All posts by plthomasedd

P. L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English), current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Brill), and author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means (IAP, 2019) and How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, in press). NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning (Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research) volume Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America (Brill, 2018). Follow his work @plthomasEdD and the becoming radical (https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/).
memoir, REM

Aftermath

But the stars collide
They’re beautiful and much maligned
In a universe where you see the worst
And it’s up to you to fix it

“Aftermath,” R.E.M.

I am not in Kansas…
Move back home with mom and dad…
My bedroom is a stranger’s gun room…
I can’t go back there anymore

“Not in Kansas,” The National

Dorothy’s journey in The Wizard of Oz was a quest and a mantra—”There’s no place like home”—but Thomas Wolfe has warned us otherwise, You Can’t Go Home Again.

I have been thinking a great deal about nostalgia, the urge to return to something from before, something assumed to be better and normal. The Covid-19 pandemic has coincided with my oldest nephew finally having the time needed to scan hundreds of family photos gathered after the deaths of my parents over a six-month period a couple years ago.

The images are haunting and fill me with nearly overwhelming melancholia. The newest and last batch of scans forced me to consider both the allure of back then and if any moment is really better; is there ever really such a thing as the good old days?

These photographs span decades and generations; many of the oldest black-and-white photos are faded, blurred, but they capture people mostly unsure of how to be while being photographed. There is an awkwardness that puts up masks to whether or not these days were more than the old days, but also “good.”

And family photographs are rich with babies and children, especially babies on people’s laps. There are two in the newest batch that I can’t quite fully process, babies on laps—one of my mother and me, obscured by finger prints, and another of my oldest nephew sitting on my mother’s lap, her beside my father in an eerily red-hued picture from 1983:

 

There are about 20-plus years between these images of my mother, and I am turned inside out by my parents’ faces, both looking away and appearing to be quite distant from the moment then in the early 1980s, there with the beginning of a life that will always be inextricably intertwined with theirs.

My oldest nephew, who we call Tommy on our side of the family, carried a tremendous bulk of the responsibility as my parents’ health declined and once they died. His earnest duty to them has persisted as he has scanned these hundreds of photos, I assume, in one effort to hold onto a home that we shared at different times.

I look at these images and feel like Dorothy:

Well, I, I think that it, that it wasn’t enough just to want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em. And it’s that if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. Is that right?

But I also know this to be misguided nostalgia—that you can’t go home again.

The urge to go back to seemingly better times is a powerful political message, however, one resonating in a different way in 2020 during a pandemic that has erased normal from most of our days and nights.

Political messages about reclaiming the good old days has had mixed results.

In 1996, Bill Clinton levered the future over the past:

“The real choice is about whether we will build a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past; about whether we believe our best days are ahead or behind us; about whether we want a country of people working together, or one where you’re on your own,” Clinton said.

But Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump have shared political success by taking the opposite stance:

“We ran on a theme: ‘Make America Great Again.’ And a lot of people are saying that may have been the greatest theme ever in politics. Ronald Reagan had a small thing called ‘Let’s Make America Great.’ That was good,” Trump said earlier in the evening. “I don’t like it as much. And he sure as hell didn’t use it as much.”

Those of us leery of the good old days often ask people to specifically identify when and what was “great” in the past, specifying the when but also acknowledging how it was “great” and for whom.

At whose expense is anyone’s happiness?

Bob Dole seems to have lost due to his failure to recognize that a nostalgia for a 1950s U.S. ignored that mid-twentieth century America was often anything except great for large populations of people not like him.

However, even as 2020 is a presidential election year, throughout the world, all of us are now confronted with wanting to return to normal, desiring through a haze of nostalgia to go back to the time before the pandemic.

I have been struck by how unfamiliar now images of crowds seem to me—major sporting events, music concerts.

I am reminded of going with friends to see The National in an outdoor venue in Pittsburg just after the Las Vegas mass shooting. It was a challenging and disorienting experience, but many of us simply attended the event to cling in part to something we considered normal.

It seems entirely reasonable in our current medical crisis to want things as they were before the pandemic. But it is also completely irrational to want to return to the world that brought us to this shut down.

Thinking everything was better in the past is not just nostalgic, but negligent.

Before the pandemic, people across the U.S. lacked health care and stable well-paying jobs. Those facts increased the crisis.

I have been looking through hundreds of photographs and missing the people and the times; it is a powerful thing to want to go home again.

But we can’t go home, we will never go back to normal.

In the aftermath of crisis, in fact, the greatest honor we can pay to our past is to move forward, better people and seeking the very best of Maggie Smith’s final lines to “Good Bones”: “This place could be beautiful,/right? You could make this place beautiful.”

education, Teaching, Testing

My Transition to Emergency Remote Teaching

Across my undergraduate and graduate courses in education, I stress the importance that all educators have a detailed understanding of the educational philosophies and theories that they claim to embrace as well as if their practices match those claims.

Teachers, however, are a practical lot, and most pre-service and in-service teachers resist my argument.

The somewhat abrupt move to remote teaching that has occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic has emphasized for me, again, that the value in educational philosophy/theory and how that matches practice cannot be overemphasized.

While my philosophy/theory and practice are well outside the norms of mainstream, traditional schooling—and that causes stress and anxiety for many of my students, at least temporarily—I was incredibly well prepared to shift my courses to remote and individualized structures within an hour of addressing my schedules (see foundations of education and scholarly reading and writing).

The entire transition is now being handled by email, smart phones (text, Facetime, phone calls), and the blogs linked above. I prepared no Zoom meetings and no video lectures.

In fact, the scholarly reading and writing course is not much different than it would have been without the shift except that we no longer sit together in the same room every Monday evening.

