Category Archives: Education

#BlackLivesMatter, diversity, Education, Equity, Inclusion, inequity, race, racism, sexism, social justice

There Can Be No Equity without Community and Empathy

[D]espite overwhelmingly good intentions, most of what passes for intercultural education practice, particularly in the US,
accentuates rather than undermines existing social and political hierarchies.

Paul Gorski, Good intentions are not enough: a decolonizing intercultural education

A split second of awareness kept me from stepping into my apartment’s elevator, the floor covered in vomit, recently.

I thought about this moment yesterday while standing in that same elevator filled with an unpleasant smell as I also noticed a new orange-brown stain on the floor.

A week or so ago, I was unloading two bicycles from my car rack, going up and down the elevator and walking through the enclosed garage of the complex a couple of times. I encountered twice a women with her small dog on a lease, and in both cases, she paused while the dog urinated on a steel beam in the garage.

It isn’t uncommon to see dog droppings scattered down the hallway carpet in this complex either.

Having lived almost four decades in my own homes before becoming an apartment dweller, these experiences are new but not shocking, and they remind me of the general lack of concern for others I experienced in dorm life in college. I also recognize these behaviors are typical of the American character, one grounded in rugged individualism and lacking any real sense of community.

It is the trash carelessly tossed out of car windows or dropped on the sidewalk.

It is the “I got mine so you get yours!” ethos of the good ol’ U.S. of A.

As I stepped out of the elevator yesterday, I was thinking about #TransDayofVisibility and about why people are so antagonistic about diverse sexualities and races, about gender fluidity and transexuality.

A type of awareness for me that helped move me past the bigotry and intolerance of my upbringing was coming to peace with my own self-awareness, being able to articulate that I did not make choices about my gender identification or sexuality but that I came to recognize my gender identification and sexuality.

To be blunt, I cannot fathom denying other people that recognition because I want my awareness to be honored. I also had to come to terms with differences being simply different and having nothing to do with right or wrong, or normal or abnormal.

What is “right” or “normal” for me is not in any way a template or commentary on anyone else, and vice versa.

While this may not be uniquely American, it is certainly true of Americans that we have a fatal lack of community and empathy.

And that “we” is statistically white Americans who exist in a sort of fear that if the “normal” white America has constructed isn’t the only way of being then maybe it isn’t “right.”

Rugged individualism is a significant part of the enduring presence of racism, sexism, homo-/trans-phobia, and all sorts of bigotry in the U.S.

But the negative consequences of rugged individualism are more than the narcissism inherent in racism and other types of bigotry (the provincialism that leads a person to see themselves as “right” and “normal” and people unlike them as “Other”).

What may be worse is that a society that centers the individual maintains inequity even when trying to expand diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) if the centering remains.

I have been involved in DEI initiatives at my university for many years, and since I actively incorporate anti-racism/anti-bias elements in my scholarly and public work, I find myself regularly confronting the misguided “good intentions” of my colleagues, my progressive white colleagues.

My first rude awakening about DEI in colleges and universities came early on when I discovered that my department and DEI structures across campus used the strongly debunked “framework of poverty” promoted by Ruby Payne.

Payne’s work is steeped in racist and classist stereotyping, and it suffers from the centering of whiteness and an idealized middle-class “normal.” When I challenged using Payne’s workbooks, I also encountered the other level of centering: “But it works,” I was told, “with our population of students.”

“Our population of students” happens to privileged and white.

Almost twenty years later, I faced the same situation and same justification again.

An event was held for students examining the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. The featured speaker was a former white nationalist. When I raised concerns about centering a former white nationalist, I heard the exact same justification I heard in my first weeks of coming to my university—but our (white) students.

What if we created opportunities for growth in DEI by centering those people experiencing the unfair weight of inequity? What if we considered a Black student sitting in the audience while a former white nationalist was given center stage and honored as an authority?

If we were organizing an event on sexual assault would we invite a former rapist to speak to that audience? If not, I imagine some of that decision is grounded in considering those people who have experienced sexual assault.

I included the central point from Gorski above this blog because I am disheartened by DEI efforts; I am witnessing Gorski’s recognition that “good intentions” often still perpetuate inequity by refusing to confront it, not resisting the urge to center whiteness and privilege.

While I no longer see Payne’s materials around campus, many still eagerly guide students through poverty simulations, poverty tours, and “pretend to be a minority” activities; these are all dehumanizing and offensive approaches that are grounded in stereotyping while continuing to center the sensibilities of the “normalized” group.

No one needs to pretend to be poor or minoritized is they are willing and eager to listen to people with lived experiences in poverty or being a minority.

Days ago I avoided stepping into that elevator because I was looking beyond myself instead of assuming the world was centered on me.

That elevator would have been clean and safe to enter, however, if everyone else lived with a sense of community and empathy.

Education, Teaching, Writing

Unlearning to Write

In my foundations of education course, we discussed the role of evidence and research in education, highlighting the problem with experimental/quasi-experimental research and its use in the so-called real world of day-to-day teaching. I always use medicine as an analogy—such as the recently development of the Covid-19 vaccine.

What I hope to accomplish is to offer students a more nuanced understanding of evidence and research. I stress that based on my nearly 40 years of teaching, gold-standard research matters, but it rarely matters in teaching (versus medicine) the way that many people think.

Teaching and learning, I explain, are extremely complicated.

In the article we examined, Seven ‘great’ teaching methods not backed up by evidence, one of the “popular” teaching practices Higgins and Coe claim there is “no evidence for” is discovery learning.

As someone who has spent four decades grounded in discovery learning and using workshop structures when teaching literacy, specifically writing, I find such claims to be condescending and off-base because they are overly simplistic.

In the listing of educational practices there is “no evidence for,” I ask students to consider how research in education often defines “works” or “doesn’t work” (test scores, for example), and I also invite them to consider the limitations of isolating any teaching or learning practice in order to examine causality (common in quantitative experiments).

