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge. Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.
This record encouraged a belief in some people that good teaching must be purely instinctive, a kind of magic performed by born superstars. As Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute and a former teacher, put it to me, successful teaching depends in part on a certain inimitable “voodoo.” You either have it or you don’t. “I think that there is an innate drive or innate ability for teaching,” Sylvia Gist, the dean of the college of education at Chicago State University, said when I visited her campus last year.
That belief has spawned a nationwide movement to improve the quality of the teaching corps by firing the bad teachers and hiring better ones. “Creating a New Teaching Profession,” a new collection of academic papers, politely calls this idea “deselection”; Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, put it more bluntly when he gave a talk in Manhattan recently. “If we don’t change the personnel,” he said, “all we’re doing is changing the chairs.”
The reformers are also trying to create incentives to bring what Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, calls a “different caliber of person” into the profession. Rhee has proposed giving cash bonuses to those teachers whose students learn the most, as measured by factors that include standardized tests — and firing those who don’t measure up. Under her suggested compensation system, the city’s best teachers could earn as much as $130,000 a year. (The average pay for a teacher in Washington is now $65,000.) A new charter school in New York City called the Equity Project offers starting salaries of $125,000. “Merit pay,” a once-obscure free-market notion of handing cash bonuses to the best teachers, has lately become a litmus test for seriousness about improving schools. The Obama administration’s education department has embraced merit pay; the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, which finances experimental merit-pay programs across the country, rose from $97 million to $400 million this year. And states interested in competing for a piece of the $4.3 billion discretionary fund called the Race to the Top were required to change their laws to give principals and superintendents the right to judge teachers based on their students’ academic performance."
What do you think about firing "the bad teachers" and replacing them with better ones whose evaluation is based on their students' grades?
“Can Good Teaching be Learned ?”
Hey Jane, I read that article, and I agree that the teaching techniques sound too much as belonging to the banking model of education. It seems that there is no place for the students in there, but just the teacher's image alone is in the center of learning. Besides, the "cold call" will only create unpleasant atmosphere of fear and worries among students who do not have what to say at a particular moment. Yes, this way the class will be quiet, but not because students are afraid to miss the teacher's words, but because they feel insecure. Is this a real learning? It is definitely not a Freireian classroom.
I posted the excerpt from this article as an answer to Mighty's question about the High School Graduation Rates. You can see it above.
Integrating Vocational and Basic Skills Education
Thank you Amy and Wynne for the great presentation. It was very interesting for me to look at the GED Bridge Program at LaGuardia from a different perspective: not from the inside - the classroom point of view, but from the outside - the administrative position.
I can situate it now in the wider specter of different educational programs. The GED Bridge Program is designed not only to prepare students to pass the GED exam, but also to transition them into the post-secondary education. Thus, it is a good example of a program that contextualizes basic skills learning. Besides, different services like financial aid and career counseling are explained and presented to students, so they do not have any difficulties when seeking help in those areas. We did not talk a lot about student services, but I find them to be one of the key components of students' success because they can help to plan further career steps and, the most important, to eliminate one of the biggest barriers, namely hardship with tuition payments. So, I find this integrated system (basic skills+career orientation+student services) to be an effective mechanism that facilitates students in moving towards college credentials.
If to speak about classroom environment, student-instructor and instructor-instructor relationship, I imagine constant communication, feedback and reflection network. Only continuous interaction can build an atmosphere that is responsive to students' needs and can help them not only with the short-term plans, but also with their longstanding goals.
The Stigmatizing of Non-English Language Speakers in the USA
I strongly agree that the discussion about stigmatizing of non-English language speakers is very important, and - unfortunately - usually ignored. I think that a better word for stigmatization would be discrimination on the ground of language and culture and that is against all human rights. It seems that it is very normal for many people in the US society today to judge and categorize others because of their accent and country of origin. Many times I was asked where I got that weird/cute accent from, and when I say Ukraine, people say:"Oh, Russia!" (It is the same that to say to an American that you are a Canadian.) After that the following assumptions are common: " So you must have many brothers and sisters in your family that lives in the place where it is always cold and snowy!" There are other questions also:"Do you have cell phones there? Does everybody wear golden teeth?" I feel like I want to say:"Hey, Ukraine is on the planet Earth!" Sometimes it gets even worse. One of my friends, an exchange student from Bulgaria, was looking for a summer job a few years ago. She was refused from one of the restaurants because of "all these foreigners that come,take our jobs, and American economy is getting bad." The whole "American dream" was a nightmare for her. She does not want to come for another summer and urges all her friends to avoid it. She said that the pink glasses that she saw the USA through got stepped on. Unfortunately, this bad image of "the land of freedom" will stay with her for a long time. Unfortunately,she did not experienced that great America, those great people that are not biased against others with an accent. Damage was done not only to that person, but to the image of the US abroad, to the country that is fighting for the democracy in the whole world.
These examples are another reason to fight with the prejudice against "something different" than mainstream views and myths. Education is the strongest and the most important weapon that can bring immediate results. It might seem like an impossible task, but a long journey always starts from the first step.
National Assessment of Adult Literacy 2004
The 2004 NAAL report is another proof of the common myths, such as "the USA is a monolingual nation" and, as a result, "only English literacy is worth being measured." Like many other reports, it ignores the fact that for just the decade of 1990-2000 about 9.1 million immigrants entered the USA (according to U.S. Census Bureau, 2002). Although it is just 3.2% of the total population of the US, it is a huge number that equals the entire population of Sweden, for example. If we look closer, the other numbers in the USA today are striking: 37.7 million are foreign born, and 55.1 million speak a language other than English at home (http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ ACSSAFFFacts?_submenuId=factsheet_1&_sse=on). The latter number alone - either bilingual or monolingual in a language other than English - represents 19.6 percent of the US population. It means that a "national" survey of US adults' literacies did not notice a few dozen millions people that stay "transparent" for the policy makers as well. Let's just pretend that they do not exist!
That is why I think that the numbers of US adults' literacies fail to represent the real picture, as they do not take into account the literacy level in other languages. For an ill person, a wrong diagnosis can bring great suffering or even death. Unrealistic numbers, as history shows, can only aggravate the problems that already exist and impose ineffective policies that fail to benefit the nation as well as the particular individuals.
The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire
Viktoriia Dudar
Professor Barbara Gleason
Adult Language and Literacy
6 April 2010
The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire
A philosophical position of Paulo Freire, an internationally recognized scholar who viewed education as a crucial power behind social and economic transformation, is often described as “an amalgam of Marxism and Christian and humanist schools of Existentialism” (Thampi 92). His multidimensional approach to education, his views on inter-class relationships, oppression and liberation, history and culture are widely popular among educators, theologians, and researches in different professional fields for the last forty years; his critical pedagogy is continuously reinvented in the new sociopolitical contexts around the world. To better understand Freire’s contribution to the theory of education, it is important to analyze Freire’s life and professional experience, his key concepts of praxis, transformation of the world, problem-posing education, dialogical classroom, and the examples of implementation of his pedagogy.
Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, the northeast region of Brazil that was the poorest and underdeveloped area of the whole country. The social formation of the northeast remained strongly hierarchical: the small class of wealthy landowners marginalized starving population in the search for profit from the cultivation of sugarcane. The forests as well as wildlife were entirely destroyed on the coastal areas in order to free the soil for sugar production. As a result, the population of the northeastern Brazil suffered from a severe hunger, poverty, and a whole range of different diseases. Mies describes the situation as being critical: about 60 percent of population did not eat meat or drink milk; 80 percent did not eat any eggs; about 500 out of 1,000 babies were dying from gastric diseases; 70 percent of population was illiterate; life expectancy was 30 -33 years. Besides, in Recife the unemployment rate was about 70 percent; thus, prostitution (even among children) was in many cases the only way to survive and to support a family (1765). Freire, growing up in Recife, experienced hunger and poverty and that caused him to fall behind in school. Although he belonged to a middle class family, a German piano and his father’s necktie were the only symbols of their class affiliation. “Lourdes’s piano and my father‘s neckties made our hunger appear accidental,” writes Freire in Letters to Cristina (22).
After completing his secondary education, Freire went to Recife University where he studied philosophy and psycho-linguistic, working in parallel as a teacher of Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza, a school teacher, and his interest in education grew stronger. He was involved in the “catholic action” movement trying to explain Christian faith to bourgeoisie and later to the lower-class population. In 1959, he submitted his doctoral thesis to Recife University on teaching adult illiterates and soon became a coordinator of a literacy program for adults in Recife. In 1963, he accepted an invitation of the Brazilian government and became the Director of the National Literacy Program which was a part of a bigger mass education movement – Movimento de Cultura Popular. The main goal of the movement was not only to teach people how to read and write but also to educate them about their basic democratic rights and encourage them to vote (the illiterate population did not have the right to vote).
Freire started his battle with illiteracy in a small village of Angicos in the state Rio Grande do Norte. During a short period of 45 days, 300 workers were taught to read and to write, which was a great success of his program. It was planned to apply Freire’s method to educate the whole country, but the fast growing numbers of voters (90,000 new voters were added to former 80,000 in the state of Sergipe) who were organizing and trying to shift the political power and to change the well established social structure brought fear among political leaders. As a result, Freire was accused of “international subversion” and jailed for seventy-five days. He could not stay in Brazil anymore and was exiled to Chile where he accepted a position at the University of Chile and implemented his literacy method. At that time he wrote about his Brazilian experience in Education: the Practice of Freedom, described his Chilean work in Education for Critical Consciousness, and completed Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In 1969, he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and a year later Freire became a special consultant to the Office of Education at the World Council of Churches in Geneva. He was involved in education programs in Peru, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Guinea-Bissau and received the UNESCO Prize for Education. After fifteen years in exile, Freire was able to return to Brazil where he died in May of 1997 (Mackie 3-8; Mies 1764-1766). Through his life, his books, and his teaching, Freire left a precious legacy to the world.