Here are the ways in which my educational philosophy/theory and practice have provided the foundation for moving quite easily to remote asynchronous learning:

  • While I am just noticing the online terminology (asynchronous v. synchronous), I have practiced individualized instruction (asynchronous) for the vast majority of my 36 years of teaching. Throughout my 18 years teaching high school English, I experimented with and refined workshop methods with both writing and literature instruction; therefore, my courses are often designed around students working on holistic and authentic products of learning that are developed over drafts.
  • Individualized instruction that focuses on authentic artifacts of learning is nested inside my larger commitment to student-centered teaching. I start with each student and genuinely place content and so-called skills secondary. I try to begin with student reactions (reflections on readings, drafts of assignments) and then drive instruction with what students know, what students do not yet know, and student misconceptions.
  • As a writing/composition instructor, I tend to function as a teacher by responding to student work as submitted; being “on” for students throughout the day and responding to student work as it is submitted may be stressful for some teachers, but I already function that way, which lends itself well to the necessary asynchronous nature of remote teaching.
  • My courses are supported by checklists, models, and support material that I always prompt students to use before they rely on my help; I see my overarching goal as a teacher as making myself unneeded, fostering intellectual autonomy in my students. “Take your time. You can do this on your own” is essentially the soft message I am whisper behind all that I do.
  • All of my courses are managed by a low-technology commitment; I am neither a no-tech Luddite, nor a technology evangelist. My courses are all on WordPress platforms, easily and freely accessible to anyone, not just students. My students and I already interact by email and through a fairly sophisticated use of Word (comments, track changes, etc.). This low-technology approach allowed me to shift remotely in minutes, sacrificing only a few elements of my teaching (which I discuss below).
  • I teach by inviting students to have shared experiences, but I do not suffer the illusion that those experiences can or will guarantee the same outcomes. I feel far more concerned about fostering ways of learning than covering and asking students to perform to a set of disciplinary knowledge. Thus, I have no standard lectures to video for students to view, although I often ask students to read shared texts that give us some foundation for thinking deeply or at least harder about topics.
  • Throughout my career I have been anti-grades/tests, but in the reality of traditional schooling, my approach is best described as delaying grades—although I do not give any sorts of tests. While many teachers are struggling with assessment (implementing tests, assigning grades on assignments) when moving to remote teaching, my portfolio approach (course grade assigned based on a final portfolio submitted of all work) hasn’t needed to be adjusted for my shift to remote teaching.

Yes, I have made the transition to remote teaching fairly easily; however, I am not suggesting that there haven’t been costs, things lost in the shift. Those losses and concerns include the following:

  • A key aspect of my educational philosophy/theory is that I am solidly anti-online courses; I remain a strong advocate for the traditional classroom structures in which teachers and students interact face-to-face. I am not convinced that the amount of face-to-face class time traditionally practiced is necessary, and I certainly practice a great deal of one-on-one conferencing. However, remote instruction can never match the power of in-person classroom dynamics.
  • Class sessions for me include two major structures: workshop or discussion. Workshop has transitioned remotely quite well, but I have abandoned the discussion element, recognizing that is a major sacrifice. Here, I must distinguish between remote teaching in a crisis and creating a course online (in which synchronous sessions over some App would allow discussion). In the Covid-19 crisis, I have elected not to add the stress of designated days/times to meet as a class. However, I genuinely cannot imagine that online discussions can meet the level of in-person class dynamics create, when we all can make eye contact and be “in the moment” together of discussions.

In one way, the sudden shift to remote teaching also fit well into my educational philosophy/theory that requires me to be vigilant about critical reflection on my role as a teacher, and a human being. I never see any of my practices as “fixed,” always in reflective flux.

The Covid-19 pandemic forced me to reconsider a course mid-stream, but I am prone to doing that most of the time any way.

My teacher personae is a contradictory mix of external self-assurance tempered by a pervasive fear that I am failing my students. As I worked diligently to transform my classes, I monitored my own practices against my educational philosophy/theory (checking what I had planned as well as what I revised and expected of students).

I remain, then, resolute in this belief: Our day-to-day teaching in so-called normal times always benefits from recognizing what our educational philosophy/theory is and how well our practices remain grounded in those commitments.

Epistemic Trespassing, politics

Epistemic Trespassing in Real Time: Peter Navarro, Economist

[Header Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash]

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has an impressive academic background:

Navarro went to Tufts University on a full academic scholarship,[9] graduating in 1972 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He then spent three years in the U.S. Peace Corps, serving in Thailand.[7][13] He earned a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University‘s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1979, and a PhD in Economics from Harvard under the supervision of Richard E. Caves in 1986.[13]

His political and academic careers as well as his primary areas of expertise include economics and public policy.

Recently, however, Navarro has drawn criticism for clashing with Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about Covid-19. Navarro has justified his disagreements as follows:

“I have a Ph.D,” Navarro said. “And I understand how to read statistical studies, whether it’s in medicine, the law, economics or whatever.” He added, “Doctors disagree about things all the time. My qualifications in terms of looking at the science is that I’m a social scientist.”

Navarro is demonstrating in real time both the existence and dangers of epistemic trespassing, embodying several of the qualities and conditions outlined in Ballantyne’s work.

For example, Navarro fits the basic definition by acknowledging his credibility lies in social sciences (economics) but he feels justified in speaking authoritatively on medicine:

Epistemic trespassers are thinkers who have competence or expertise to make good judgments in one field, but move to another field where they lack competence—and pass judgment nevertheless. We should doubt that trespassers are reliable judges in fields where they are outsiders.

Navarro also exhibits these common qualities:

Out of their league but highly confident nonetheless, trespassers appear to be immodest, dogmatic, or arrogant. Trespassers easily fail to manifest the trait of intellectual humility and demonstrate one or another epistemic vice (Whitcomb et al. 2017, Cassam 2016). Second, it’s useful to distinguish between trespassers holding confident opinions and investigating questions in another field [emphasis in original]. I assume it can be epistemically appropriate for people to look into questions beyond their competence, even when it would be inappropriate for them to hold confident opinions.

Once challenged, Navarro responded as expected:

Trespassers are a crafty bunch, of course, and they may resist reasoning in the way I’ve described. They may grant they are in one of the three reflective cases but insist they have not thereby flouted any epistemic norm. How could that work? For any particular trespassing case, the presumption that there is some epistemic trouble can be defeated by good reason to think there’s no epistemic trouble in the case. I call reasons that defeat the presumption of epistemic trouble defences [emphasis in original]. Defences are reasons indicating no epistemic norm has been violated.

Navarro embraced the third defense offered by Ballantyne: “(D3) I am trespassing on another field, but my own field’s skills successfully ‘transfer’ to the other field”:

I expect something like (D3) will be among the most common justifications given by trespassers. For example, Richard Dawkins (2006, p. 56) suggests that he does not see what expertise philosophers of religion could possibly have that scientists like him would lack; in his own eyes, his scientific competence apparently transfers to a new context where he can appropriately answer questions about arguments for and against God’s existence. Neil deGrasse Tyson may believe that his scientific training has taught him critical thinking—the only skill needed to answer philosophical questions. In general, if the trespasser’s expertise successfully transfers from one field to another, then the trespasser does not violate any norms related to lacking the other field’s skills.

With Navarro’s challenge to Fauci, we are witnessing that “[o]verzealous transfer can occur when thinkers mistakenly assume a new context is just like a previous one. … They are cautionary tales for how exemplary critical thinking in one field does not generalize to others.”