Higgins and Coe make one fatal mistake in their claim about discovery learning by setting up a false dichotomy between discovery learning and direct instruction (a mistake made by many progressive educators who discount direct instruction).

Instead, I offered to my students, of arguing whether or not direct instruction or discovery learning work alone, I have found that the two do work in conjunction if paired effectively. Over my first five or so years of teaching, I discovered that a great deal of direct instruction was often wasted when students were tasked with authentic performances of learning (such as writing essays).

Placed in difficult and/or new tasks, students often revert to their known (see more on this below) regardless of the teacher’s direct instruction and, more importantly, regardless of that known being relevant or not to the task assigned.

I adjusted my teaching, then, by offering less up-front and shifting my direct instruction after students had produced an artifact of learning (again, such as an essay) that gave them context for that instruction.

This new process (for me) fit perfectly into my workshop approach to teaching writing since it gave even more significance to requiring and allowing students to revise their essays after I provided feedback (both in the form of comments on their individual essays and mini-lessons/direct instruction to the entire class).

Along with my foundations class this spring, I am teaching first-year writing and upper-level writing/research. These two writing-intensive courses have different goals (first-year writing is broader and more transitional and introductory while the upper-level course is specifically focused on disciplinary/academic writing in the social sciences [education]), but offer the sort of teaching/learning problem noted above; in other words, for students to write well in college, they must unlearn to write first (cast off that comforting known).

The Known/Misconception: The Research Paper

In the upper-level writing/research course, I have students read two main texts, one on navigating educational research and the other addressing rethinking how to write as a scholar. The three main writing assignments are scaffolded so that they build and inform each other, moving from annotated bibliographies to a cited scholarly essay and then to a public commentary.

I want to focus on the problems students and I face with the cited essay; here is the assignment and the support material I provide:

Assignment

Students will conduct a research project in which they critically analyze how the above chosen issue is presented in the mainstream media, and write in a workshop format (multiple drafts, conferencing) an 8-10 page essay using APA format (see student resources provided) detailing how well or not the media has presented the research. See Sample APA 7e with comments. The essay should include the following major sections: opening, literature review, media coverage, relationship between research and media, and closing/conclusion.

Checklist for Creating Bibliographies and References List Using APA

Sample APA Bibliographies

References Sample

Sample APA 7e with comments

Checklist for Revising Cited Essay

What happens fits exactly into the dynamic I discovered in those early and challenging years of teaching; students faced with a new and difficult task revert to their known and mostly ignore my instruction and even the assignment.

The essay students are tasked with writing is an analysis of media coverage of an educational topic. In order to analyze the quality and accuracy of that media coverage, students do very short literature reviews (the first main section of the essay) of their chosen topic.

While I focus my first-year writing essays on giving students a great deal of choice, in the upper-level course, we confront that writing in academia is often highly structured, a bit more “artificial” and scripted than so-called real-world writing of essays. I, therefore, offer (see above) some guidelines for subheads and sections. I also emphasize that the essay is primarily about building to an analysis of media coverage and identifying the relationship between the media claims and what research shows on the topic (in other words, I stress that the essay is 2/3 about the media).

After doing their library research and submitting their annotated bibliographies (on 8-10 peer-reviewed articles) as well as submitting their working references lists for the cited essay, guess what these students turn in for their cited essay (despite the assignment and detailed support material I provide)?

A high school research paper on their educational topic—which I specifically and repeatedly tell them not to do—and not an analysis of media coverage of that topic.

But that is their known.

Researcher Howard Gardner, often associated with multiple intelligences (another popular idea in education that researchers enjoying saying there is “no evidence for”) made a huge impact on my teaching when I read about the need to consider three aspects of students when teaching: their known, unknown, and misconceptions.

Teaching should build on the known, provide the unknown (direct instruction), and confront the misconceptions. As Gardner notes, misconceptions are incredibly robust, and as I have discovered, misconceptions sit inside the known for students who have no context for distinguishing between the two.

What’s wrong with the high school research paper? It creates for students a number of bad habits that they must unlearn in order to write well and credibly in college. Here are some of those bad habits to unlearn:

  • Known/misconception: Students understand the “research paper” to be a distinct (and special) kind of essay. Instead, they need to recognize that doing scholarly research and using citation are common expectations for almost all different types of disciplinary writing (essay conventions that vary widely among different fields).
  • Known/misconception: Students understand MLA style formatting to be universal, and not disciplinary based. Instead, as above, students need to apply the style and format appropriate to the discipline; for example, we write differently and cite differently in education as a social science than scholars who use MLA in literary analysis.
  • Known/misconception: Students understand their “job” as a student is to write about research in ways that prove they did research. As a result, students writing research papers (inauthentic forms) dutifully cover one source at a time until they have worked through their sources; this is writing about your sources, and not your topic. Instead, as I implore my students often, students need to use their research and sources to support their own original discussion by writing about their topic and not their research (see more about this here).
  • Known/misconception: Students understand a script/template for the “essay” and write clunky introductions and conclusions while struggling to develop beyond three body paragraphs. Instead, students need a much more organic and authentic perception of the essay form, again in the context of disciplinary conventions. Despite this course using a main text encouraging students to incorporate scholarly personal narrative (recommended as their opening), many students wrote their known, the clunky introduction with empty overstatements.

After responding to the essays, I returned to the essay prompt and the support materials I provided. I walked through the direct instruction addressing much of the above while asking students to look at their essays and my feedback as I taught. Students then began in class revising.

Student after student asked sincere questions that highlighted the difficulty they faced trying to move beyond the known/misconception (unlearning) in order to write the essay assigned.

Synthesizing research (instead of quoting or paraphrasing one source at a time; see here) continues to overwhelm them since they want to write about their sources, for example:

According to The Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletes in Education, anything more than twenty work hours a week can result in problematic grades or psychological well-being (Fuller, Lawrence, Harrison, Eyanson, & Griffin, 2019). 