Freire developed his concept of education as a practice of freedom from a critical reflection on various adult education projects that he undertook in Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s and in Chile in the late 1960s. He believes that illiteracy is a result of dehumanization of the world through oppression of workers and peasants by the ruling elites. Freire regards dehumanization as a historical fact that can be changed because it is “not a given destiny but a result of an unjust order” (Freire, Pedagogy 44). Consequently, illiteracy can be overcome by liberation of the masses through education that has transformational character. First of all, through learning to read and write, the oppressed develop critical awareness of the unjust social order, of themselves, and of their own place within the class society. Secondly, they begin to transform the society that regards them as mere objects of manipulation (Freire, Pedagogy 54). Transformation is achieved through praxis – “the process of action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (Freire, Pedagogy 79) – that is central to the humanization and liberation of the world. Freire compares liberation with childbirth because it is painful when people often experience fear of freedom as a result of continuous oppression and their identification with the oppressor (Pedagogy 49). This fear can be overcome through a collective struggle stimulated by education against the existing social relations.
Freire maintains that education is never neutral, and it serves either for domestication or liberation of people. The former can be reached through the banking concept of education, and the latter – through the problem-posing education. The banking concept of education is a process in which the teacher is the subject and the students are objects to be acted upon (Pedagogy 73). Freire believes that “[e]ducation is suffering from narration sickness” (Pedagogy 71) because knowledge is considered to be a commodity that belongs only to the chosen ones who have a power to teach it to ignorant masses. People are taught to accept what is handed down to them by the elite (oppressors) and are kept in ignorance and silence. Thus, the teacher is the depositor, and the students are the depositories that can only passively receive and store information. As a result, this education helps the oppressors to maintain the existing social order through mythicizing of reality and by imposing the passive role on the students who adapt to the world without even a though about its transformation - “the individual is spectator, not re-creator” (Freire, Pedagogy 75). As an alternative, Freire introduces the problem-posing education that is the practice of freedom, not the practice of domination. This method embodies a two-ways communication which leads to the true knowledge through the critical perception of reality. It is based on creativity and “stimulates reflection and action upon reality” that leads to awareness about “the unfinished character of human beings” (Freire, Pedagogy 84). The problem-posing education cannot serve the needs of the oppressor because it is “a humanist and liberating praxis” (Freire, Pedagogy 86) that enables the teacher and the students to become the subjects of an education that demythicizes the world and frees from oppression.
The main way through which the problem-posing education is carried out is dialogue. Freire believes that the word that consists of two elements such as reflection and action is the essence of dialogue. If one of the elements is underrepresented, the other one suffers immediately. For example, if the word lacks action, it is changed into “idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating ‘blah’” (Freire, Pedagogy 87). On the other hand, the word without reflection becomes activism that leads to the reduction and absence of dialogue. Freire states that “to speak a true word is to transform the world” (Pedagogy 87) through naming the reality (reflection) and changing it (action). Furthermore, dialogue is nourished by love for the world and for people, by humility that helps to acknowledge equality with everybody else but not superiority, by faith in humanization of the world through its transformation, by hope that inspires the battle for transformation of the world, and by critical thinking that views reality as a process but not as a static phenomenon (Freire, Pedagogy 89-92). Freire believes that only dialogue is capable of generating critical thinking and opposes naïve and magical thinking as the means of dehumanization of the world. For example, in Education for Critical Consciousness, Freire states that “[c]ritical consciousness is integrated with reality; naïve consciousness superimposes itself on reality; and fanatical consciousness, whose pathological naiveté leads to the irrational, adapts to reality” (44). He suggests that people can be helped to move from naïve or magical thinking to critical consciousness only through dialogical education that is implemented at the “point of emergence”. He refers to critical consciousness as conscientização which is the process of learning “to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Pedagogy 35). Thus, dialogue is seen as horizontal relationships between people that help them to reflect critically on the world in order to transform it. On the other hand, anti-dialogue involves vertical relationships that are loveless, mistrustful, hopeless, arrogant, and non-critical, and it does not communicate but creates communiqués, a one-way communication. Consequently, “[a]uthentic education is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B,’ but rather by ‘A’ with ‘B,’ mediated by the world” (Freire, Pedagogy 93). Furthermore, authentic education does not involve memorizing unconnected words and sentences, but stimulates critical thinking, self-transformation and social and political intervention into the surrounding world.
Teaching in Angicos is an example of an authentic problem-posing literacy program. Freire describes five phases that he and a team of educators undertook in Brazil in the early 1960s. A first phase consists of researching the words and phrases of the group with which a teacher is working during informal conversations. Freire emphasizes the necessity of the close emotional and direct contact with the people of the particular area in order to understand their habits, conflicts, hopes, and believes (Education 49). During a second phase, an educator chooses the most “generative” words that have phonemic richness, correspond to the phonetic difficulties of the language, and carry pragmatic tone that connect them to the social reality of the people, and thus generate the greatest amount of critical thinking. Freire’s team selected seventeen key words such as favela (slum), rain, plow, land, food, salary, government, sugar mill, etc (Education 82-84). In a third phase, a teacher creates coded situational problems in the form of drawings, slides, posters and cards. Then, people decode the situations through discussing particular illustrations, expressing their feelings, hopes, and disappointments, and connecting drawings to the situations from their own life. It helps them to identify their own problems and realize that there is a way to solve them. For example, when discussing the first situation Man in the World and with the World, people learn the difference between nature and culture, and discover that they can transform the world through their work (Education 63). Then, in a fourth phase, the agenda of a program can be easily modified according to the needs of the students (Education 52). A final fifth phase includes the preparation of the cards with the generative words that are broken down into phonemic families. For example, the word tijolo (brick) which is chosen after a discussion of situation of construction work is broken into syllables ti-jo-lo. Then, the initial consonant of each syllable is combined with other vowels: te-te-ti-to-tu, ja-je-ji-jo-ju, la-le-li-lo-lu, which is an example of a phonemic family for the word tijolo. From these syllable people were able to create words in the first night of the program (Freire, Education 54). Freire believes that the most difficult part of teaching a literacy program is maintaining the horizontal relationship of dialogue and viewing students as the subjects but not depositories that need to be filled with knowledge. Nevertheless, his approach was implemented in a number of different classrooms all around the world.
The remedial English program at the College of the Bahamas is a successful example of applying the Freirean approach to education. Nan Elsasser taught an experimental writing course to the group of the first generation working Bahamian women who went to college. Her curriculum was a result of collaboration between a team of educators who find traditional writing programs based on memorizing rules and filling in blank spaces to be ineffective for the future success in college and isolating because it excludes students’ experiences and knowledge from classroom activities. The combination of Freire’s pedagogy of developing critical consciousness through working on generative themes and Vygotsky’s theory of inner speech were implemented for teaching advanced literacy skills (Fiore and Elsasser 89). At the beginning of her teaching that corresponds to Freire’s first phase of problem-posing education, Elsasser learned about the Bahamas and her students through discussing their lives and schooling, investigated students’ habits of organizing their thoughts through the word association exercises, and asked students to give her advice about staying on the Bahamas through writing What You Need to Know to Live in the Bahamas essay. Although the students had difficulties with analyzing and incorporating broader information about their surrounding world, they started realizing similarities between their lives and responded to one another’s comments (Fiore and Elsasser 91). Her next step that corresponds to Freire’s second phase was selecting a generative theme through listing conflicting situations that the students suggested on the board and choosing the most important issue through voting. They selected marriage for their generative theme. Then, Elsasser and the students discussed marriage problems in the Bahamas and different readings on this topic that helped them to realize that their personal problems are influenced by the society that they live in. As a result, they could examine, make connections, critique the world around them, generate their own theories about writing mechanics, and rely in their writing on class discussions and readings (Fiore and Elsasser 93-95). During a next phase that corresponds to Freire’s idea about transforming the world, the students wrote an open letter to Bahamian men that was published in order to solve marriage issues that persist in their society. Furthermore, all of them passed the English exam, and that represented a big difference compare to the previous results – forty- five to sixty percent would usually fail this exam (Fiore and Elsasser 100-103). The success of this program shows that Freire’s approach to education can be easily adjusted to different contexts and needs of students and bring outstanding results.
Many attempts were made to implement Freire’s pedagogy in the third world countries by Freire himself and the educators who claim to practice his methods. His pedagogy became very popular during the Green Revolution when UNESCO and other international organizations were trying to increase food production by educating rural population through literacy programs that combined basic skills education with vocational training in agricultural field (Kidd and Kumar 26). However, some educators believe that Freirean pedagogy is very often distorted and his terminology and methods are used “without its substance as a smokescreen for the continued domestication of Third World peasants and workers in the interests of foreign capital” (Kidd and Kumar 28). For example, the pseudo-Freirean approach avoids the word “oppression” and focuses on “poverty” instead that is believed to be caused by poor and prevents them from better life; the actions of the dominant regime such as low wages, unequal rights and limited access to land and water are ignored. Kidd and Kumar name this concept a “culture of poverty” that can be cured only by changing the poor and educating them, but not by changing the social structure (28). They can be changed through awaking their critical consciousness that is defined as awareness of their needs and different resources that are available for fulfilling these needs. In other words, the poor are taught to see themselves through the eyes of their oppressors and accept their current state of being as natural and unchangeable which is the opposite of Freire’s idea about critical thinking. If the poor could increase food production which is very low because of their ignorance and inability to cultivate plants, then they would be able to end their poverty and starvation. La Belle describes this scenario as deprivation-development strategy that is used to change the behavior of the poor in the existing conditions as a solution to their problems which opposes Freire’s idea about liberation through breaking the social structure of domination (Kidd and Kumar 28).