That skills may not transfer is grounded in “background knowledge is crucial for the successful application of skills in any domain (Barnett and Ceci 2002, p. 616), but trespassers often lack such knowledge.”

Expertise is a complex combination of skills, knowledge, and experiences; therefore, “how to read statistical studies” is simply not generic across disciplines.

Navarro’s doubling down also represents that “[o]ne hallmark of trespassing, however, is a lack of awareness of the failure to render good judgments”:

The Dunning-Kruger effect says that thinkers who are ignorant in a domain tend to be ignorant of their ignorance (Kruger and Dunning 1999). This is a bias influencing meta-knowledge. People who lack first-order knowledge often lack second-order knowledge about their lack of knowledge. Psychologists have described this as a kind of intellectual ‘double curse’ (Dunning et al. 2003). … Self-ignorance about trespassing is dangerous. Sometimes trespassers will have enough knowledge to give them false confidence that they are not trespassers but not enough knowledge to avoid trespassing.

Finally, however, Ballantyne’s confronting epistemic trespassing is not an argument for disciplinary siloing, but a call for awareness and greater care in situations where interdisciplinary input and consideration are not only common but possibly even necessary—such as in the workings of government and the formation of policy:

Researchers from different fields pull their chairs up to the table and try to arrange the pieces into a coherent whole. But these people have different technical backgrounds and vocabularies, different goals for research practice, and different perceptions of the problem. Presumably, the group could benefit from some guidance, lest their collaboration devolve into grabbing pieces and bickering over whose perspective is best….

…I’ve defended the idea that recognizing the risks of trespassing should often encourage greater intellectual modesty. Researchers on interdisciplinary collaboration have also affirmed the importance of something like modesty. For example, some researchers note that the ‘first step’ for cross-field collaborators ‘is to acknowledge, respect, and explore the diversity of perspectives’ (Hirsch Hadorn, Pohl, and Bammer 2010, p. 437). When researchers tackle together so-called wicked problems—from epidemics to poverty to nuclear arms control—they should presume they don’t have in hand what is required to hold confident answers to the questions, or even to know what those questions are. Their ignorance is what prompts the collaboration, and so they should begin the conversation knowing there are significant unknowns. My proposal is that many questions often not viewed as interdisciplinary call for a similarly modest response. We should be more sensitive to the inherent difficulties of confidently answering hybridized questions. At the same time, we may be encouraged by the possibility that cross-field efforts will enhance our understanding of important questions.

Navarro has little to offer about how the U.S. should confront a pandemic, but inadvertently, he has demonstrated the reality and dangers of epistemic trespassing, a moment in our nation’s history that may prove this to be more than mere academic “bickering” and a threat to human life.

See Also

Epistemic Trespassing: From Ruby Payne to the “Science of Reading”

science

Shame in the Time of Covid-19

Almost immediately, I noticed some disturbing patterns on social media when the U.S. began directly responding to the Covid-19 pandemic several weeks ago.

The “Covid-19 is a hoax” and “Covid-19 is no worse than the flu” posts on Facebook immediately appeared (and have mostly disappeared), but what is more concerning is that very garbled and oversimplified posts also appeared and continue to flourish.

Ground Zero of garbled and oversimplified social media posts, I think, was arguments over the danger of Covid-19 that focused on death rates (percentage of deaths among those testing positive for the virus). Focusing on this one stat (a complicated data point because it is skewed by if and when people are tested, a serious failure of this pandemic event) greatly misrepresented the why of the unique danger Covid-19 presents.

Most people missed the “novel” terminology (many corona viruses exist, but a “novel,” thus new, version distinguishes Covid-19) and subsequently rushed past the very complex set of reasons this pandemic is not like the flu or other reasons people die daily in the U.S. and throughout the world.

The real threats posed by Covid-19 include the unknown (death rates, who is at-risk, etc.), but also some very significant knowns—likelihood that medical facilities will be overwhelmed, creating greater death rates for Covid-19, the flu, and other situations that normally could be addressed; the complicated and difficult to manage spread of the virus (by asymptomatic people); strategies that work such as “flattening the curve.”

As the U.S. moves into a second month of social distancing, there is more known each day about the virus, and subsequently, there are also more data on how we are managing the virus as well.

Changing information has always been a feature of science and of being evidence-driven. Changing information has always deterred many people from listening to science and evidence-driven policy.

This is a deadly paradox for dealing with a pandemic.

It seems reasonable to acknowledge that science/evidence-denial is incredibly dangerous and inexcusable in a well-informed and so-called advanced society (recognizing that the idealism about the U.S. is not well supported by evidence on lingering inequities).

But a potentially as harmful dynamic is science/evidence evangelism, which is quickly becoming forms of shaming. Two of the most recent forms of shaming concern social distancing and wearing face masks.

As with Covid-19 broadly, the science/evidence on social distancing and face masks is complicated, but slightly different.

Data drawn from cell phones has created a state-by-state and city-by-city ranking of who is practicing social distancing and who isn’t. However, that data exist doesn’t mean that any data set proves what people immediately assume.

Raw movement data by cell phone use doesn’t control for rural versus urban settings, doesn’t control for socioeconomic status of the users (who can and cannot “choose” not to work), and doesn’t control for essential versus nonessential movement.

A common problem in science/evidence is that data can be less valid and credible depending on how that data are interpreted and displayed; also, when messages are made public is incredibly important.

Cell data were immediately used to rank and shame states and cities (thus, this message will likely endure), but once the data and messages gained traction, a more nuanced and less shaming message has emerged:

In cities across America, many lower-income workers continue to move around, while those who make more money are staying home and limiting their exposure to the coronavirus, according to smartphone location data analyzed by The New York Times.

Although people in all income groups are moving less than they did before the crisis, wealthier people are staying home the most, especially during the workweek. Not only that, but in nearly every state, they began doing so days before the poor, giving them a head start on social distancing as the virus spread, according to aggregated data from the location analysis company Cuebiq, which tracks about 15 million cellphone users nationwide daily.

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Denise Lu and Gabriel J.X. Dance add:

The data offers [sic] real-time evidence of a divide laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic — one in which wealthier people not only have more job security and benefits but also may be better able to avoid becoming sick. The outbreak is so new that the relationship between socioeconomic status and infection rates cannot be determined, but other data, including recent statistics released by public health officials in New York City, suggests [sic] that the coronavirus is hitting low-income neighborhoods the hardest.