Most of the sources used tended to use the definition of disparity provided by the institute of medicine (Cook, et al.,2012; Williams & Wyatt, 2015; Wang, et al., 2013).

Many articles and papers done on these topics jointly don’t go far enough when splitting up classes to paint an accurate picture of disparities faced by different persons at various levels of class with varying races (Braveman, et al. 2010).

If we think carefully about this known, we can see that students are avoiding themselves and being specific (writing out of fear of mistakes rather than producing their own claims and original writing). This type of writing is performing as a student, not writing as a scholar or academic.

Learning to write, then, is in part unlearning to write.

Developing and growing as a writer is a daunting task, and it also exposes the problem with oversimplifying complex tasks for students (the five-paragraph essay and research paper do not serve students well).

Students as writers and scholars have much yet to discover; they will have much better success if teachers are there to offer direct and expert instruction as they become bogged down in the known that are in fact misconceptions.

citation, Critical Media Literacy, Education, Education Week, Gun Control, Science of Reading

Citation and Credibility: Three Lessons

In my three courses this fall, students are now all working on scholarly essays that incorporate high-quality sources (focusing on peer-reviewed journal articles). Since the work lies primarily in the field of education, students are using APA style guides.

Often when teaching students citation, we focus our lessons on (the drudgery of) formatting and idiosyncratic citation structures (APA’s annoying lowercase/upper case peculiarities, for example, in bibliographies) as well as the challenges of finding and evaluating a reasonable amount of valid sources to support the claims of the essay.

Students often struggle with evaluating sources for bias, and honestly, they are not well equipped to recognize flawed or ideologically skewed reports that appear to be in credible journals and are themselves well cited.

Part of the problem has been well documented by Gerald Bracey; citing Paul Krugman, Bracey confronts the rise of think tanks that promote their agendas through the veneer of scholars and scholarly reports. Then, Bracey notes, “[t]he media don’t help much. By convention, they present, at best, ‘balanced’ articles, not critical investigative pieces” (p. xvi). This is what I have labeled “both sides” journalism.

While scholarly writing and citation can often slip into a circus of minutia, one lesson needing greater care is helping students (and anyone making a research-based claim) recognize that their credibility and authority is built on the validity and quality of the sources they incorporate.

Here, I want to present three lessons illuminating that dynamic—all pulled from current issues.

Lesson One: The “Science of Reading”

One of the best examples of the problems with ideological think tank reports and media coverage occurred (again) at Education Week, a major publication covering education that has abandoned “critical investigative pieces” for simply reporting (crossing the Big Foot line) and “‘balanced’ articles.”

Ideological think tanks, as Bracey warned, are well organized and very aggressive, systematically alerting media and providing press releases so detailed that journalists have to do little work (except, of course, evaluating the credibility of the report to begin with).

Media routinely cover that think tanks release reports, and journalists have argued it isn’t their job to determine if those reports are valid or not.

For example, Education Week is so invested in the “science of reading” narrative and movement, that they eagerly present reports from NCTQ because their reports reinforce that narrative—even though, NCTQ itself has been repeatedly criticized for not meeting even the basic guidelines for scientific research.

Sarah Schwartz ignores that NCTQ is not a credible source for making claims about teacher training in reading. But with just a brief Google search, anyone can find that NCTQ has had numerous reports reviewed, finding a disturbing patterns: “Although NCTQ reports have been critiqued for their limited use of research and highly questionable research methodology, this report employs the same approaches as earlier NCTQ reports,” explain Stillman and Schultz in one of the most recent reviews (also concurrent to the report cited in EdWeek).

Students, like journalists, are often not expert in the topics they are addressing, and well-formatted reports can seem credible, but often fail the basic expectations of peer-review (NCTQ releases their reports without peer review and receive media coverage while the discrediting reviews tend to receive no media coverage).

The lesson here for students (and journalists) is that any claim is only as good as the sources used to support that claim.

If the “science of reading” is a valid narrative (and, in fact, it isn’t), citing sources that fail the basic test of being scientific certainly erodes if not discredits the initial claim.

Lesson Two: Gun Violence/Control

Since school shootings are a subset of the larger pattern of mass shootings unique to the U.S., I have been researching gun violence and school safety for many years. These topics have robust research bases that tend to contradict public and media assumptions about both.

I had just recently covered school shootings and safety with my educational foundations course when the highly publicized mass shootings near Atlanta, GA and in Boulder, CO erupted. So I returned to research on gun violence in two classes, having some students challenge what I was sharing. Those comments tend to echo typical pro-gun talking points and the common, but weak, arguments supporting gun ownership found in mainstream media.

Here’s the essential problem with research on school safety and gun violence/control: Gun advocates are ideologically driven and use compelling but false arguments to promote their gun agenda.

In other words, standard arguments for school safety (armed police on campuses, surveillance cameras, metal detectors, active shooter drills, etc.) and access to and ownership of guns (Second Amendment) are dramatically different than findings in existing research. Making this dynamic worse is that gun advocates have powerful organizations such as the NRA and even high-profile scholars offering discredited but popular arguments and research.

For example, John Lott is an economist and author of a high-profile pro-gun book; he also publishes research on gun violence that in many ways looks to students, the public, and the media like high-quality research.

Again, simply reporting on Lott’s research or citing that research in academic writing proves to be misguided since his work has been widely discredited once reviewed (see above).

The lesson here for students is that not all published scholarship is credible, and, possibly even more importantly, students need to seek out a body of research, never relying on only one study or the work of one scholar.

Lott is discredited but his work is also a distinct outlier; academic and scholarly writing loses credibility when relying on cherry picking (outlier research) in order to support a claim.

Lesson Three: Identity Politics

Another aspect of academic and scholarly writing grounded in sources is the importance of terminology—using disciplinary or technical terms in valid and accurate ways.