The pseudo-Freirean method of education can be illustrated through the examples of some literacy programs designed by World Education organization in India and Thailand. The literacy program launched in Thailand in the early 1970s emphasized hygiene, birth control, and obedience to the authorities, ignoring any political or economic intervention by the poor. The main goal of this program was to improve living conditions of rural population by “attempting to correct misconceptions and to change the outmoded behaviors” (Kidd and Kumar 33) through informing masses. This approach opposes Freire’s dialogical nature of problem-posing education that treats students as equal partners in the educational process. “Liberating education consists of acts of cognition, not transferrals of information” (Freire 79). Likewise, a literacy program in India disregarded the economic and political causes of poverty and emphasized the ignorance of the poor as a source of their problems. For example, a Hindi literacy primer stated that “[e]ating rice has a bad effect on health” (Kidd and Kumar 33) without any explanation on why people cannot afford to eat anything else. Freire opposes this “prescription” character of education that implies “the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another” that is the form of oppression (47). These examples show how Freire’s name can be used to disguise the education that domesticates the lower-class population in some third world countries.
In conclusion, Freire’s belief in humanization of the world through liberation of oppressed constantly reminds us about the unjust social structure that domesticates through banking education and vertical relationships between people. However, his concept of problem-posing education is an effective tool in order to liberate ourselves and our students through recognizing our own position in the world, critically examining our conflicts and problems, and finally, transforming the world around us. In the modern world, where the global wealth increased six-fold, but the poverty gap between the poor and rich countries has also tripled over the last decades, Freire’s philosophy can become a powerful vehicle in the battle of humanity for its right to live as valuable members of the society who have their own opinion and are not just mere puppets on the invisible strings manipulated by the ruling elites.
Works Cited
Fiore, Kyle, and Nan Elsasser. “‘Strangers No More’: A Liberatory Literacy Curriculum.” Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Ed. Ira Shor. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987. 87-104. Print.
Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum, 1986. Print.
---. Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
---. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum, 2008. Print.
Kidd, Ross, and Krishna Kumar. “Co-opting Freire: A Critical Analysis of Pseudo-Freirean Adult Education.” Economic and Political Weekly 16.1/2 (1981): 27-36. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Mackie, Robert. Introduction. Literacy and Revolution, the Pedagogy of Paulo Freire. Ed. Mackie. New York: Continuum, 1981. Print.
Mies, Maria. “Paulo Freire's Method of Education: Conscientisation in Latin America.” Economic and Political Weekly 8.39 (1973): 1764-1767. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Thampi, Mohan. “The Educational Thought of Paulo Freire.” Social Scientist 2.1 (1973): 91-95. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Professor Barbara Gleason
Adult Language and Literacy
6 April 2010
The Pedagogy of Paulo Freire
A philosophical position of Paulo Freire, an internationally recognized scholar who viewed education as a crucial power behind social and economic transformation, is often described as “an amalgam of Marxism and Christian and humanist schools of Existentialism” (Thampi 92). His multidimensional approach to education, his views on inter-class relationships, oppression and liberation, history and culture are widely popular among educators, theologians, and researches in different professional fields for the last forty years; his critical pedagogy is continuously reinvented in the new sociopolitical contexts around the world. To better understand Freire’s contribution to the theory of education, it is important to analyze Freire’s life and professional experience, his key concepts of praxis, transformation of the world, problem-posing education, dialogical classroom, and the examples of implementation of his pedagogy.
Paulo Freire was born in 1921 in Recife, the northeast region of Brazil that was the poorest and underdeveloped area of the whole country. The social formation of the northeast remained strongly hierarchical: the small class of wealthy landowners marginalized starving population in the search for profit from the cultivation of sugarcane. The forests as well as wildlife were entirely destroyed on the coastal areas in order to free the soil for sugar production. As a result, the population of the northeastern Brazil suffered from a severe hunger, poverty, and a whole range of different diseases. Mies describes the situation as being critical: about 60 percent of population did not eat meat or drink milk; 80 percent did not eat any eggs; about 500 out of 1,000 babies were dying from gastric diseases; 70 percent of population was illiterate; life expectancy was 30 -33 years. Besides, in Recife the unemployment rate was about 70 percent; thus, prostitution (even among children) was in many cases the only way to survive and to support a family (1765). Freire, growing up in Recife, experienced hunger and poverty and that caused him to fall behind in school. Although he belonged to a middle class family, a German piano and his father’s necktie were the only symbols of their class affiliation. “Lourdes’s piano and my father‘s neckties made our hunger appear accidental,” writes Freire in Letters to Cristina (22).
After completing his secondary education, Freire went to Recife University where he studied philosophy and psycho-linguistic, working in parallel as a teacher of Portuguese. In 1944, he married Elza, a school teacher, and his interest in education grew stronger. He was involved in the “catholic action” movement trying to explain Christian faith to bourgeoisie and later to the lower-class population. In 1959, he submitted his doctoral thesis to Recife University on teaching adult illiterates and soon became a coordinator of a literacy program for adults in Recife. In 1963, he accepted an invitation of the Brazilian government and became the Director of the National Literacy Program which was a part of a bigger mass education movement – Movimento de Cultura Popular. The main goal of the movement was not only to teach people how to read and write but also to educate them about their basic democratic rights and encourage them to vote (the illiterate population did not have the right to vote).
Freire started his battle with illiteracy in a small village of Angicos in the state Rio Grande do Norte. During a short period of 45 days, 300 workers were taught to read and to write, which was a great success of his program. It was planned to apply Freire’s method to educate the whole country, but the fast growing numbers of voters (90,000 new voters were added to former 80,000 in the state of Sergipe) who were organizing and trying to shift the political power and to change the well established social structure brought fear among political leaders. As a result, Freire was accused of “international subversion” and jailed for seventy-five days. He could not stay in Brazil anymore and was exiled to Chile where he accepted a position at the University of Chile and implemented his literacy method. At that time he wrote about his Brazilian experience in Education: the Practice of Freedom, described his Chilean work in Education for Critical Consciousness, and completed Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In 1969, he was a visiting professor at Harvard University, and a year later Freire became a special consultant to the Office of Education at the World Council of Churches in Geneva. He was involved in education programs in Peru, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Guinea-Bissau and received the UNESCO Prize for Education. After fifteen years in exile, Freire was able to return to Brazil where he died in May of 1997 (Mackie 3-8; Mies 1764-1766). Through his life, his books, and his teaching, Freire left a precious legacy to the world.
Freire developed his concept of education as a practice of freedom from a critical reflection on various adult education projects that he undertook in Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s and in Chile in the late 1960s. He believes that illiteracy is a result of dehumanization of the world through oppression of workers and peasants by the ruling elites. Freire regards dehumanization as a historical fact that can be changed because it is “not a given destiny but a result of an unjust order” (Freire, Pedagogy 44). Consequently, illiteracy can be overcome by liberation of the masses through education that has transformational character. First of all, through learning to read and write, the oppressed develop critical awareness of the unjust social order, of themselves, and of their own place within the class society. Secondly, they begin to transform the society that regards them as mere objects of manipulation (Freire, Pedagogy 54). Transformation is achieved through praxis – “the process of action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (Freire, Pedagogy 79) – that is central to the humanization and liberation of the world. Freire compares liberation with childbirth because it is painful when people often experience fear of freedom as a result of continuous oppression and their identification with the oppressor (Pedagogy 49). This fear can be overcome through a collective struggle stimulated by education against the existing social relations.
Freire maintains that education is never neutral, and it serves either for domestication or liberation of people. The former can be reached through the banking concept of education, and the latter – through the problem-posing education. The banking concept of education is a process in which the teacher is the subject and the students are objects to be acted upon (Pedagogy 73). Freire believes that “[e]ducation is suffering from narration sickness” (Pedagogy 71) because knowledge is considered to be a commodity that belongs only to the chosen ones who have a power to teach it to ignorant masses. People are taught to accept what is handed down to them by the elite (oppressors) and are kept in ignorance and silence. Thus, the teacher is the depositor, and the students are the depositories that can only passively receive and store information. As a result, this education helps the oppressors to maintain the existing social order through mythicizing of reality and by imposing the passive role on the students who adapt to the world without even a though about its transformation - “the individual is spectator, not re-creator” (Freire, Pedagogy 75). As an alternative, Freire introduces the problem-posing education that is the practice of freedom, not the practice of domination. This method embodies a two-ways communication which leads to the true knowledge through the critical perception of reality. It is based on creativity and “stimulates reflection and action upon reality” that leads to awareness about “the unfinished character of human beings” (Freire, Pedagogy 84). The problem-posing education cannot serve the needs of the oppressor because it is “a humanist and liberating praxis” (Freire, Pedagogy 86) that enables the teacher and the students to become the subjects of an education that demythicizes the world and frees from oppression.