The data are less about compliance and more about socioeconomic inequity and the false (idealized) myth of “choice” in the U.S. That choice is less about inherent character in people and more about privilege and anyone’s birth lottery.

Soon, we will have to confront that race/racism also pervades nearly every aspect of this pandemic, as Michael Harriot outlines on Twitter.

Social distance shaming is rooted in misunderstanding and oversimplifying data as well as careless data displays, such as charts and graphs.

More recently, since WHO and the CDC have begun to re-address guidelines on wearing masks, there is more mask shaming, which demonstrates once again that science and evidence are often complicated, but the media and lay people are apt to rush to oversimplifications, especially those who are science/evidence evangelists.

Similar to the initial message about the dangers of Covid-19 examined in the opening, what I understood about wearing face masks as the pandemic spread in the U.S. was not what most people said then or now; whether or not healthy or asymptomatic people (no evidence of exposure) should wear surgical masks or N95 masks was based on supply (low) and ranking who needed those most (medical workers), not about the effectiveness of wearing the masks.

People who interpreted the initial message as “masks do not protect healthy people” (an oversimplification grounded in truth) eventually recognized the contradiction as that sat against “healthcare workers need masks.”

The shift is now occurring whereby officials appear to be suggesting that everyone wear surgical masks, even prompting guides for making them at home. But the original science/evidence is not being honored in this either, especially as people begin to mask shame in the same ways that they are social distance shaming.

Seeking out the evidence on wearing masks is walking into a topic that may be even more complicated than a pandemic itself, but there is one really sobering fact that gets glossed over time and again:

Surgical Masks

Surgical masks (see Image 1) are loose, single use cloth masks designed to provide protection against large droplets, splashes or sprays of bodily or other hazardous fluids. These types of masks experience leakage around the edges when the user inhales, and do not provide a reliable level of respiratory protection against smaller airborne particles. The primary recommended medical function of these types of disposable masks is for infected individuals who want to decrease the risk of transmitting the disease to others in their vicinity, and they are not a substitute for a respirator mask and their primary function is not to protect the wearer of the mask [emphasis added].

Surgical Mask

Since the U.S. has made no effort to address the supply/need element in access to masks, and since the evidence on wearing basic masks is complicated (above), the move to mask shaming may have very negative consequences such as a false sense of security (prompting more socializing and working against social distancing) and stimulating unhealthy behavior (more face touching, reusing unsanitary masks).

Science and evidence are powerful and essential parts of creating public policy and especially of mandated and voluntary human behavior during a health crisis.

Yet, once again, we have ample evidence that neither the fatalism of denial nor the evangelism of shaming is the proper way to navigate science and evidence because science/evidence is more often than not very complicated and always in a state of evolution.

See Also

No need for healthy to wear face masks, says WHO after review

Heymann said masks could create a false sense of security that could end up putting people at greater risk. Even with the mouth and nose fully covered, the virus can still enter through the eyes.

“People think they are protected when they are not,” he said. “Healthcare workers, in addition to the masks, wear visors too, to protect the eyes.”

Another concern is that people may contaminate themselves when they adjust, remove and dispose of their masks.

COMMENTARY: Masks-for-all for COVID-19 not based on sound data

Media, race, racism, White Fragility, Whiteness

Better Call Saul: On the High Art of Centering Whiteness

Among the pantheon of white-man art, including the Coen brothers and David Lynch for me, the creators of Better Call Saul offer a finely crafted and deeply flawed series that is really hard not to look at and enjoy.

This prequel to Breaking Bad shares many of the strengths (beautifully and finely filmed, nuanced and morally ambiguous characters) and most of the flaws (centering whiteness, ignoring or running roughshod over brown and black characters) with its source. As I am nearing the end of the series on Netflix (with the newest season on AMC), I often find Saul better than the original, in part because I think it unpacks extremely well being a lawyer against the moral ambiguity of many compelling characters (even as I have no real expertise in whether or not the series captures the law in any sort of valid way).

Saul fits into my fascination with moral ambiguity, notably Andy Sipowicz in NYPD Blue as one example. But I have to admit that I am primarily drawn to how well made the series is; as TV, it is just damned compelling to look at. (I often find myself seeing comic book panels, still camera shots that do as much as the acting or dialogue.)

As I noted above, I have this affection for Lynch and the Coen brothers, although I would put the creators of Saul closer to the latter.

Well into my 20s and my young teaching and writing career, I was an uncritical (and self-contradictory) devotee of a sort of John Gardner “craft idealism” that had too much grounding in modernism and white-man art arguments that posed craft over (for example) diversity of characters and voices in the name of “universal”—a humanities/fine art veneer like “objectivity” to protect the status of white men.

In those formative years, I wasn’t paying very close attention to the tension among my love and admiration for Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, John Gardner, Ralph Ellison, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, and Adrienne Rich (just to offer a brief array).

I recognized some of that tension directly, then, in Season 3, Episode 10, Lantern, of Saul, when Kim Wexler, hyper-ambitious romantic partner of Jimmy/Saul, is left injured after a car accident.

Wexler, distracted by her newest client’s case while driving on a dangerous highway, crosses three lanes of traffic and crashes into rocks on an embankment. After returning home battered and with a broken right arm, the law office assistant, Francesca, brings Wexler her law files and has rearranged her schedule so that Wexler can salvage a deadline with the new client and maintain her commitment to her main client.

We watch as Wexler immediately drops into her Type A self-sacrificing persona. But Wexler pauses, freezes in fact, before telling Francesca to cancel the new client rescheduling and push forward her commitments with her main client.

The next time we see them together, Francesca is on her cell talking to the new client, and recommending a different law firm, while Wexler grabs a couple handfuls of DVDs.

Later when Jimmy/Saul returns to the newly relaxed Wexler on her couch, Kim asks Jimmy what he wants to watch next, handing him Monty Python before musing about watching To Kill a Mockingbird, “again.”

Jimmy and Kim then have what I imagine to be a conversation with a much different meaning than intended.

In the popular consciousness, the film Mockingbird is an iconic moment for the actor Gregory Peck but also a window (like the novel it is based on) into the white savior narrative that few in the U.S. are willing or able to confront.

There is much to unpack in Wexler saying she was motivated as a child to be Atticus Finch, but to the show’s credit, Kim does make fun of her idealism when she responds to Jimmy’s dig about becoming a lawyer to change the world; she acknowledges she is working herself almost literally to death to make a successful local bank into a successful regional bank.

Again, where I think Saul excels is in the many types of lawyers the show explores, knocking the sort of idealistic and hokey shine off the Finch iconic lawyer myth.