Recently, Barbara Smith took Megan McCain to task for McCain’s misuse of “identity politics”:

As one of three Black women who coined “identity politics,” Smith offers an incredibly important lesson for students because her Twitter thread offers credible sources for her claim, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective and What Liberals Get Wrong About Identity Politics, the latter of which leads us to the seminal text itself, Combahee River Collective Statement.

The lesson for students here is the need to clarify terms in valid ways, including finding the primary source for scholarly language.

In some frustrating ways, citation formats and structures are both tedious and powerful aspects of building a student’s or scholar’s credibility. But a far more important task for students in terms of establishing their credibility is finding bodies of evidence that are verified by the field itself, most often peer reviewed and sitting within the bounds of many similar studies.

Since the space for scholarship and evidence continues to expand, students need to be better equipped for the difficult task of determining when sources are valid and when they are mere ideological distraction.

Unfortunately, as I show above, we have ample evidence around us daily of the great divide among research, the media, and the public—a divide often manipulated by powerful organizations with ideological agendas.

Education, education reform, grade retention, literacy, NCTE, NEPC, reading, Science of Reading

Letter to the Editor: Tennessee Poised to Fail Students

In response to Third grade retention law causing suburban superintendents angst, I submitted the following letter to the editor (published HERE):

While it is increasingly popular across the US to pass third-grade retention laws as part of larger reading policies, often under the guise of the “science of reading,” there are decades of research showing that grade retention is extremely harmful to children, especially minoritized students and students living in poverty.

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the largest organization of English teachers in the US, “oppose[s] legislation mandating that children, in any grade level, who do not meet criteria in reading be retained” and “oppose[s] the use of high-stakes test performance in reading as the criterion for student retention.”

As well, the National Education Policy Center (Boulder, CO) has issued a policy brief warning that states “[s]hould not adopt ‘ends justify the means’ policies aimed at raising reading test scores in the short term that have longer-term harms (for example, third-grade retention policies).” Further, states “[s]hould not prescribe a narrow definition of ‘scientific’ or ‘evidence-based’ that elevates one part of the research base while ignoring contradictory high-quality research.”

Tennessee must not fall prey to trendy political gimmicks that harm children and do not address the needs of those children learning to read.

deficit thinking, Education, grammar, literacy, literature, reading

Correcting Course on Correctness in English/ELA

My granddaughter is six, in the first grade, and currently in the throes of learning to read—as commanded by formal schooling. Recently, she has shown some of those typical bursts of improvement I have witnessed in learning by young children; those moments give meaning to the word “marvelous.”

In an effort to inject some joy into my granddaughter’s reading journey, I have given her some comic books (a medium that was central to my own journey to being a voracious reader and writer). I was concerned that the text and format of a comic book would be beyond her, but she loves to make her own books, which are heavily picture-oriented to tell stories, so I thought even if she couldn’t read comic books, they would be very appealing to her own hobby.

But what surprised me was when she picked up a graphic novel of Marvel’s Spider-Gwen, she immediately began reading quite well—until she hit very commonly used wording and words that aren’t served well by structured phonics; she stumbled over “gonna” and “wanna,” but was really thrown by “MJ” as the way characters refer to Mary Jane Watson.

Having been taught formally how to read in an environment grounded in correctness, my granddaughter stumbles over the far more prevalent language usage in the real world.

This tension is represented well by the fate of the pronoun “they” (and its forms); “they” for centuries has served in the real-world of speaking English as a gender-neutral singular pronoun even as so-called standard English has persisted in tossing that usage into the “incorrect” bin (although this nonsense is finally losing momentum in formal formats).

For more than a century, the field of English/ELA has resisted real-world language usage and awareness and preferred training children in language acquisition through systems of correctness (phonics rules and grammar rules). Teaching that is grounded in rules and correctness appears to be easier because that approach contributes to control and simplistic forms of assessment and grading, but approaching language through correctness is a dis-service to children and language.

Even though there are increasingly important calls for de-emphasizing correctness in English/ELA, such as the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)’s call for Black linguistic justice, those of us who teach reading, literature, or writing face an incredibly complex paradox—the challenge of fostering in students a healthy and valid view of language while also raising their awareness of the politics of language (that dialects such as so-called standard English, for example, do carry political weight in the real world even though it shouldn’t).

Boland and Queen address the tyranny of correctness in the real world in their Why grammar mistakes in a short email could make some people judge you. Here they investigate why “readers judged strangers harshly simply because of writing errors”—themselves using language of “correctness” (“errors”).

Every semester when I once again address issues surround formatting (citation styles, submitting assignments), I must confront the tyranny of correctness in terms of not wanting to perpetuate the unhealthy culture of correctness while also wanting my students to be aware of the power of correctness so that they have power over their language use instead of being victims of the “error hunt.”

Here, then, are some of the ever-evolving ways I am trying to navigate the tensions in teaching language against the tyranny of correctness:

  • De-grade correctness and formatting related to language. Removing grades and punishment allows a teacher still to address language use and shifts the focus to editing and away from correcting.
  • Change the language we use about language. I avoid “correct/incorrect,” “right/wrong,” and any reference to “fixing” or “correcting” when I mean “revising” or “editing.”
  • Use minimum expectations that move issues of correctness and formatting outside the more substantive elements of language usage. I often have students submit early drafts to address formatting (such as the working references list for a cited essay) well before submitting the essay for my feedback.
  • Examine all dialects and forms of language as powerful and complex language while also interrogating the politics of dialects, including that “standard English” exists and why it exists. Student awareness about the growing debate to de-center standard English is the least we can do in English/ELA on the path to actually de-centering it.
  • Foster a culture of purposefulness instead of a culture of rules. When we examine, for example, the arcane formatting guidelines involved in formal citation, I try to emphasize not that this or that format is “right,” but that formal writing needs to exhibit purposefulness by the writer as part of their credibility and authority. A submitted essay with two or three fonts and font sizes appears careless, for example, and diminishes the reader’s trust in the purposefulness of the writer.
  • Shift all explorations of language to discovery instead of complying with correctness. This, as I noted about my ploy with my granddaughter, is about the joy and wonder of language usage. Once we set aside corrupted and debasing beliefs about “good” or “bad” language (especially that one dialect is more or less rich than another), we allow students to engage with all language in healthy and complex ways.