The main way through which the problem-posing education is carried out is dialogue. Freire believes that the word that consists of two elements such as reflection and action is the essence of dialogue. If one of the elements is underrepresented, the other one suffers immediately. For example, if the word lacks action, it is changed into “idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating ‘blah’” (Freire, Pedagogy 87). On the other hand, the word without reflection becomes activism that leads to the reduction and absence of dialogue. Freire states that “to speak a true word is to transform the world” (Pedagogy 87) through naming the reality (reflection) and changing it (action). Furthermore, dialogue is nourished by love for the world and for people, by humility that helps to acknowledge equality with everybody else but not superiority, by faith in humanization of the world through its transformation, by hope that inspires the battle for transformation of the world, and by critical thinking that views reality as a process but not as a static phenomenon (Freire, Pedagogy 89-92). Freire believes that only dialogue is capable of generating critical thinking and opposes naïve and magical thinking as the means of dehumanization of the world. For example, in Education for Critical Consciousness, Freire states that “[c]ritical consciousness is integrated with reality; naïve consciousness superimposes itself on reality; and fanatical consciousness, whose pathological naiveté leads to the irrational, adapts to reality” (44). He suggests that people can be helped to move from naïve or magical thinking to critical consciousness only through dialogical education that is implemented at the “point of emergence”. He refers to critical consciousness as conscientização which is the process of learning “to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Pedagogy 35). Thus, dialogue is seen as horizontal relationships between people that help them to reflect critically on the world in order to transform it. On the other hand, anti-dialogue involves vertical relationships that are loveless, mistrustful, hopeless, arrogant, and non-critical, and it does not communicate but creates communiqués, a one-way communication. Consequently, “[a]uthentic education is not carried on by ‘A’ for ‘B’ or by ‘A’ about ‘B,’ but rather by ‘A’ with ‘B,’ mediated by the world” (Freire, Pedagogy 93). Furthermore, authentic education does not involve memorizing unconnected words and sentences, but stimulates critical thinking, self-transformation and social and political intervention into the surrounding world.
Teaching in Angicos is an example of an authentic problem-posing literacy program. Freire describes five phases that he and a team of educators undertook in Brazil in the early 1960s. A first phase consists of researching the words and phrases of the group with which a teacher is working during informal conversations. Freire emphasizes the necessity of the close emotional and direct contact with the people of the particular area in order to understand their habits, conflicts, hopes, and believes (Education 49). During a second phase, an educator chooses the most “generative” words that have phonemic richness, correspond to the phonetic difficulties of the language, and carry pragmatic tone that connect them to the social reality of the people, and thus generate the greatest amount of critical thinking. Freire’s team selected seventeen key words such as favela (slum), rain, plow, land, food, salary, government, sugar mill, etc (Education 82-84). In a third phase, a teacher creates coded situational problems in the form of drawings, slides, posters and cards. Then, people decode the situations through discussing particular illustrations, expressing their feelings, hopes, and disappointments, and connecting drawings to the situations from their own life. It helps them to identify their own problems and realize that there is a way to solve them. For example, when discussing the first situation Man in the World and with the World, people learn the difference between nature and culture, and discover that they can transform the world through their work (Education 63). Then, in a fourth phase, the agenda of a program can be easily modified according to the needs of the students (Education 52). A final fifth phase includes the preparation of the cards with the generative words that are broken down into phonemic families. For example, the word tijolo (brick) which is chosen after a discussion of situation of construction work is broken into syllables ti-jo-lo. Then, the initial consonant of each syllable is combined with other vowels: te-te-ti-to-tu, ja-je-ji-jo-ju, la-le-li-lo-lu, which is an example of a phonemic family for the word tijolo. From these syllable people were able to create words in the first night of the program (Freire, Education 54). Freire believes that the most difficult part of teaching a literacy program is maintaining the horizontal relationship of dialogue and viewing students as the subjects but not depositories that need to be filled with knowledge. Nevertheless, his approach was implemented in a number of different classrooms all around the world.
The remedial English program at the College of the Bahamas is a successful example of applying the Freirean approach to education. Nan Elsasser taught an experimental writing course to the group of the first generation working Bahamian women who went to college. Her curriculum was a result of collaboration between a team of educators who find traditional writing programs based on memorizing rules and filling in blank spaces to be ineffective for the future success in college and isolating because it excludes students’ experiences and knowledge from classroom activities. The combination of Freire’s pedagogy of developing critical consciousness through working on generative themes and Vygotsky’s theory of inner speech were implemented for teaching advanced literacy skills (Fiore and Elsasser 89). At the beginning of her teaching that corresponds to Freire’s first phase of problem-posing education, Elsasser learned about the Bahamas and her students through discussing their lives and schooling, investigated students’ habits of organizing their thoughts through the word association exercises, and asked students to give her advice about staying on the Bahamas through writing What You Need to Know to Live in the Bahamas essay. Although the students had difficulties with analyzing and incorporating broader information about their surrounding world, they started realizing similarities between their lives and responded to one another’s comments (Fiore and Elsasser 91). Her next step that corresponds to Freire’s second phase was selecting a generative theme through listing conflicting situations that the students suggested on the board and choosing the most important issue through voting. They selected marriage for their generative theme. Then, Elsasser and the students discussed marriage problems in the Bahamas and different readings on this topic that helped them to realize that their personal problems are influenced by the society that they live in. As a result, they could examine, make connections, critique the world around them, generate their own theories about writing mechanics, and rely in their writing on class discussions and readings (Fiore and Elsasser 93-95). During a next phase that corresponds to Freire’s idea about transforming the world, the students wrote an open letter to Bahamian men that was published in order to solve marriage issues that persist in their society. Furthermore, all of them passed the English exam, and that represented a big difference compare to the previous results – forty- five to sixty percent would usually fail this exam (Fiore and Elsasser 100-103). The success of this program shows that Freire’s approach to education can be easily adjusted to different contexts and needs of students and bring outstanding results.
Many attempts were made to implement Freire’s pedagogy in the third world countries by Freire himself and the educators who claim to practice his methods. His pedagogy became very popular during the Green Revolution when UNESCO and other international organizations were trying to increase food production by educating rural population through literacy programs that combined basic skills education with vocational training in agricultural field (Kidd and Kumar 26). However, some educators believe that Freirean pedagogy is very often distorted and his terminology and methods are used “without its substance as a smokescreen for the continued domestication of Third World peasants and workers in the interests of foreign capital” (Kidd and Kumar 28). For example, the pseudo-Freirean approach avoids the word “oppression” and focuses on “poverty” instead that is believed to be caused by poor and prevents them from better life; the actions of the dominant regime such as low wages, unequal rights and limited access to land and water are ignored. Kidd and Kumar name this concept a “culture of poverty” that can be cured only by changing the poor and educating them, but not by changing the social structure (28). They can be changed through awaking their critical consciousness that is defined as awareness of their needs and different resources that are available for fulfilling these needs. In other words, the poor are taught to see themselves through the eyes of their oppressors and accept their current state of being as natural and unchangeable which is the opposite of Freire’s idea about critical thinking. If the poor could increase food production which is very low because of their ignorance and inability to cultivate plants, then they would be able to end their poverty and starvation. La Belle describes this scenario as deprivation-development strategy that is used to change the behavior of the poor in the existing conditions as a solution to their problems which opposes Freire’s idea about liberation through breaking the social structure of domination (Kidd and Kumar 28).
The pseudo-Freirean method of education can be illustrated through the examples of some literacy programs designed by World Education organization in India and Thailand. The literacy program launched in Thailand in the early 1970s emphasized hygiene, birth control, and obedience to the authorities, ignoring any political or economic intervention by the poor. The main goal of this program was to improve living conditions of rural population by “attempting to correct misconceptions and to change the outmoded behaviors” (Kidd and Kumar 33) through informing masses. This approach opposes Freire’s dialogical nature of problem-posing education that treats students as equal partners in the educational process. “Liberating education consists of acts of cognition, not transferrals of information” (Freire 79). Likewise, a literacy program in India disregarded the economic and political causes of poverty and emphasized the ignorance of the poor as a source of their problems. For example, a Hindi literacy primer stated that “[e]ating rice has a bad effect on health” (Kidd and Kumar 33) without any explanation on why people cannot afford to eat anything else. Freire opposes this “prescription” character of education that implies “the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another” that is the form of oppression (47). These examples show how Freire’s name can be used to disguise the education that domesticates the lower-class population in some third world countries.
In conclusion, Freire’s belief in humanization of the world through liberation of oppressed constantly reminds us about the unjust social structure that domesticates through banking education and vertical relationships between people. However, his concept of problem-posing education is an effective tool in order to liberate ourselves and our students through recognizing our own position in the world, critically examining our conflicts and problems, and finally, transforming the world around us. In the modern world, where the global wealth increased six-fold, but the poverty gap between the poor and rich countries has also tripled over the last decades, Freire’s philosophy can become a powerful vehicle in the battle of humanity for its right to live as valuable members of the society who have their own opinion and are not just mere puppets on the invisible strings manipulated by the ruling elites.
Works Cited
Fiore, Kyle, and Nan Elsasser. “‘Strangers No More’: A Liberatory Literacy Curriculum.” Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. Ed. Ira Shor. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987. 87-104. Print.
Freire, Paulo. Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Continuum, 1986. Print.
---. Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print.
---. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary Edition. New York: Continuum, 2008. Print.
Kidd, Ross, and Krishna Kumar. “Co-opting Freire: A Critical Analysis of Pseudo-Freirean Adult Education.” Economic and Political Weekly 16.1/2 (1981): 27-36. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Mackie, Robert. Introduction. Literacy and Revolution, the Pedagogy of Paulo Freire. Ed. Mackie. New York: Continuum, 1981. Print.
Mies, Maria. “Paulo Freire's Method of Education: Conscientisation in Latin America.” Economic and Political Weekly 8.39 (1973): 1764-1767. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Thampi, Mohan. “The Educational Thought of Paulo Freire.” Social Scientist 2.1 (1973): 91-95. JSTOR. Web. 29 Mar. 2010.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
In Pursuit of Knowledge
It was a pleasant and challenging journey during my first semester in the Language and Literacy program. When I entered a classroom at the first time I did not know what to expect:I experienced mixed feelings of happiness and worrisome. But it turned out to be wonderful! I am grateful to my classmates and professors who gave me a great support and inspiration! Happy Holidays to everybody!!!