Yet, Saul for all the craft and care isn’t much different than Mockingbird for its inability to avoid possibly the most common flaw in pop culture in the U.S., centering whiteness.

While Walter White in Break Bad can be seen as something of a twisted Finch white savior, Jimmy/Saul is certainly not that, but remains the center of a morally ambiguous and morally corrupt world where lawyers, police, and the Mexican cartel all intersect in ways that do not leave anyone in the best of light—even Jimmy/Saul’s Finch-like brother, Chuck.

By comparison, Saul is far more aware of and attentive to black and brown characters; on balance, characterization, along with camera work, is an admirable craft in both series, I think.

The Salamanca/Fring dichotomy is fascinating and tense even as those who watched Break Bad know where these men’s lives are leading.

Saul is rich with allusion and references as yet another hallmark of craft-focused art; yet, even as we may enjoy and value this craft, I think we must remain vigilant to set that aside and recognize that while care is taken in many of the elements of making a series, there is enough carelessness to take the series to task.

Mike and Nacho are fascinating ancillary characters (although many of these types of characters often feel as important as Jimmy/Saul)—the former yet another centered white man and the latter, a powerful example of the type of diversity that deserves more than it receives.

With Saul, I am torn, but I think it unintentionally makes a case against itself (the use of Mockingbird, for example) that suggests centering whiteness is a feature and a flaw of this sort of film-making craft, but to acknowledge that doesn’t mean this flaw has to be fatal.

education, science

What the Covid-19 Pandemic Should Teach Us about “Science”

RWE speak today

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

For nearly twenty years now, I have been examining misconceptions about and misrepresentations of “scientific” as it relates to what evidence supports teaching practices and school policy. The problem that I confront over and over is complicated since scientific evidence absolutely does matter in making large and small educational decisions, and educators and policy-makers must remain vigilant in monitoring who determines what “science” matters in those processes.

For example in the early 2000s, the National Reading Panel as a major component of No Child Left Behind was charged with examining the scientific evidence behind how to teach reading. Along with the problems exposed after NRP released their findings, I raised red flags about handing over what science matters from disciplinary structures to bureaucratic/political mandates.

At least one concern raised about the conclusions of NRP is that this bureaucratic body made a contested decision about which studies met the bar of “scientific,” a debate that has existed for some time in academia and research broadly as well as in each discipline.

For the most part, NRP’s decision does reflect a traditional bias for quantitative research and experimental/quasi-experimental methods, but that decision effectively erased a huge body of evidence about how to teach reading.

However, from NCLB and NRP to the failed implementation of Common Core standards and the concurrent high-stakes tests, the irony is that bureaucratically determined and mandated “science” tends to work in significantly unscientific ways—and also tends to fail.

More recently, I have confronted a similar dynamic in the “science of reading” movement. With the release of a policy statement attempting to call for resisting the problems with both the media narrative and the state-level reading policies that narrative is driving, many of the challenges to the policy reflect why debates around “science” are doomed regardless of anyone’s intent.

First, “science” is a term used in many different ways, particularly important is to recognize that scholars and scientists often mean something quite different than the general public, the media, or political leaders.

I show students the documentary Flock of Dodos, a rambling film that explores the incessant debate over teaching evolution in public schools that does an excellent job exposing the really jumbled communication among evolutionary scientists, the media, and the public.

For students, I ask them to consider people who say they do not “believe” in evolution because it is “just a theory.” We unpack both the inappropriate verb (“believe” is incompatible with science; faith v. empirical evidence) but also that the general public confuses “theory” with “hypothesis,” which is an important distinction for scientists (similar to the correlation/cause confusion).

In the documentary, in fact, the scientists admit that “fact” is a better word than “theory” for discussing evolution with the lay public because a scientific theory is the conclusion made from the scientific process and the accumulation of evidence, proof.

Next, however, much that humans know about the world and human experience is still being examined; therefore, most scientists see “facts” as ways to guide us in any moment while also leaving the door open for more evidence, some supporting what we know or some that may change our knowledge base in small or even significant ways.

Evolutionary science and climate change science are extremely compelling bodies of science, but neither is likely finished, or settled. Science, in fact, is buoyed in great part by those who are willing to continue to test and replicate the science most of them are comfortable with extolling as “fact.”

This nuance is typically too complicated for the lay public, resulting in some who see science as the fist of God and some who think “you can make research mean anything.” Both extremes are harmful for science and humanity.

My concerns about the “science of reading” narrative and the resulting reading policy being considered and adopted by states are that the narrative itself makes a case for a far too narrow view of “science” (similar to NRP, which advocates and the media routinely cite) and wield “settled” in ways that remind me of how people in the South reference God and the Bible to shut down anyone challenging authority.

One aspect of the current Covid-19 pandemic, then, that I have been following is how the media, political leaders, and the public have interacted with the science of medicine during the U.S.’s response to this health crisis.

Not insignificant, as one example, in this situation is the governor of Georgia two months into the spread of the pandemic in the U.S. saying that he just learned in the last 24 hours that people who are asymptomatic can spread Covid-19, something that has been widely reported in media.

Here are some ways that the Covid-19 pandemic offers lessons on “science”:

  • The evolving official messages (WHO, CDC) on people wearing face masks reflect that science is often complicated, but that the media and political leaders rush to oversimplify. With face masks in short supply in the U.S., the initial message suggesting that healthy people not wear masks reflected making decisions based on the relationship between supply and demand—not that masks made no difference for healthy people (although if you read carefully, the evidence about face mask effectiveness is far from settled and often contradictory). As WHO and the CDC change their recommendations, people, I think, will see “science” as arbitrary, missing the context for the initial and revised recommendations.
  • State and international comparisons of data have been a powerful lesson about how data are gathered, how any statistic is calculated and defined, and how data are displayed on charts and graphs. Rates and percentages have been tossed around in ways that are mind boggling and disorienting. I highly recommend this tutorial for navigating statistics and graphic representations of that data. I also suggest taking a critical view of the recent cell phone data used to identify which states are complying with social distancing. Pappas warns “the numbers should be taken with a grain of salt,” after sharing: “‘Travel distance is one aspect, but of course people can travel far without meeting a soul or travel 50 feet and end up in a crowd — so we know that the real world picture can be quite complex,'” Waller noted.”
  • How Covid-19 is spread, how vaccines and tests to detect viruses are created and implemented, how different viruses can or cannot be compared, and how any virus remains active on surfaces and in changing weather have all been very complex and much debated topics in the media—reflecting the importance of how the media report complicated scientific information. Science is often held hostage to the quality of the reporting, and journalists tend to be ill equipped to understand any and all complex fields of specialization.
  • Nothing new, of course, but the Covid-19 pandemic emphasizes the importance of relying on credible sources and information outlets and also the problem with social media and meme culture that allows the spread of easily disputed false information. With the rise of Trump and this health crisis, however, at least there are far more opportunities for people accessing fact-checking web sites.