I became a reader and writer vey heavily influenced by collecting and reading comic books, where the text is not simply formatted on the page and where artwork provides a substantial percentage of the textual meaning. My granddaughter has been zipping through reading aloud from children’s books or her homework worksheets (often designed to match the culture of correctness). But comic books and even signage have proven that correctness falters in the real world.

For far too long English/ELA classes and teachers have been associated with a hostility toward language (and students) because of a culture of correctness; our fields have also been too often disengaged with the real world, where WandaVision is more compelling than Shakespeare.

If we love language and our students, we must correct course on correctness in English/ELA.

Education, literacy, NEPC, reading, Science of Reading

Understanding the “Science of Reading” Movement and Its Consequences: A Reader

1 Comment

MacPhee, D., Handsfield, L.J., & Paugh, P. (2021). Conflict or conversation? Media portrayals of the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, TBD. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.384

Abstract

In this article, we contend that in media stories on the science or reading, journalists have relied on strategic metaphorical framing to present reading education as a public crisis with a narrow and settled solution. Drawing on data from a critical metaphor analysis of 37 media stories, we demonstrate how frames used in recent media reporting have intensified the reading wars, promoting conflict and hampering conversation among stakeholders and across research paradigms and methodologies. The media have asserted a direct connection between basic research and instructional practice that, without sufficient translational research that attends to a variety of instructional contexts and student populations, may perpetuate inequities. We end with an example of collaboration and a challenge to reframe reading education in ways that center collaboration and conversation rather than conflict.

Conflict or conversation? Media portrayals of the science of reading

Bowers, J. S., & Bowers, P. N. (2021, January 22). The science of reading provides little or no support for the widespread claim that systematic phonics should be part of initial reading instruction: A response to Buckingham. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/f5qyu

Abstract

It is widely claimed that the science of reading supports the conclusion that systematic phonics should be part of initial reading instruction. Bowers (2020) challenged this conclusion after reviewing all the main evidence, and Buckingham (2020a) provided a detailed response where she argues that the evidence does indeed support systematic phonics and criticizes an alternative form of instruction called “Structured Word Inquiry” or (SWI). Here we show that every substantive criticism Buckingham makes is factually incorrect or reflects a fundamental mischaracterization. There is nothing in her article that challenges the conclusions that Bowers (2020) draws regarding systematic phonics, and nothing that challenges the claims we have made in the past regarding SWI. This should not be used to support whole language or balanced literacy, but it should motivate researchers to consider alternative methods that are well motivated on theoretical grounds, such as SWI.

Bowers and Bowers (2021)

Caught in the Crosshairs: Emerging Bilinguals and the Reading Wars (NEPC)

After a relatively quiet phase, the “reading wars” reignited in 2018 in the wake of a flurry of news media coverage sparked by a public radio documentary that argued that students across America were receiving inadequate phonics instruction. More than a dozen states—including Florida, Texas and North Carolina—rushed to react, passing laws requiring pre-service and current teachers to place a greater emphasis on phonics.

Now researchers who study Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) students are raising questions about the potential impact of these efforts on such students, including emerging bilinguals. …

Continue reading HERE

See Also

Policy Statement on the “Science of Reading” (NEPC)

The Critical Story of the “Science of Reading” and Why Its Narrow Plotline Is Putting Our Children and Schools at Risk

Perspective | Is there really a ‘science of reading’ that tells us exactly how to teach kids to read?

citation, deficit thinking, Education, plagiarism, Writing

The Talk

Yesterday I had The Talk with two of my classes—my first-year writing seminar and my upper-level writing/research course.

Doing so proved to me once again that you can’t have The Talk too often with young people. Students were under-informed, misinformed, and worst of all, filled with fear.

The Talk, of course, for these classes was about plagiarism.

yellow and black tissue roll
Photo by Jasmin Sessler on Unsplash

Two students in separate classes shared what I think is far too common with the emphasis on what to avoid, plagiarism, (a deficit perspective) instead of what to do and why, scholarly/academic citation—one having been “terrified” by a seminar on plagiarism when they were first-year students and the other struggling to express their concern about teachers being too “harsh” (a recognition that their experience with citation was mostly about avoiding punishment).

Despite the differences in class levels, these students were equally hesitant to answer basic questions about the purposes of citation and what constitutes plagiarism; they offered tentative and incomplete answers when I persisted in coaxing responses.

We tended to agree, eventually, that what constitutes plagiarism is a complicated issue. Students, unlike teachers and professors, were quick to argue that citation errors are not plagiarism, and students also place far more emphasis on intent (which among my colleagues is typically rejected out of hand).

The purpose of The Talk yesterday was to help students make some distinctions about reasonable expectations for citation in academic settings as opposed to intimidating students into not plagiarizing. My questions revolved around the purposes of the bibliographies included in cited essays as well as the basic expectations of in-text citations.

In other words, I wanted students to feel more empowered with increased confidence in terms of knowing they were not plagiarizing even when they remained uncertain about the formatting expectations of the style manual they were being required to use (my students typically are using APA in my courses but have backgrounds in MLA).

Approaching citation at the conceptual level (and avoiding the negative approach of “don’t plagiarize”) seeks to help students understand attribution in academic settings.