Reading: History and Modernity
Viktoriia Dudar
Professor Barbara Gleason
Theories and Models of Literacy
9 December 2009
Reading: History and Modernity
Reading process that seems so natural and simple to the modern person in the highly industrialized societies is just the tip of the iceberg that hides far more complex issues under the obvious appearance. The evolution of the silent reading, the approaches to teaching reading, and the interpretation of the text by readers will be discussed to better understand reading and the different dimensions of this phenomenon.
The Evolution of Silent Reading
Writing and reading are indissolubly connected, interacting and influencing each other. As a result, the modifications in writing transformed the way of the process of reading that evolved from aloud to silent.
After the Greeks introduced vowels, word separation was not longer necessary to make the meaning out of the text; therefore, Greece became the first ancient civilization to apply scriptura continua. In contrast, the Semitic languages, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic continued to be written with word separation to avoid ambiguity (Blake 94). Although Greek and Roman civilizations were most likely aware about the Semitic tradition of writing, they did not find any reasons to employ it because deeply oral and rhetorical societies were not interested in fast, comprehensive reading, and a narrow circle of readers, usually specially trained scribes or clergy, did not consider reading either necessary or accessible to the greater part of the population (Saenger 11). Furthermore, texts, especially religious, were meant to be read aloud in order to live and to bring meaning to people in contrast to the dead word on the page (Manguel 45). The absence of word separation,punctuation marks, paragraphing, tables of contents, and page numbering made the process of script deciphering toilsome and long. However, some instances of silent reading, such as Alexander’s the Great reading of a letter from his mother in the fourth century BC and St. Ambrose’s reading in silence at the end of the fourth century are recorded in the history as extraordinary events (Manguel 42). In the monastic communities that emerged in the fourth century, reading the sacred texts privately in the cell and publicly in Church were alternating with long periods of silence. However, not all of them could read, but all were advised to learn the texts by heart. To help those that were poor readers, the continuous text was divided into lines according to the meaning, so that the reader would know when to raise his voice and when to lower it, at the end of the sentence or thought. Manguel considers this method – by the name of per cola et commata – a primitive form of punctuation, since it also facilitated locating a particular passage in a text (49).
A dramatic change in writing happened in the seventh century when the Irish scribes copied spaces between words from the Syriac Gospels, which they were translating, in order to better comprehend writing. Blake states that this invention was “a major factor in the dissemination of new ideas about political and religious freedom, individual study, religious contemplation, and personal expression” (115) that occurred eight hundred years later. Furthermore, scribes developed punctuation that is still used nowadays and started writing comments between the lines to explain the ambiguity of Latin grammar, which was heavily inflectional; these changes led to emerging of silent reading. However, these innovations were not known beyond the borders of the British Isles until the tenth century, and became widely used only in the beginning of the thirteenth century (Manguel 50).
Silent reading brought significant changes in all spheres of life. First of all, it facilitated the spread of independent thought because readers could read privately even writings that were against widely accepted religious doctrines. Although silent reading encouraged critical thinking, it paralleled with evoking anger among governing elements that started implementing censorship of books spreading heretical thoughts. Consequently, book burning became a common routine in order to prevent heresy against church in the fourteenth century (Blake 104-105). Nevertheless, the spread of humanism and the interest in philosophy, science, art, and literature led to the revival of learning in Europe, known as the Renaissance. Vernacular languages underwent remarkable changes in grammar and in the way of transcribing. For example, during the late Middle Ages Old English changed from a heavily inflected language to an analytic language with more regular spelling that eased the act of reading. In addition, more works were composed in vernacular languages, so scribes started applying cursiva formata to accelerate the copying process. Moreover, many schools were opened where reading and writing was taught. As the result of these processes the number of people who could read increased enormously demanding cheaper reading materials. Partially this demand was satisfied by libraries that were significantly changed in order to accommodate silent readers. Besides the improving of the features of the text format, such as composing lists of subjects arranged alphabetically, using of titles, chapters, capital letters, colored paragraph marks, and cataloging of manuscripts, the users of libraries were forbidden not only to talk, but even to whisper (Blake 101-103). The spread of literacy led to the invention of the printing press in the middle of fifteen century, an event that opened even greater opportunities to the readers, contributing to the Western civilization.
The tumultuous history speaks directly to our modern world in topics of language and literacy, like teaching children and adults how to read, the relationship between a text and its reader, and oral vs. written culture, to name only a few. When my classmates and I had the chance to visit the Department of Rare Books in Columbia University, I started pondering upon the great length of time for the development of writing and upon how restricted writing and reading were for so many centuries. Silent reading could not have existed as a part of the human intellect should all these preliminary steps have not taken place.
If we think about the continuous and indissoluble connection between reading and speaking, remembering that Aramaic and Hebrew used the same word for the two “different” actions, we can probably better understand how we relate to a text on a page in comparison with how the previous generations did. Humanity advanced from reading a text aloud towards inner utterance, thenceforth towards a text with a fixed system of graphems that can be full of information, but also (and most importantly) a springboard for the reader’s own inner reflection, connecting what he reads with his previous experience. The reader not only gives life to the “dead” text on a page, but he also brings his personal interpretation through his unique experience. Silent reading deprives us from one level of transmitting meaning (voice inflections, tone, volume, rhythm, accent, and color), but gives us a different way of understanding. It can be facilitated by punctuation alongside with previous experience that help a reader nowadays to construct the meaning of the text: as Winterowd states, “[t]he information brought to the text will make even blurred type more readable!” (70). He presents three cues in deriving meaning: grapophonic (connecting the written or printed symbols with the way words are pronounced), syntactic (the grammatical level) and semantic (60). Today, most of the readers derive meaning from a text without using their voice, but when the text is too difficult to apprehend, they start sounding it out. Nevertheless, these cues are mandatory in learning how to read and how to understand a text.
The history of reading is of a vital importance to humankind, if we realize that it repeats itself with every child and adult learning to read. Suffice to say, nobody is born with a reading ability, much less – silent reading. We all must acquire the alphabet first, slowly moving to syllables through vowels; the young reader’s first books are filled with words corresponding to images. The teacher makes the connection between the print and the oral, emphasizing the intonation that corresponds to the punctuation. Plain-voice reading of a student usually reflects little understanding of the text. The student, child or adult, struggles for some time with writing after dictation and several repetitions of each word in voice or sub-voice are needed before he can write it, but in this stage, words are morphing from oral to written and backwards without meaning. Another difficult step in teaching children how to write is the separation of words because they are inclined towards a certain scriptura continua (Saenger 2); the most plausible explanation is their inner connection with the continuous oral speech. The space between words not only facilitates meaning (and really long words slow us down or even “force” us sounding them out), but it also points toward the separation of words as units with a single meaning and pronunciation.
In conclusion, by comparing silent reading to oral utterance, the written text receives a new life and the relationship between the reader and the text becomes more personal. If we consider sound and voice belonging somehow more to an “outside” world, silent reading brings the text in our inner self, “next” to our own thoughts and experience, compelling their inter-action.
The Great Debate
For many years, scholars have argued upon which is the best approach to teach children to read. Two instructional approaches known as phonics and look-and-say have been the subject of the Great Debate for over a century gaining popularity at different times.
At the beginning of the 20th century educators agreed on the beginning reading methods, such as (1) emphasis on comprehension of the reading material from the beginning of reading, (2) stress on the silent reading, (3) reading of the stories about the every-day life that children can connect to their own experience, (4) encouraging to identify new words with the help of picture clues, (5) using phonics only in the remedial classes or implementing it very slowly while avoiding isolation and blending of sounds, (6) instructing children in small groups formed on their achievements in reading (Chall 13-15). Consequently, the look-and-say approach became predominant in teaching reading with the publication of basal-reading series such as Dick and Jane by Scott Foresman that were repetitive and highly predictable, emphasizing simple words that can be easily remembered.
Leonard Bloomfield, a distinguished linguist, criticized this approach in the early 1940s, and emphasized the learning of the letter-sound correspondence as the first step in instructing beginning readers. However, his theory was in the most part ignored until the success of Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read that defended learning of the alphabetic code as the first step in teaching reading (Chall 24). Flesch heavily criticized the prevailing methods of reading instruction and believed that the look-and-say approach is a “guessing game” where children try to guess words or wait for the teacher to identify them, and the real reading never starts because children easily confuse between such words as cow, horse, pig, sheep, and chicken (Flesch 16-20). He argues that for thousands of years, starting from the invention of the alphabet, people learned to read by memorizing the sound of each letter in the alphabet, but not memorizing the whole words as if they were logographs. He says that teaching of reading in the USA is “totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense” (Flesch 2). Furthermore, Flesch states that English is a purely phonetic system, but just with a few more exceptions in pronunciation than other languages that makes it possible to use phonics instruction starting by teaching words that spell regularly (12-13). Therefore, phonics instruction was accepted by parents as well as teachers that started embedding it into their classroom activities. Moreover, in many instances it was combined with writing, spelling, reading conventional basal and library books, and typing that resulted in appearing of other approaches, such as the Initial Teaching Alphabet, Moore’s Responsive Environment, Individualized Reading, the Language Experience approach, Programmed Learning and others (Chall 16).