In real time, we are witnessing where compelling science intersects with science that is in-process, nowhere close to settled. The Covid-19 pandemic should teach us that science is incredibly important while also being imperfect and often inadequate. Nothing, not tests or vaccines, is 100% despite some wanting science to be black-and-white in its conclusions.

Another lesson is that the relationship between experts (academics, scientists, doctors) and the lay public as that is facilitated by the media often works in ways that detract from the potential for science to serve us all well.

Covid-19 is a life-or-death matter, yet even with that urgency, ultimately we must acknowledge that science is not a hammer, but given the skeptical respect and space it deserves, science could be our best opportunity for a better world.

education, poetry

The Things Schools Ruin: Poetry Edition

[Header Photo by Kristin O Karlsen on Unsplash]

When I posted two of my favorite lines of poetry to highlight our human failures, I received a poetic reply:

funny, I posted the Wasteland today.
You know, ‘April is the cruelest month’ and all that.

— oTTo & Nairb (@NairbOtto) April 2, 2020

While this poetry exchange remains anchored to the dead-white-man problem with the canon many of us have experienced in formal schooling, I think it also speaks to, when allowed, that poetry is a genuinely powerful and relevant human form of expression that is more often than not harmed by traditional teaching.

National Poetry Month, April 2020, falls in the midst of a world-wide pandemic that has disrupted almost all formal schooling across the U.S. and much of the world, but social media suggests that poetry not only persists, it thrives.

Poet Tara Skurtu, for example, launched the International Poetry Circle through her Twitter account, and the response from poets video recording poetry readings has accelerated beyond her capacity to manage them.

When given the opportunity, poetry is its own best teacher, and when readers are allowed, poetry matters.

Even though I came to recognize my own calling and journey as a poet during my first year of college, I was during that same period having a terrible experience with Emily Dickinson, who I loathed because of formal schooling but came to love many years later as a teacher while exploring her life and work on my own.

By my junior year of college, I had made the transition from considering a major in physics or architecture to committing to English education. It was a hard and long journey for me to find my life in words because schooling was often in my way.

I entered teaching high school English determined to teach well, but also determined to open the door to literature and writing for my students in ways that weren’t often allowed for me (except for the occasional teacher who was working against the traditions of schooling).

The two seemingly endless challenges I faced, however, were that my own early efforts at teaching well proved to be as counter-productive to fostering a love of reading and writing as so-called traditional methods and that students hated, for example, writing and poetry so deeply because of their experiences over nine or ten years I was facing the most uphill of uphill battles.

I taught Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus” for many years in conjunction with his The Stranger; I also had a poster of Sisyphus hanging on my classroom wall.

Like Sisyphus I taught poetry each year with good intentions and great care, only to have the students remain stoically anti-poetry.

Teaching poetry was my rock, but I was not happy.

Then on Twitter this morning, I was reminded of when my teaching poetry turned a corner:

https://t.co/PrqmddQ1eb

— Paul Thomas (@plthomasEdD) April 2, 2020

Eventually, I shifted my entire poetry unit, spanning a quarter of the academic year, to a series of lessons grounded in the lyrics and music of the Athens, Georgia based alternative band R.E.M. And I discovered that my students were drawn to the poetry of James Dickey, who at the time taught at the University of South Carolina.

James Dickey (cropped).jpg
Public Domain

In the late 1980s, our high school was destroyed by arson, and once the school was rebuilt, we made a large print of Dickey’s “For the Last Wolverine,” had Dickey sign it, and hung it prominently in the entrance of our new library.

Dickey himself was from Georgia, and I think students found his rural poetry set in nature and dealing with animals concrete and accessible. He was very readable and students tended to feel a sense of comfort with their understanding of these poems.

Although Dickey, like many white men of the twentieth century, poses problems as a flawed man, I will always have a warm place in my teacher heart for how my students embraced these poems; we had many good days reading and discussing these poems by Dickey (along with “Deer among Cattle” and “For the Last Wolverine”):

There is a complicated paradox to formal schooling since the structure is an ideal way to bring young people into the beauty and wonder of language, but the demands of mass education for structured outcomes tend to ruin those experiences with beauty and wonder.

Poetry worked with my students when we allowed ourselves to experience poetry for poetry’s sake, when we set aside the insidious urge to analyze and reduce any poem to a neat theme.

And despite having similar problems as the dead-white-man tradition of schooling, social media shows us that poetry links us, poetry can stabilize and soothe us when the world is too much with us.

If and when we return to some brave new world on the other side of the Covid-19 pandemic, something we will then call “normal,” I hope those of us who are charged with teaching language and poetry will be able to hold onto the beauty and wonder of poetry in ways that guide us as we invite students to join in.

No literary technique hunt. No multiple-choice questions.

I think that when I read Dickey’s poems aloud—”I wave, like a man catching fire”—just as when I read Faulkner aloud, there was something about my deeply Southern voice and Dickey’s very Southern poetry that resonated with my Southern students.

Poetry as us, us as poetry.

I miss those days, and regret it took me several years to allow those times that now sit in my heart fondly.

Bicycling, memoir

When the World Wakes Up, and We Are All Inside

1 Comment

 

Magnolia Wisteria and Bridge
Magnolia Wisteria and Bridge (Steven Hyatt)

“I can’t look at everything hard enough.”

Emily in Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Most of my life, I have been an outside person, but never much of a nature person. I am drawn, you see, to the sun more so than the natural world because, in part, I am allergic to much of that natural world.

I have been thinking a lot about this during the current Covid-19 pandemic and the expectations of social distancing and staying, mostly, at home (which means indoors).

My childhood throughout the 1960s and 1970s occurred in the South where my working-class parents practiced under the expectation that children played outside if the weather in any way made that possible. In fact, my sister and I gleefully raced outside much of our childhood.

I recall very fondly playing pick-up sports in the large field near our rented house in Woodruff, South Carolina (the field on the property of the adjacent junior high school) and the variety of make-believe adventures we neighborhood children constructed in the large field on the other side of the house that stored giant mounds of gravel.