Some of the key concepts I emphasized include the following:

  • Recognizing that the primary purpose of the bibliographies included in cited writing is to provide enough information so that a reasonable person can locate the source with a minimum of effort. I urge students to start with what information is essential for that purpose and then to attend to the tedious formatting requirements of that information next.
  • Understanding that in-text citation is required to identify appropriate attribution of other people’s ideas and words. I have found that students often focus on attribution for words (quoting) but aren’t as apt to voice the need to cite ideas. (Note: Students are well aware that blunt plagiarism—passing off an entire essay as your own when it isn’t or pasting huge sections of text from Wikipedia into an essay as if they wrote it—is wrong; therefore, they see plagiarism as a situation about intent and characterize most concerns raised by teachers/professors in their cited work as citation errors, not plagiarism.)
  • Recognizing that the primary purpose of in-text citations is to include the essential information required by the style sheet assigned so that a reasonable person knows which source in the list of references is being cited. Here, the issues of citation at the conceptual level overlap with style sheet formatting so we discuss the different thresholds of major citation systems (APA focusing on author name and year as opposed to MLA using only the name).

The discussion of citation at the conceptual level seemed to help students feel more confidence as most of them faced the unfamiliar waters of APA, but we also had to confront the elephant in the room—what I call the gauntlet of academic citation.

I shared with students the harsh truths about plagiarism in higher education.

First, I explained my experience on my university Academic Discipline Committee, where many years ago I came to the realization that my university has no official definition of plagiarism and that professors vary significantly in their definitions of plagiarism as well as how they identify and punish plagiarism across campus (some religiously using Turnitin.com and others never reporting even blunt plagiarism).

Regretfully, this discussion brought students back to fear, but I think they need to be aware of the unpredictable landscape of citation in college so that they can better advocate for themselves. I specifically urged them to seek out an advocate if they find themselves in situations where they think plagiarism is being misidentified in their work.

Next, I explained to students how systems such as Turnitin.com work (another tool for variation in how plagiarism is addressed in different professor’s classrooms) and that these systems are expensive but not as effective as simple Googling.

I also addressed the student’s concern about many professors being too harsh by admitting that academic citation during college is often much more severe than in the real world (where plagiarists become president or serve in the senate) and far more complex than in the real world.

For me, after 37 years of teaching high school and college students writing and the gauntlet of academic citation, I recognized yesterday that we adults fail the citation/plagiarism talk the same way we fail the sex talk—by focusing on what not to do and instilling fear instead of understanding in young people.

This new recognition sits now beside a long-standing Truth I practice and preach about teaching all aspects of writing; there is no one-shot inoculation (or even two-shot inoculation in our age of Covid-19) because writing and the technicalities of citation are complex, things we gradually acquire even as there is simply no finish line.

Instilling fear in young people is a dis-service to them as well as the lessons we hope to teach and the good we believe we are doing for them.

Education, sexism

From Dress Codes to Pornography: Miseducating Children on Love and Sex

“My first introduction to porn was in middle school watching the ‘scrambled channel’ to catch the few split seconds when the static morphed into a bare butt thrusting,” explains Tracy Clark-Flory, a journalist covering the sex industry, adding: “Officially, I thought of watching porn less as entertainment than instruction, an investigation into men’s desire more than my own.”

Want Me by Tracy Clark-Flory
Want Me, by Tracy Clark-Flory

Clark-Flory notes that her experience is “typical” for young women, and her evolving lessons around pornography are powerfully framed as she further examines her earliest lessons:

It goes without saying: as I was growing up, no one had talked to me about the sexual politics of power, performance and perspective. No one – not my parents, not my sex ed classes, not the writers of glossy magazine sex advice – had bothered to go beyond basic mechanics and technique. A true sexual education has less to do with diagrams of the human reproductive system than with understanding another organ: the brain.

My porn life: what my years as a sex writer taught me about my desires

Addressing a controversy around the backstory of an American Girl doll with lesbian aunts, James Finn confronts how children are the “big losers” in the lessons they receive about love, sex, and marriage:

When straight people get married, we tell kids the truth — that the bride and groom love each other and want to spend their lives together. Don’t small children love hearing about that? I sure did when I was a kid.

So here’s the the frightening lesson being taught in this American Girl uproar: Straight people marry for love. Gay people marry for sex, and that’s so disgusting we don’t dare talk about it in front of children.

Parents SHOCKED Over Doll’s Lesbian Aunts

Both of these examples are disturbing because they expose the great failure in the U.S. to offer purposeful and healthy education for children on love and sex, leaving most of the lessons children learn to chance and taking place well outside formal schooling or the purview of parents or other caring adults.

Clark-Flory’s experiences framed as “typical” for girls and young women unmask some of the foundational messages that allow and perpetuate male-centric and misogynistic norms that create hostile and unfulfilling environments for many if not most women. Like Clark-Flory, Finn adds the alienating and harmful lessons about “normal” love, sex, and traditions such as marriage.

Even the recent rise in efforts to address pornography in formal education, “porn literacy,” tends to cause even greater harm, Clark-Flory argues, because “the goal is less to foster a thoughtful, nuanced engagement with porn, but rather to reject the medium as ‘fake.'”

“[M]oralizing around sexual behaviors that many people genuinely enjoy,” Clark-Flory concludes, “is counter to the compelling and undeniable truth offered up by porn: sex can be a great many things.”

In mainstream education and parenting in the U.S., we must admit that most teaching about love and sex is either absent or normative (and harmful).

Next to the examples offered by Clark-Flory and Finn, one of the most powerful and pervasive indirect lessons found in formal schooling become even more disturbing—the lessons taught by dress codes.

From the first days of schooling, children are taught that a great deal of who they are as well as their responsibility for other people’s behavior is linked to their clothing. And those lessons are not only harmful but also deeply gendered; research details that dress codes disproportionately impact girls and young women.

The messaging of dress codes are no different than what Finn notes about popular dolls:

Children hear what their parents are saying about American Girl. Nascent queer kids are being injected with self loathing. Kids who will grow up cis and straight are internalizing values of bullying and stigmatizing.