Although the look-and-say and phonics approaches to reading instruction reflect very different underlying philosophies and stress very different skills, very few educators today would be strict advocates of either approach. Recent studies show that neither of these approaches produces high results when children are deprived of the reading material. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that reading performance for children remained stable despite the different approaches to reading education that have prevailed at different times for the last 30 years. But the strong relationship between NAEP reading scores and the access to print was revealed, and that indicates the importance of exposure to books (McQuillan 74). For example, McQuillan states that phonological awareness is largely the result of reading as well as a traditional basal method that produces better reading achievements in print-rich classrooms (43, 61). He believes that the key to improving reading among children lays in ensuring that they have enough meaningful reading material in their classrooms, libraries, and homes stating that “approaches heavy in print exposure are almost always superior (and no worse) than the alternatives” (McQuillan 61). This argument is continued in Parent’s Guide to Literacy for the 21th Century by Janie Hydrick where she introduces the notion of emergent literacy theory and emphasizes the crucial importance of literature-based reading programs and response to literature at home. Hydrick talks about opportunities for children to read and to listen to literature as well as frequent trips to libraries and book stores where trade books can be borrowed or purchased (Hydrick 48-54). Furthermore, she describes emergent literacy not merely as reading readiness, but as a complex idea of supportive environment that provides opportunities for children to practice different aspects of language and literacy, such as speaking, listening, writing, and reading, as a part of children’s daily lives at home as well as at school (Hydrick 42-43).
The approaches to teaching reading raised my interest because phonics instruction and the look-and-say method that govern reading education in the USA for decades were new ideas to me. I grew up learning the Ukrainian language that has exact correspondence between sounds and letters. Therefore, I was taught how to read through simply learning the alphabet and the correspondent sounds at first, and then recognizing the letters in the word, sounding them out, uniting them into syllables, and then into words. The phonics instructions were given mostly during the first year of school, and starting from the second grade I was practicing my reading through fables, folk tales, and rhymes. Only while reading Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham and other good-night stories to the boy whom I used to baby-sit, I came across pattern books and found them interesting and melodic.
Literacy will become accessible to all students only when teachers learn to identify the individual needs of every student and try to use the most suitable way of instruction. While both approaches shown above emphasized the importance of literature (available for children at home and in libraries), the debate itself presented how crucial the methods of teaching are, calling for teachers’ personal gifts and capacities in order to find the proper balance. As questions to myself, would I extensively engage the phonics method in my teaching or would I also use the look-and-say method? In what proportion? Which one should come first? Or maybe we can use them in parallel? The answers are indeed very complex, pointing toward an idealistic personalized method: traditional phonics or look-and-say philosophies do not represent the aim itself, but they are only meth-odos (Greek for “on the road to”) and the “perfect recipe” for teaching one child could bring very little or no results whatsoever in another one. In another words, there cannot be a universally effective method. While the debate itself does not carry an answer, it does raise awareness on how important the preparation of a lesson is: only through his or her personal experience, knowing the weaknesses of a class in general and of a student in particular, can a teacher start pondering upon the appropriate balance between phonics and look-and-say in a lesson. For a teacher, the “right” response can only come after the “right” question and “correct” diagnosis of the class. Another important factor in teaching reading is including it in the greater picture of emergent literacy, a broader way of acknowledging children’s interaction with many other aspects of literacy, taking into consideration their predispositions and motivators.
Teaching reading should not be left exclusively for a “specialized” environment and tutor; on the contrary, overcoming the breach between school and home, learning and playing, we can benefit in our methods of teaching. Alphabet games, letters and food (like cereal or cake), rhymes, songs and images are only few examples of potential support in one’s endeavor to instructing reading.
Reader Response
Shakespeare’s great plays and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy are two archetypal examples of understanding the world. They represent two different ways of thinking that are described by many psychologists and educators.
Blake describes two ways of apprehending reality, namely the narrative (fiction, poetry, plays) and paradigmatic (scientific, rational, abstract) modes of thought basing his differentiation on the theory of Elliot Eisner and Jerome Bruner. Eisner includes other arts besides literature in the narrative mode of knowing, calling it an aesthetic mode of knowing. The knowledge is acquired differently through these two modes of thought that “neither contradict nor corroborate the other” Bruner believes (qtd. in Blake 128): knowledge is created through narrative mode, and it is discovered through paradigmatic mode (Blake 125-126). Bruner states that the Western culture is closer acquainted with the paradigmatic thought based upon categorization and conceptualization than with the aesthetic mode that establishes knowledge through pleasure initiated by a form of art and through the structures created by this mode (e.g., a poem, a novel ) (Blake 126). In addition, the reading of informational and literary texts significantly varies: while the primary purpose of informational texts is to convey knowledge, resulted from observation, the approach to reading literary texts differed through years. Therefore, scholars distinguish three stages in a theory of literary criticism, such as: emphasis on the author and his or her aims (Old Criticism), stress on the autonomy of the work itself (New Criticism), and emphasis on the reader and his individual interpretation of a text (Reader Response) (Blake 143).
Reader Response theory lays in the heart of Louise Rosenblatt’s criticism of the old school that excluded human consciousness from the literary transaction. While emphasizing an active role of the reader in the construction of the meaning of the text, she introduces a transactional approach to explain the reading process based on the philosophy of John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley. Rosenblatt explains the interaction between reader and text not as simply a linear phenomenon, but as “an ongoing process in which the elements and factors are, one might say, aspects of a total situation, each conditioned by and conditioning the other” (17). Particular stimuli of the text that reader responds to evoke emotions, feelings, associations, ideas, memories of the past experiences, allowing readers to engage into the active and dynamic process of creating personal meaning that becomes part of one’s literary experience. Furthermore, Rosenblatt differentiates between efferent and aesthetic reading: when the former is concerned with the information inferred from the text, the latter refers to the live-through experience of the text (Flynn 59). Likewise, Winterowd introduces the notion of determinate (or stable) and indeterminate (or unstable) meaning believing that deep comprehension of a text goes beyond simply imparting of information and extends to understanding of emotions and values (71). He uses the example of the word “pornography” concluding that even the meaning of one word is “blurred” and can be interpreted dissimilarly by different people, “let alone a complex text” (72).
However, these ideas are doubted by some scholars who believe that text has one, stable meaning, intended by the author. For example, Hirsch states that only a single interpretation is possible based on the logic and evidence found in text (Flynn 62). Rosenblatt as well as Winterowd opposes an autonomous nature of a text stating that reading is a complex social interaction where a poem is “an active process lived through during the relationship between a reader and a text” (21) where every reader brings their own understanding. She vividly describes the importance of students’ personal response to literature that can be expressed at the beginning as an emotional ambiguity, the first step towards rational understanding (Flynn 57). Furthermore, Rosenblatt views literature first of all as the source of enjoyment and satisfaction from reading (74) that can be destroyed by educators who “place the screen between the student and the book” (61) by imposing accepted ideas about literature while depriving them of personal encounter with a text. When a teacher encourages spontaneous responses that do not have to follow a particular form and accepts the importance of the personal relationship to a text, the new enthusiasts of literature are born who are not simply passive “spectator sports” audience.
The topic of Reader Response is particularly compelling to me because of one simple reason: I love literature and very often respond to it with smiles and tears. I believe that while reading and constructing the meaning of a text, a person discovers her or his own inner world, feelings, emotions, and the very essence of her or his being unless the meaning is imposed by teachers, critics’ reviews or even peers. I think that the best way to read is to start from the original work without any background knowledge about an author or a particular epoch, and only after the personal “acquaintance” with text, some additional information, and sharing with others can only deepen one’s understanding. How often do we hear exclamations like “I did not even think about that!” or “Now I understand it!” when the class discussions help to establish the meaning in a particular community of readers. It indicates the fluidity of meaning that, as Winterowd described it, “is once again not in the text, but part of group consensus” (73).
In addition, for centuries the question of the “true” meaning of a text has been the matter of concern for humankind. The best example would be the Biblical text that is believed by many to have the only stable meaning. People’s lives were at stake when they “fall” into heresy based on their own interpretation of the Bible.
Also, the understanding of modes of knowing and the transactional theory of reading is crucial in teaching practice. Educators can greatly facilitate children in learning how to read and to write when they point out the different forms of text as well as the variety of their purposes. For example, if children are asked to write a poem about their Christmas holidays, it can be very helpful to emphasize that usually poems are the reflections of one’s emotions and feelings, but not a report about how many presents they received. Besides, teachers can significantly influence students’ attitudes towards literature making it a precious part of their lives or, on the contrary, just the work that has to be done in order to receive a grade and then never return to it again. The careful selection of reading material that connects to students’ lives, a class where every opinion is appreciated, and the interesting activities with a text like a “Jeopardy” game or prediction of the end of a story can awake curiosity and love to literature.
In conclusion, reading is one of the fundamental elements of literacy, and the mastering of this ability, in conjunction with writing, is the essential quality that is necessary for productive functioning and integration in the 21st century society. The better this process is studied, the greater the chances educators understand it and effectively apply their findings in spreading the universal literacy.
Works Cited
Blake, Brett Elizabeth, and Robert W. Blake. Literacy Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.
Chall, Jeanne S. “What the Debate is All About.” Learning to Read: the Great Debate. 3rd ed., Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996. 13-52. Print.
Flesch, Rudolf. “A Letter to Johnny’s Mother.” Why Johnny Can’t Read. 3rd ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1986. 1-21. Print.
Flynn, Elizabeth A. “Reconsiderations: Louise Rosenblatt and the Ethical Turn in Literary Theory.” College English 70.1 (2007): 52-68. Print.
Hydrick, Janie. A Parent’s Guide to Literacy for the 21st Century. Urbana: NCTE, 1996. Print.
Manguel, Alberto. “The Silent Readers.” A History of Reading. Viking, 1996. 41-53. Print.
McQuillan, Jeff. The Literary Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions. Fullerton: Heinemann, 1998. Print.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. “The Poem as Event.” The Reader, the Text, the Poem: the Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. 6-21. Print.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. “The Setting for Spontaneity.” Literature as Exploration. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983. 57-77. Print.
Saenger, Paul. “Introduction.” Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 1-17. Print.
Winterwood, W. Ross. “To Read.” The Culture and Politics of Literacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 57-83. Print.