Once we moved to the house my parents built on the town golf course, Three Pines, I was ten and soon found refuge in the huge expanse of woods surrounding our large lot as well as spending a great deal of my life playing golf or outdoors pick-up basketball.

My entire adult life has been spent as a recreational cyclist, riding for many hours each week on the roads and trails around upstate South Carolina and the mountains of North Carolina.

One of the great ironies of my life is that when I was a child my parents often wanted to go driving in the mountains of NC (along the highway where my parents spent their secret honeymoon after a hushed marriage at the courthouse), but I fought these trips with the sort of pettiness children excel in showing; as an adult, I have ridden my bicycle thousands of times along those same roads.

It is in my cycling life, I think, that I can best describe the dichotomy of being an outdoor person but not a nature person.

One of the more common cycling loops we did for many years throughout the spring (and more) included climbing up Hogback Mountain near Tryon, NC. The climb is anywhere from 3-5 miles of climbing depending on the turn-around point (and the paved road has been extended over the years of doing this ride).

Once just before starting the ride with a cyclist I hadn’t done the climb with before, he said that he loved riding Hogback because of the view at the top. I immediately said, “What view?” You see, I really never saw the climb as a way to see the view or take in the surroundings because it was a physically and psychologically demanding feat.

But I worshipped every chance I had to be outside, to be in the sunshine for hours at a time.

With our brave new world of social distancing and commitments to staying at home, I have had an unexpected shift in how I view the natural world.

A week or so ago, I noticed the large amount of wisteria in the area. I wrote a poem about that, but I have continued to see and think about the blossoming of spring all around us while most of us have our heads and our minds focused on an invisible virus, a pervasive threat that is not just beyond our senses but may actually disrupt our senses of taste and smell.

As with forms of socializing, the recommendations and mandates restricting groups to fewer than 3 people have brought to an end group cycling, something that has been at the center of my adult life as well.

So my lifelong need to be outside has taken on a new form and a new importance.

Each day, a friend and I schedule one outdoor activity, road cycling, mountain biking, or a walk/hike. Instead of a hobby or a form of leisure, these have transformed into a necessity, an elixir against the terror of the pandemic and the claustrophobia of social distancing and staying home.

But as the world wakes up around us this spring, the world available to us is shrinking. In my home state, all the state parks have closed—no hiking or mountain biking trails left open.

Since road cycling alone or in pairs is less safe than larger groups, mostly, we had been mountain biking and walking/hiking a great deal. And all while flowers and trees are bursting to life and everything has a dull yellow layer of pollen announcing the coming of spring to the South.

Wisteria and Dogwood trees are going about their usual business, oblivious to Covid-19, social distancing, or stay-at-home mandates. Pollen dusts everything in sight while we sit inside staring at our variety of screens.

Nature without the interference of humans will persist as nature. In Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic Oryx and Crake, Snowman, believing himself the last human, witnesses just that:

The buildings that didn’t burn or explode are still standing, though the botany is thrusting itself through every crack. Given time it will fissure the asphalt, topple the walls, push aside the roofs. Some kind of vine is growing everywhere, draping the windowsills, climbing in through the open windows and up the bars and grillwork. Soon this district will be a thick tangle of vegetation. If he postponed the trip much longer the way back would have become impassable. It won’t be long before all visible traces of human habitation will be gone. (pp. 221-222)

Early in the move to social distancing, we drove the hour to Dupont forest to hike. The hiking trails to waterfalls are always popular, but on this trip, the crowd was disturbing since we were confronted with a dilemma—the need to be outside and our commitment to avoiding large groups of people, particularly strangers.

Regretfully, this experience was an omen of the new restrictions that now ban anyone hiking those exact trails, just as most of our mountain biking trails are now officially closed.

Covid-19 is exposing some of our greatest urges and weaknesses as humans. We desire community, socializing, but we are often our own worst enemies, especially when the greatest threat to our safety is unseeable and each other.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

For me, the new reality has forced me to rethink my relationship with the outdoors I have cherished my entire life, a new recognition of the natural world.

As we were cycling laps around a park in my hometown, a friend and I talked about my new fascination with wisteria and we both acknowledged not really knowing the names of trees and plants all coming to bloom around the lake at the center of this park.

It seems a different kind of important now to see the various plants and trees individually, and to know their names.

That day we were climbing Hogback I recall now that I did pause at the top, I did look at the view, and I had to agree it was more than worth my time to not just look, but really see the view from above the trees and across the valley.

education, education reform, NEPC, Ravitch, reading

If You’re Going to Write About Science of Reading, Get Your Reading Right

The release of the joint statement (National Education Policy Center and Education Deans for Justice and Equity) on the “science of reading” version of the current Reading War held, I hoped, great promise for at least slowing a very harmful process. I also briefly crossed my fingers that the statement could ease some of the discord and help key figures in the debate find that there is more common ground than disagreement.

However, social media has provided evidence that neither of these outcomes is likely. The advocates of the “science of reading” doubled down on their condescension and general nastiness (a feature of Twitter), and there is this blog post from Daniel Willingham: If You’re Going to Write About Science of Reading, Get Your Science Right.

I commented several times on the post and even offered a discussion by email. Willingham did respond to my comments and the exchange was civil, but alas, fruitless.

The crux of Willingham’s concerns about the statement seems to be:

I think the statement is pretty confused, as it conflates issues that ought to be considered separately. This statement is meant to be about the science of reading, so much of the confusion arises from a failure to understand or appreciate the nature of science, how basic science applies to applied science, and the scientific literature on reading.

This is a misreading of the policy; I think that misreading is in part prompted by Diane Ravitch’s framing of the statement with “There is no Science of Reading,” which Willingham references in his first paragraph.

To clarify, Ravitch’s framing is misleading, and Willingham has failed to grasp the purpose of the statement, directly identified by NEPC:

All students deserve equitable access to high-quality literacy and reading instruction and opportunities in their schools. This will only be accomplished when policymakers pay heed to an overall body of high-quality research evidence and then make available the resources necessary for schools to provide our children with the needed supports and opportunities to learn. This joint statement from NEPC and the Education Deans for Justice and Equity provides guiding principles for what any federal or state legislation directly or indirectly impacting reading should and should not do.

This statement is a policy statement that raises a long-overdue red flag about a complicated process: Mainstream media have created a narrative that teachers have failed to use the “science of reading” because teacher education has failed to teach that, preferring balanced literacy instead. This narrative also claims the “science of reading” is settled and that the research base justifies systematic intensive phonics instruction for all students, a claim being used to endorse and implement misguided reading legislation across the U.S. [1]

Willingham has missed that nuanced and complex focus of the statement and spends the blog post mostly challenging issues that simply do not exist in the statement itself, primarily complaining that the statement has a fundamental misunderstanding of “science” (“The distinction between basic and applied science ought to be fundamental to any discussion of the science of reading”).