Why would anyone want to teach shaming and bullying to kids? Women marry one another sometimes; that’s just a fact. Same-sex marriage is legal, ordinary, and no more sexual than any other marriage. Kids can handle that reality even if their family practices a faith that doesn’t endorse same-sex marriage.

Parents SHOCKED Over Doll’s Lesbian Aunts

Similar to the normalizing messaging around American Girl dolls recognized by Finn about love, sex, and marriage, dress codes lay the foundation for slut shaming and victim blaming.

Girls are taught early and often that they are responsible for how boys respond to their clothes and their bodies. But boys are learning these lessons also.

The great and awful irony in this dynamic is that the attitudes and practices considered “normal” (and thus right)—such as honoring marriage as a celebration of love by one man and one woman or the respectability politics of dress codes—alienate and miseducate children in ways that lead to unfulfilling and abusive attitudes about love and sex.

Love and sex are central to being fully human—but not in any singular or correct way. Beneath the problems around consent and sexual abuse/assault are the many harmful lessons children are learning daily in their schools, their homes, and their communities.

Children are not incomplete humans, and avoiding lessons around love and sex as well as miseducating children about love and sex denies their humanity along with perpetuating the likelihood that in their lives love and sex will lead to fear, humiliation, and even abuse.

The problems are not pornography or dolls with lesbian aunts; the problems are the adults, themselves trapped in fear and misinformation.

Education, genre, literacy

Teaching WandaVision: A Textset on Pastiche [updated]

Early in the semester of my first-year writing seminar, we consider and reconsider openings in essays, an interrogation of students’ experiences with the mechanical “introduction” with the obligatory thesis sentence.

We examine, for example, several Beginnings from Barbara Kingsolver’s essays in High Tide in Tucson and Small Wonder. Two essay beginnings reveal the complexity of student awareness about genre, writing forms, and language/text conventions.

Kingsolver’s “Creation Stories” opens with “June is the cruelest month in Tucson, especially when it lasts until the end of July.” Students always struggle with tone (missing the exaggeration and humor), and completely miss the allusion the T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” (a work itself rich with allusion and historically situated).

I have them consider that their dominant experiences with literary texts in school have been deadly serious, both the texts they have read and the approach taken to those texts (analyzing for deeply serious meaning). Then, I stress the problems with referential texts, such as the use of allusion, since the author is expecting the readers/audience to have the background knowledge needed to recognize the reference and its significance to the texts being addressed.

“Once upon a time, a passing stranger sent me into exile,” Kingsolver begins in her “Jabberwocky.” Immediately, students identify this reference to fairy tales, showing they have a sense of genre that helps guide their expectations as reader (although, as noted above, they also have the “seriousness” baggage cultivated in their formal English courses).

Formal reading and analysis of texts remains mostly in English and literacy courses where students focus on text-based literature (what we once called “print”) and instruction includes techniques such as satire, parody, allusion, and pastiche.

However, most students spend much of their lives with texts that are virtual and in the form of video (film, series, etc.). And in the world outside of formal schooling, referential texts are quite common but depend on pop culture background knowledge—such as the TV series Community.

Before the activity on beginnings, I asked if students were watching the recent series WandaVision, grounded in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Very few were watching and many weren’t aware of the series available on Disney+.

WandaVision
Disney/Marvel

When I pulled up the IMDB page of WandaVision and scrolled to a black-and-white trailer for the series, students have no reference point for what the series is doing as pastiche exploring the history of sitcoms in the U.S. reaching back into mid-twentieth century.

However, as I watched the first five episodes, I continually identified matching sets from series I watched growing up as well as homages to sitcom opening credits and theme songs.

WandaVision takes the Easter Egg hook now common in the MCU and carries references several steps farther, turning the series into a powerful lever for moving the MCU forward and a stand-alone homage and critique of pop culture driven by TV and film.

As with Community, WandVision provides a perfect opportunity for rethinking what texts we present to students and how we help students navigate referential media.

Here, then, drawn from the sources below, I want to offer a textset for WandaVision as an exploration of pastiche while highlighting some of the instructional goals that match traditional approaches in English course and some that expand that instruction.

Instructional goals for a WandaVision textset may include the following

  • Introducing or examining techniques such as satire, parody, allusion, and pastiche, focusing on the distinguishing characteristics among these approaches as well as the uses of and limitations to referential texts.
  • Exploring genre and medium conventions grounded in U.S. TV sitcoms since the mid-twentieth century, including the following: bedrooms of TV married couples, conventions of sitcoms (theme music, opening credits, set design, etc.), TV transition from black-and-white to color, sitcom tropes (pregnancy, neighbors, spouse roles, etc.).
  • Rethinking text beyond print and the importance of the binge-series versus traditional films or network TV weekly series.

Source background materials (Marvel comics that serve the MCU; see here):

Avengers (vol. 1): 113, 133-135, Giant Size 4 (1974), 185-187, 253, 254, 675-690

Vision and Scarlet Witch (1982): 1-4

West Coast Avengers (vol. 2, Avengers West Coast vol. 1, vol. 2): 42-49, 52

Avengers Disassembled

House of M

New Avengers: 26

Avengers: Children’s Crusade

Scarlet Witch: Witches’ Road

Vision: The Complete Collections

Avengers: No Road Home

House of X: 1

Empyre X-Men: 1, 4

TV and Film references (pastiche sources through E5):

[TV]

I Love Lucy (1951-1957)

The Honeymooners (1955-1956)

Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963)

The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961-1966)

Bewitched (1964-1972)

I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970)

The Twilight Zone (195901964)

The Brady Bunch (1969-1974)

The Partridge Family (1970-1974)

The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977)

The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1969-1972)

All in The Family (1971-1979)

Charlie’s Angels (1976-1981)

Get Smart (1965-1970)