Professor Barbara Gleason
Theories and Models of Literacy
9 December 2009
Reading: History and Modernity
Reading process that seems so natural and simple to the modern person in the highly industrialized societies is just the tip of the iceberg that hides far more complex issues under the obvious appearance. The evolution of the silent reading, the approaches to teaching reading, and the interpretation of the text by readers will be discussed to better understand reading and the different dimensions of this phenomenon.
The Evolution of Silent Reading
Writing and reading are indissolubly connected, interacting and influencing each other. As a result, the modifications in writing transformed the way of the process of reading that evolved from aloud to silent.
After the Greeks introduced vowels, word separation was not longer necessary to make the meaning out of the text; therefore, Greece became the first ancient civilization to apply scriptura continua. In contrast, the Semitic languages, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic continued to be written with word separation to avoid ambiguity (Blake 94). Although Greek and Roman civilizations were most likely aware about the Semitic tradition of writing, they did not find any reasons to employ it because deeply oral and rhetorical societies were not interested in fast, comprehensive reading, and a narrow circle of readers, usually specially trained scribes or clergy, did not consider reading either necessary or accessible to the greater part of the population (Saenger 11). Furthermore, texts, especially religious, were meant to be read aloud in order to live and to bring meaning to people in contrast to the dead word on the page (Manguel 45). The absence of word separation,punctuation marks, paragraphing, tables of contents, and page numbering made the process of script deciphering toilsome and long. However, some instances of silent reading, such as Alexander’s the Great reading of a letter from his mother in the fourth century BC and St. Ambrose’s reading in silence at the end of the fourth century are recorded in the history as extraordinary events (Manguel 42). In the monastic communities that emerged in the fourth century, reading the sacred texts privately in the cell and publicly in Church were alternating with long periods of silence. However, not all of them could read, but all were advised to learn the texts by heart. To help those that were poor readers, the continuous text was divided into lines according to the meaning, so that the reader would know when to raise his voice and when to lower it, at the end of the sentence or thought. Manguel considers this method – by the name of per cola et commata – a primitive form of punctuation, since it also facilitated locating a particular passage in a text (49).
A dramatic change in writing happened in the seventh century when the Irish scribes copied spaces between words from the Syriac Gospels, which they were translating, in order to better comprehend writing. Blake states that this invention was “a major factor in the dissemination of new ideas about political and religious freedom, individual study, religious contemplation, and personal expression” (115) that occurred eight hundred years later. Furthermore, scribes developed punctuation that is still used nowadays and started writing comments between the lines to explain the ambiguity of Latin grammar, which was heavily inflectional; these changes led to emerging of silent reading. However, these innovations were not known beyond the borders of the British Isles until the tenth century, and became widely used only in the beginning of the thirteenth century (Manguel 50).
Silent reading brought significant changes in all spheres of life. First of all, it facilitated the spread of independent thought because readers could read privately even writings that were against widely accepted religious doctrines. Although silent reading encouraged critical thinking, it paralleled with evoking anger among governing elements that started implementing censorship of books spreading heretical thoughts. Consequently, book burning became a common routine in order to prevent heresy against church in the fourteenth century (Blake 104-105). Nevertheless, the spread of humanism and the interest in philosophy, science, art, and literature led to the revival of learning in Europe, known as the Renaissance. Vernacular languages underwent remarkable changes in grammar and in the way of transcribing. For example, during the late Middle Ages Old English changed from a heavily inflected language to an analytic language with more regular spelling that eased the act of reading. In addition, more works were composed in vernacular languages, so scribes started applying cursiva formata to accelerate the copying process. Moreover, many schools were opened where reading and writing was taught. As the result of these processes the number of people who could read increased enormously demanding cheaper reading materials. Partially this demand was satisfied by libraries that were significantly changed in order to accommodate silent readers. Besides the improving of the features of the text format, such as composing lists of subjects arranged alphabetically, using of titles, chapters, capital letters, colored paragraph marks, and cataloging of manuscripts, the users of libraries were forbidden not only to talk, but even to whisper (Blake 101-103). The spread of literacy led to the invention of the printing press in the middle of fifteen century, an event that opened even greater opportunities to the readers, contributing to the Western civilization.
The tumultuous history speaks directly to our modern world in topics of language and literacy, like teaching children and adults how to read, the relationship between a text and its reader, and oral vs. written culture, to name only a few. When my classmates and I had the chance to visit the Department of Rare Books in Columbia University, I started pondering upon the great length of time for the development of writing and upon how restricted writing and reading were for so many centuries. Silent reading could not have existed as a part of the human intellect should all these preliminary steps have not taken place.
If we think about the continuous and indissoluble connection between reading and speaking, remembering that Aramaic and Hebrew used the same word for the two “different” actions, we can probably better understand how we relate to a text on a page in comparison with how the previous generations did. Humanity advanced from reading a text aloud towards inner utterance, thenceforth towards a text with a fixed system of graphems that can be full of information, but also (and most importantly) a springboard for the reader’s own inner reflection, connecting what he reads with his previous experience. The reader not only gives life to the “dead” text on a page, but he also brings his personal interpretation through his unique experience. Silent reading deprives us from one level of transmitting meaning (voice inflections, tone, volume, rhythm, accent, and color), but gives us a different way of understanding. It can be facilitated by punctuation alongside with previous experience that help a reader nowadays to construct the meaning of the text: as Winterowd states, “[t]he information brought to the text will make even blurred type more readable!” (70). He presents three cues in deriving meaning: grapophonic (connecting the written or printed symbols with the way words are pronounced), syntactic (the grammatical level) and semantic (60). Today, most of the readers derive meaning from a text without using their voice, but when the text is too difficult to apprehend, they start sounding it out. Nevertheless, these cues are mandatory in learning how to read and how to understand a text.
The history of reading is of a vital importance to humankind, if we realize that it repeats itself with every child and adult learning to read. Suffice to say, nobody is born with a reading ability, much less – silent reading. We all must acquire the alphabet first, slowly moving to syllables through vowels; the young reader’s first books are filled with words corresponding to images. The teacher makes the connection between the print and the oral, emphasizing the intonation that corresponds to the punctuation. Plain-voice reading of a student usually reflects little understanding of the text. The student, child or adult, struggles for some time with writing after dictation and several repetitions of each word in voice or sub-voice are needed before he can write it, but in this stage, words are morphing from oral to written and backwards without meaning. Another difficult step in teaching children how to write is the separation of words because they are inclined towards a certain scriptura continua (Saenger 2); the most plausible explanation is their inner connection with the continuous oral speech. The space between words not only facilitates meaning (and really long words slow us down or even “force” us sounding them out), but it also points toward the separation of words as units with a single meaning and pronunciation.
In conclusion, by comparing silent reading to oral utterance, the written text receives a new life and the relationship between the reader and the text becomes more personal. If we consider sound and voice belonging somehow more to an “outside” world, silent reading brings the text in our inner self, “next” to our own thoughts and experience, compelling their inter-action.
The Great Debate
For many years, scholars have argued upon which is the best approach to teach children to read. Two instructional approaches known as phonics and look-and-say have been the subject of the Great Debate for over a century gaining popularity at different times.
At the beginning of the 20th century educators agreed on the beginning reading methods, such as (1) emphasis on comprehension of the reading material from the beginning of reading, (2) stress on the silent reading, (3) reading of the stories about the every-day life that children can connect to their own experience, (4) encouraging to identify new words with the help of picture clues, (5) using phonics only in the remedial classes or implementing it very slowly while avoiding isolation and blending of sounds, (6) instructing children in small groups formed on their achievements in reading (Chall 13-15). Consequently, the look-and-say approach became predominant in teaching reading with the publication of basal-reading series such as Dick and Jane by Scott Foresman that were repetitive and highly predictable, emphasizing simple words that can be easily remembered.
Leonard Bloomfield, a distinguished linguist, criticized this approach in the early 1940s, and emphasized the learning of the letter-sound correspondence as the first step in instructing beginning readers. However, his theory was in the most part ignored until the success of Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read that defended learning of the alphabetic code as the first step in teaching reading (Chall 24). Flesch heavily criticized the prevailing methods of reading instruction and believed that the look-and-say approach is a “guessing game” where children try to guess words or wait for the teacher to identify them, and the real reading never starts because children easily confuse between such words as cow, horse, pig, sheep, and chicken (Flesch 16-20). He argues that for thousands of years, starting from the invention of the alphabet, people learned to read by memorizing the sound of each letter in the alphabet, but not memorizing the whole words as if they were logographs. He says that teaching of reading in the USA is “totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense” (Flesch 2). Furthermore, Flesch states that English is a purely phonetic system, but just with a few more exceptions in pronunciation than other languages that makes it possible to use phonics instruction starting by teaching words that spell regularly (12-13). Therefore, phonics instruction was accepted by parents as well as teachers that started embedding it into their classroom activities. Moreover, in many instances it was combined with writing, spelling, reading conventional basal and library books, and typing that resulted in appearing of other approaches, such as the Initial Teaching Alphabet, Moore’s Responsive Environment, Individualized Reading, the Language Experience approach, Programmed Learning and others (Chall 16).