Since a key element of the statement raises that exact issue, this extended complaint is itself, to use Willingham’s language, “confused.”

A couple of important points lie beneath the unfortunate consequence of the topic of teaching reading continuing to be a fruitless debate (what the statement is explicitly seeking to end).

First, the teaching of reading as a subset of the field of education has historically and now currently been over-run with epistemic trespassing; psychology, economics, and political science routinely encroach on education as if the discipline itself has no scholarship or scholars.

Some of this trespassing has to do with disciplinary hierarchies linked to distinctions between quantitative and qualitative research (often veneers for academic sexism), but some of the trespassing is simply disciplinary bullying.

While I completely agree with Willingham that anyone making claims about the “science of reading” should understand “science,” he has failed to acknowledge an equally important requirement—understanding reading and literacy.

As Nathan Ballantyne examines carefully, having robust and critical skills in one field, psychology, does not necessarily equip a scholar for transferring those skills to another field, especially (as Willingham notes himself) into a field grounded in real-world practice such as education, teaching children to read.

Willingham and Mark Seidenberg, both psychologists, are two of the main scientists cited in the “science of reading” narrative in mainstream media, and two of its defenders (although as scholars, they both tend to offer far more caveats and nuance than advocates who are journalists).

They, however, lack a background in teaching literacy, and while their research is quite valuable, as the statement notes, narrow types of “scientific” are ultimately incomplete evidence for day-to-day teaching.

No one is arguing there is no “science of reading,” but the ham-fisted claims about “settled” science and the misuse of “science” to support flawed reading policy are inexcusable.

But here is a much more problematic part of this continued debate. Willingham represents not only epistemic trespassing, but also has explicitly discredited all educational researchers, suggesting journalists as more credible:

Believing something because someone else believes it rather than demanding and evaluating evidence makes you sound either lazy or gullible. But we yield to the authority of others all the time. When I see my doctor I don’t ask for evidence that the treatments he prescribes are effective, and when an architect designed a new deck for my house I didn’t ask for proof that it could support the weight of my grill and outdoor furniture. I believed what they told me because of their authority.

I think education researchers don’t speak with that kind of authority and (apparently unlike Sanden) I don’t think we deserve it. I can point to two key differences between a doctor (or architect, or accountant, or electrician, etc) and education researchers.

He adds later, “Anyone can take the title ‘education researcher.’”

As someone with an EdD and who straddles two different fields, education and English, I can assure you that this sort of disciplinary bullying is still common in the academy. Education is routinely dismissed as mere occupational preparation, and English is framed as one of the impractical fields in the impractical humanities.

This sort of disrespectful finger pointing, I think, must be unmasked since any time someone points a finger, several are pointing back as well.

“The replication of findings is one of the defining hallmarks of science,” note Diener and Biswas-Diener, adding:

In modern times, the science of psychology is facing a crisis. It turns out that many studies in psychology—including many highly cited studies—do not replicate. In an era where news is instantaneous, the failure to replicate research raises important questions about the scientific process in general and psychology specifically. People have the right to know if they can trust research evidence. For our part, psychologists also have a vested interest in ensuring that our methods and findings are as trustworthy as possible.

Psychology, then, like economics feels justified trespassing on other fields, possibly to deflect from the needed critical inspection of their own field. It seems one reason psychology has a crisis in the quality of their science is a pattern of defensiveness:

When findings do not replicate, the original scientists sometimes become indignant and defensive, offering reasons or excuses for non-replication of their findings—including, at times, attacking those attempting the replication. They sometimes claim that the scientists attempting the replication are unskilled or unsophisticated, or do not have sufficient experience to replicate the findings. This, of course, might be true, and it is one possible reason for non-replication.

I have been in the field of literacy for 36 years, and in academia for 18 years. I am quite certain there are no pure fields and no fields that can be discounted as cavalierly as Willingham does about “education scholars” and education research (I recommend Bracey on the problems with educational research and how it is interpreted, by the way).

I also have directly admitted that epistemic trespassing is always problematic, but many topics may in fact necessitate such trespassing. Understanding and teaching reading does in fact benefit from a wide range of disciplinary evidence (as the statement asserts).

But no topic benefits from academia’s most petty traditions, including disciplinary hierarchies and bullying.

If expertise in science deserves respect (and it certainly does), then expertise in literacy and teaching reading also deserve respect—and neither should be handed over to journalism as the arbiter of those fields or to politicians who have the power of policy.

Those of us in the academy who often are discounted for being in an Ivory Tower should have higher standards for our own behavior, but there is much work yet to be done to eradicate hierarchies and pettiness even among the so-called well educated.

Let’s keep in  mind that although getting the science right is certainly important, we are in this to get the reading right, and that is the focus of the statement that some are misreading.

[1] See the following to help construct the narrative:

Gewertz, C. (2020, February, 20). States to schools: Teach reading the right way. Education Week. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/02/20/states-to-schools-teach-reading-the-right.html

Loewus, L. (2019, December 3). Data: How reading is really being taught. Education Week. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/12/04/data-how-reading-is-really-being-taught.html

Russo, A. (2018, November 14). Hard reporting: Why reading went under the radar for so long – and what one reporter is aiming to do about it. Phi Delta Kappan. Retrieved from https://kappanonline.org/russo-hard-reporting-why-reading-went-under-the-radar-for-so-long-and-what-one-reporter-is-aiming-to-do-about-it/

Schwartz, S. (2019, December 3). The most popular reading programs aren’t backed by science. Education Week. Retrieved from  https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/12/04/the-most-popular-reading-programs-arent-backed.html

Stukey, M.R., & Fugnitto, G. (2020). The settled science of teaching reading—part I. Collaborative Circle Blog. Retrieved from https://www.collaborativeclassroom.org/blog/the-settled-science-of-teaching-reading-part-1/

Will, M. (2020, January 22). Preservice teachers are getting mixed messages on how to teach reading. Education Week. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/01/22/preservice-teachers-are-getting-mixed-messages-on.html

Will, M. (2018, October 24). Teachers criticize their colleges of ed. for not preparing them to teach reading. Education Week. Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/teacherbeat/2018/10/teacher_prep_programs_reading.html

Will, M. (2019, December 3). Will the science of reading catch on in teacher prep? Education Week. Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/12/04/most-ed-professors-favor-balanced-literacy.html