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976-1977)

Growing Pains (1985-1992)

Step by Step (1991-1998)

Family Ties (1982-1989)

Full House (1987-1995)

Malcolm in the Middle (2000-2006)

Modern Family (2009-2020)

The Office (2005-2013)

Happy Endings (2011-2020)

[Film]

The Truman Show (1998)

Pleasantville (1998) [See also Viewing Pleasantville in Trumplandia]

The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Blade Runner (1982) [See The ‘WandaVision’ Finale’s ‘Blade Runner’ Reference Will Break Your Heart]

UPDATE: Here’s every TV show that WandaVision is based on (there’s a lot)

Sources

Postmodern Use of Parody and Pastiche

The inescapable postmodernism within television series Community by Sam Shepherd

The 68 Movie References in Community

10 Best Comics To Read With WandaVision!

38 details you may have missed on ‘WandaVision,’ so far

‘WandaVision’: All of the Marvel Easter Eggs and Sitcom References So Far

Breaking Down ‘WandaVision’s TV Sitcom and Genre Influences, Episode by Episode

A Guide To All The Sitcom References In ‘WandaVision’

Who Was the First TV Couple to Sleep in the Same Bed?

See Also

‘WandaVision’ echoes myths of Isis, Orpheus and Kisa Gotami to explain how grief and love persevere

Crisis, Education, education reform, Educational Research, literacy, Media, reading, Science of Reading

The “Science of Reading”: A Movement Anchored in the Past

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One of the defining moments of my first-year writing seminar is my reading aloud the first few paragraphs from A Report from Occupied Territory by James Baldwin.

This essay in The Nation from July 11, 1966, offers students dozens of powerful examples of compelling and purposeful writing, Baldwin at his best. But the circumstances of the essay are what first strike my students.

“There was a great commotion in the streets, which, especially since it was a spring day, involved many people, including running, frightened, little boys,” Baldwin writes. “They were running from the police.”

We note that Baldwin uses “police[men]” five times in the first paragraph, which focuses on people in the Harlem “in terror of the police” because “two of the policemen were beating up a kid.”

Students immediately noted that Baldwin was addressing exactly the same racism grounded in policing that has been the source of social unrest in the U.S. throughout 2020.

In other words, racism in policing in the U.S. is not a recent crisis, but a historically systemic fact of policing.

The more things change, we noted, the more they stay the same.

The history of education in the U.S. is often fascinating and surprising, but it also is like being Phil (Bill Murray) in Groundhog Day—especially when it comes to bandwagons and political and public cries of “crisis.”

Fews aspects of education represent this pattern more than reading, suffering the “science of reading” (SoR) movement since early 2018.

The SoR movement is nothing new, a movement anchored in the past.

But as David Reinking, Victoria J. Risko and George G. Hruby note at The Answer Sheet (The Washington Post), “More worrisome, a majority of states have enacted, or are considering, new laws mandating how reading must be taught and setting narrow criteria for labeling students as reading disabled.”

Reading was declared a crisis in the 1940s because of literacy tests of WWII recruits, throughout the 1950s and 1960s because of Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read, in the 1990s because of handwringing over NAEP scores, during the George W. Bush presidency with the National Reading Panel and No Child Left Behind, and, as noted above, over the last couple years because of the SoR movement prompted by the journalism of Emily Hanford.

As my students came to recognize about racism and policing in the U.S., anyone who examines the history and current bandwagon of reading will see that schools, teachers, and students have, like Phil, lived the same day over and over—reading is in crisis and here is the silver-bullet for all students to read.

One must wonder why we never pause to confront that this formula has never resulted in anything other than the same crisis.

And one must acknowledge that something cannot be a movement if it is anchored in doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

Take for example The Science of Reading: A Defining Movement.

The Coalition Members include a strong connection to The Reading League, formed in 2016.

Both the website and the League represent the very worst of missionary zeal and good intentions; and they both fail the fact check necessary for claims about a reading crisis and the bandwagon of SoR.

First, The Reading League grounds their concerns in a misguided and false red flag about whole language, as reported on Syracuse.com: “Murray is referring to the large base of research and knowledge that proves scientifically-grounded methodology in teaching reading is more effective than the ‘whole language’ approach most curriculum takes.”

This argument has two significant flaws. First, whole language has been replaced by balanced literacy for decades. And second, the 1990s revealed a discredited assault on whole language and an ignored analysis of by Darling-Hammond that showed a positive correlation between higher NAEP scores and students being in whole language classrooms.

The website, The Science of Reading: A Defining Movement, is complicated to fact check because there seems to be a purposeful effort to appear to be different than the SoR bandwagon by rejecting the term as a “buzzword” and demanding “We must preserve the integrity of reading science.”

Further, in the Preamble to their The Science of Reading: A Defining Guide, one sentence stands out: “We know that our children can be taught to read properly the first time.”

“The first time”?

Literacy and reading are lifelong learning experiences, and this claim raises a genuine red flag about this movement.

But the biggest reveal about the so-called SoR movement is in the definition, where there is a narrow parameter set for “scientifically-based”: experimental/quasi-experimental study design, replication or refinement of findings, and peer-reviewed journal publication.

If that sounds familiar, you have simply awakened to the same day some twenty years ago when the National Reading Panel made the exact same claim—and proved to be a deeply flawed report while the policy implications not only did not improve reading but also became mired in funding corruption with Reading First.

The SoR movement is a bandwagon with its wheels mired in the same muddle arguments that have never been true and silver-bullet solutions that have never worked.

Like Phil, we find ourselves waking up to the same day in reading.

This is no crisis, but it certainly is a tired, old story that needs to be left behind through some other vehicle than a bandwagon.

See Also

Greenville News (SC): SC should not “jump on bandwagon” of “science of reading” movement

Open Letter to SC House and Senate Concerning Bill 3613 [UPDATED]

How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students