Although the look-and-say and phonics approaches to reading instruction reflect very different underlying philosophies and stress very different skills, very few educators today would be strict advocates of either approach. Recent studies show that neither of these approaches produces high results when children are deprived of the reading material. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows that reading performance for children remained stable despite the different approaches to reading education that have prevailed at different times for the last 30 years. But the strong relationship between NAEP reading scores and the access to print was revealed, and that indicates the importance of exposure to books (McQuillan 74). For example, McQuillan states that phonological awareness is largely the result of reading as well as a traditional basal method that produces better reading achievements in print-rich classrooms (43, 61). He believes that the key to improving reading among children lays in ensuring that they have enough meaningful reading material in their classrooms, libraries, and homes stating that “approaches heavy in print exposure are almost always superior (and no worse) than the alternatives” (McQuillan 61). This argument is continued in Parent’s Guide to Literacy for the 21th Century by Janie Hydrick where she introduces the notion of emergent literacy theory and emphasizes the crucial importance of literature-based reading programs and response to literature at home. Hydrick talks about opportunities for children to read and to listen to literature as well as frequent trips to libraries and book stores where trade books can be borrowed or purchased (Hydrick 48-54). Furthermore, she describes emergent literacy not merely as reading readiness, but as a complex idea of supportive environment that provides opportunities for children to practice different aspects of language and literacy, such as speaking, listening, writing, and reading, as a part of children’s daily lives at home as well as at school (Hydrick 42-43).
The approaches to teaching reading raised my interest because phonics instruction and the look-and-say method that govern reading education in the USA for decades were new ideas to me. I grew up learning the Ukrainian language that has exact correspondence between sounds and letters. Therefore, I was taught how to read through simply learning the alphabet and the correspondent sounds at first, and then recognizing the letters in the word, sounding them out, uniting them into syllables, and then into words. The phonics instructions were given mostly during the first year of school, and starting from the second grade I was practicing my reading through fables, folk tales, and rhymes. Only while reading Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham and other good-night stories to the boy whom I used to baby-sit, I came across pattern books and found them interesting and melodic.
Literacy will become accessible to all students only when teachers learn to identify the individual needs of every student and try to use the most suitable way of instruction. While both approaches shown above emphasized the importance of literature (available for children at home and in libraries), the debate itself presented how crucial the methods of teaching are, calling for teachers’ personal gifts and capacities in order to find the proper balance. As questions to myself, would I extensively engage the phonics method in my teaching or would I also use the look-and-say method? In what proportion? Which one should come first? Or maybe we can use them in parallel? The answers are indeed very complex, pointing toward an idealistic personalized method: traditional phonics or look-and-say philosophies do not represent the aim itself, but they are only meth-odos (Greek for “on the road to”) and the “perfect recipe” for teaching one child could bring very little or no results whatsoever in another one. In another words, there cannot be a universally effective method. While the debate itself does not carry an answer, it does raise awareness on how important the preparation of a lesson is: only through his or her personal experience, knowing the weaknesses of a class in general and of a student in particular, can a teacher start pondering upon the appropriate balance between phonics and look-and-say in a lesson. For a teacher, the “right” response can only come after the “right” question and “correct” diagnosis of the class. Another important factor in teaching reading is including it in the greater picture of emergent literacy, a broader way of acknowledging children’s interaction with many other aspects of literacy, taking into consideration their predispositions and motivators.
Teaching reading should not be left exclusively for a “specialized” environment and tutor; on the contrary, overcoming the breach between school and home, learning and playing, we can benefit in our methods of teaching. Alphabet games, letters and food (like cereal or cake), rhymes, songs and images are only few examples of potential support in one’s endeavor to instructing reading.
Reader Response
Shakespeare’s great plays and Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy are two archetypal examples of understanding the world. They represent two different ways of thinking that are described by many psychologists and educators.
Blake describes two ways of apprehending reality, namely the narrative (fiction, poetry, plays) and paradigmatic (scientific, rational, abstract) modes of thought basing his differentiation on the theory of Elliot Eisner and Jerome Bruner. Eisner includes other arts besides literature in the narrative mode of knowing, calling it an aesthetic mode of knowing. The knowledge is acquired differently through these two modes of thought that “neither contradict nor corroborate the other” Bruner believes (qtd. in Blake 128): knowledge is created through narrative mode, and it is discovered through paradigmatic mode (Blake 125-126). Bruner states that the Western culture is closer acquainted with the paradigmatic thought based upon categorization and conceptualization than with the aesthetic mode that establishes knowledge through pleasure initiated by a form of art and through the structures created by this mode (e.g., a poem, a novel ) (Blake 126). In addition, the reading of informational and literary texts significantly varies: while the primary purpose of informational texts is to convey knowledge, resulted from observation, the approach to reading literary texts differed through years. Therefore, scholars distinguish three stages in a theory of literary criticism, such as: emphasis on the author and his or her aims (Old Criticism), stress on the autonomy of the work itself (New Criticism), and emphasis on the reader and his individual interpretation of a text (Reader Response) (Blake 143).
Reader Response theory lays in the heart of Louise Rosenblatt’s criticism of the old school that excluded human consciousness from the literary transaction. While emphasizing an active role of the reader in the construction of the meaning of the text, she introduces a transactional approach to explain the reading process based on the philosophy of John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley. Rosenblatt explains the interaction between reader and text not as simply a linear phenomenon, but as “an ongoing process in which the elements and factors are, one might say, aspects of a total situation, each conditioned by and conditioning the other” (17). Particular stimuli of the text that reader responds to evoke emotions, feelings, associations, ideas, memories of the past experiences, allowing readers to engage into the active and dynamic process of creating personal meaning that becomes part of one’s literary experience. Furthermore, Rosenblatt differentiates between efferent and aesthetic reading: when the former is concerned with the information inferred from the text, the latter refers to the live-through experience of the text (Flynn 59). Likewise, Winterowd introduces the notion of determinate (or stable) and indeterminate (or unstable) meaning believing that deep comprehension of a text goes beyond simply imparting of information and extends to understanding of emotions and values (71). He uses the example of the word “pornography” concluding that even the meaning of one word is “blurred” and can be interpreted dissimilarly by different people, “let alone a complex text” (72).
However, these ideas are doubted by some scholars who believe that text has one, stable meaning, intended by the author. For example, Hirsch states that only a single interpretation is possible based on the logic and evidence found in text (Flynn 62). Rosenblatt as well as Winterowd opposes an autonomous nature of a text stating that reading is a complex social interaction where a poem is “an active process lived through during the relationship between a reader and a text” (21) where every reader brings their own understanding. She vividly describes the importance of students’ personal response to literature that can be expressed at the beginning as an emotional ambiguity, the first step towards rational understanding (Flynn 57). Furthermore, Rosenblatt views literature first of all as the source of enjoyment and satisfaction from reading (74) that can be destroyed by educators who “place the screen between the student and the book” (61) by imposing accepted ideas about literature while depriving them of personal encounter with a text. When a teacher encourages spontaneous responses that do not have to follow a particular form and accepts the importance of the personal relationship to a text, the new enthusiasts of literature are born who are not simply passive “spectator sports” audience.
The topic of Reader Response is particularly compelling to me because of one simple reason: I love literature and very often respond to it with smiles and tears. I believe that while reading and constructing the meaning of a text, a person discovers her or his own inner world, feelings, emotions, and the very essence of her or his being unless the meaning is imposed by teachers, critics’ reviews or even peers. I think that the best way to read is to start from the original work without any background knowledge about an author or a particular epoch, and only after the personal “acquaintance” with text, some additional information, and sharing with others can only deepen one’s understanding. How often do we hear exclamations like “I did not even think about that!” or “Now I understand it!” when the class discussions help to establish the meaning in a particular community of readers. It indicates the fluidity of meaning that, as Winterowd described it, “is once again not in the text, but part of group consensus” (73).
In addition, for centuries the question of the “true” meaning of a text has been the matter of concern for humankind. The best example would be the Biblical text that is believed by many to have the only stable meaning. People’s lives were at stake when they “fall” into heresy based on their own interpretation of the Bible.
Also, the understanding of modes of knowing and the transactional theory of reading is crucial in teaching practice. Educators can greatly facilitate children in learning how to read and to write when they point out the different forms of text as well as the variety of their purposes. For example, if children are asked to write a poem about their Christmas holidays, it can be very helpful to emphasize that usually poems are the reflections of one’s emotions and feelings, but not a report about how many presents they received. Besides, teachers can significantly influence students’ attitudes towards literature making it a precious part of their lives or, on the contrary, just the work that has to be done in order to receive a grade and then never return to it again. The careful selection of reading material that connects to students’ lives, a class where every opinion is appreciated, and the interesting activities with a text like a “Jeopardy” game or prediction of the end of a story can awake curiosity and love to literature.
In conclusion, reading is one of the fundamental elements of literacy, and the mastering of this ability, in conjunction with writing, is the essential quality that is necessary for productive functioning and integration in the 21st century society. The better this process is studied, the greater the chances educators understand it and effectively apply their findings in spreading the universal literacy.
Works Cited
Blake, Brett Elizabeth, and Robert W. Blake. Literacy Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Print.
Chall, Jeanne S. “What the Debate is All About.” Learning to Read: the Great Debate. 3rd ed., Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1996. 13-52. Print.
Flesch, Rudolf. “A Letter to Johnny’s Mother.” Why Johnny Can’t Read. 3rd ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1986. 1-21. Print.
Flynn, Elizabeth A. “Reconsiderations: Louise Rosenblatt and the Ethical Turn in Literary Theory.” College English 70.1 (2007): 52-68. Print.
Hydrick, Janie. A Parent’s Guide to Literacy for the 21st Century. Urbana: NCTE, 1996. Print.
Manguel, Alberto. “The Silent Readers.” A History of Reading. Viking, 1996. 41-53. Print.
McQuillan, Jeff. The Literary Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions. Fullerton: Heinemann, 1998. Print.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. “The Poem as Event.” The Reader, the Text, the Poem: the Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978. 6-21. Print.
Rosenblatt, Louise M. “The Setting for Spontaneity.” Literature as Exploration. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1983. 57-77. Print.
Saenger, Paul. “Introduction.” Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. 1-17. Print.
Winterwood, W. Ross. “To Read.” The Culture and Politics of Literacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 57-83. Print.
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