Category Archives: Education

deficit thinking, Education, education reform, Teaching, Testing

No Need to Catch Up: Teaching without a Deficit Lens

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Some jokes work only when spoken aloud, and possibly especially when spoken aloud in certain regions of the country, but this one came to mind recently in the context of the impact of Covid-19 on schooling: “This is the worst use of ‘catch up’ in education since the Reagan administration allowed the condiment to count as a vegetable in school lunches.”

Heinz tomato ketchup bottle in shallow focus photography
Photo by Charisse Kenion on Unsplash

As I noted in a Twitter thread, a common response to schools closing during the spring of 2020 because of the pandemic is an editorial (The Post and Courier, Charleston, SC) declaring, Use summer to figure out how to catch up SC students; they’ll need it.

“How do schools help students catch up after the Covid-19 closures?” is the wrong question, grounded in a deficit lens for teaching and learning also found in concepts such as remediation and grade-level reading.

Traditional formal schooling functions under several inter-related ideologies, some of which are contradictory (consider assumptions about the bell-shaped curve and IQ v. the standards movement that seeks to have all students achieve above a normal standard).

Deficit ideologies depend on norms, bureaucratized metrics, against which identified populations (in education, grade levels linked to biological age) can be measured; the result is a formula that labels students in relationship to the norm. Many students, therefore, are positioned as deficient, labeled with what they lack.

The hand wringing about students falling behind with schools moving to remote teaching and learning during the spring exposes this deficit lens, but it has always been pervasive since the early twentieth century (at least) in U.S. education.

Consider the branding of federal education over the past couple decades—No Child Left Behind (George W. Bush) and Race to the Top (Barack Obama)—the first posing an image of falling behind (and thus the need for some to catch up) and the latter framing education as a race with necessary winners and losers (who, of course, were behind, need to catch up).

These deficit views of teaching and learning—and of teachers and students—are essential to the main structures of formal schooling, management and efficiency.

While it is a conservative mantra that all-things-government (such as public schools) are doomed to failure because it is government, the fundamental problem with public education is, in fact, bureaucracy (a weakness found in publicly funded institutions and the free market [read Franz Kafka, of Dilbert, and watch Office Space and The Office]).

Attempting to house and teach large numbers of students as efficiently as possible with constrained public funds is a guiding (if not the guiding) mechanism for how we teach students—students as widget monitored by quality control.

My father, Keith, worked in quality control his entire career. But his work involved machined parts, not human beings.

The manufactured “catch up” dilemma is a subset of that widget/quality control paradigm that can create a perception of efficiency but is antithetical to the complexity of human behaviors such as teaching and learning.

We teachers are tasked daily with a given set of students, traditionally arranged by grade levels that loosely conform to biological ages; however, our schools and our classes also vary significantly by out-of-school factors such as the socioeconomic levels of communities and racial as well as gender demographics that schools house but do not cause.

Putting efficiency and management first often ignores and even works against individual student needs and the corrosive impact of inequity that is embodied by individual and groups of students.

Putting 25-35 students in a classroom, building a highly structured and sequential curriculum, evaluating all students against those standards, and compelling teachers to maintain the same instruction and assessment across every grade level can address the priorities of efficiency and management.

But these deficit-based practices accomplish those goals at the expense of large segments of student populations.

It is counter-intuitive to admit that no such coherent and definable thing really exists as third-grade standards since we have spent forty years determined to create and recreate those standards, to test all students against those standards, and to ignore that “all students will” does not and cannot happen—in this system especially that ignores and perpetuates the inequities our students embody through no fault of their own.

Yet, no such thing as third-grade standards exist as we construct them and as we use them to label and manage students.

Eight- and nine-year-old children are biologically and environmentally incredibly diverse, especially in the ways they learn and respond to the world.

Despite our effort to limit or control human autonomy, even children are compelled to be autonomous; they have some limited ability to want to learn, to choose to comply or not with teacher expectations.

Teaching without a deficit lens is an option, however, possibly even within the system we have; although a new system would be much more preferable.

First, teaching can begin with individual students, focusing on the qualities, strengths, and knowledge they bring to any classroom.

Once a teacher knows the make-up of the abilities among any group of students, the teacher can design new and review material and experiences to provide for all students to incorporate their strengths and interests into acquiring new and better learning. Teachers can accomplish these strength-based lessons around whole-class, small-group, and individualized instruction—concessions to efficiency and management that come after putting students strengths and addressing inequity first.

As a final example of the problem of seeing the Covid-19 impact on education as somehow unique (instead of magnifying existing flaws in the system), consider the concerns raised about inequity in administering the SAT and Advanced Placement (A.P.) tests in modified forms for the remote necessities of the pandemic.

Online and modified SAT and A.P. tests have not created some new inequity; they are the mechanisms of inequity that have always existed and helped drive the deficit lens of public schooling.

Standardized testing has always measured inequity, but that testing has also always perpetuated that inequity by labeling many students as deficient as learners while the metric, in fact, mostly measures disparities in social class, gender, and race.

There is an ugly irony to calling for helping students catch up in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The move to remote teaching and learning is one of the few common experiences among our students, who enjoy or suffer the consequences of privilege and disadvantage whether in school or at home despite a pandemic.

In other words, if we remain trapped in deficit language, students are sharing the same “behindness” of having moved to remote course and having reduced instruction.

Ultimately, trying to help students catch up keeps our judgmental gaze on the student, a deficit lens, in fact. The problem with the impact of the pandemic is the same as before Covid-19 changed our world—inequity.

Pathologizing students further because of the pandemic once again allows the systemic inequities in our communities and schools to be ignored, to remain.

Ketchup was never a valid vegetable in public school lunches, and trying to catch up students in the wake of Covid-19 is yet another way to further malnourish our students.

Bicycling, Education, Teaching, Writing

The Training Wheel Fallacy for Teaching Writing

[Header Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash]

The Swamp Rabbit Trail System is a paved multi-use path running from the city of Greenville, South Carolina to Travelers Rest, to the north. As an avid road cyclist, I venture onto the trail occasionally since it runs near my university and allows a somewhat relaxed ride, free of the threat of car traffic (except for the crossings).

Riding a bicycle is often discussed as if it is a universal experience and a skill once learned, never forgotten. As a serious cyclist for well over thirty years, I can attest that observations along the Swamp Rabbit Trail offer a data set that leads to a different theory.

Riding a bicycle requires two essential skills, pedaling and balancing the bicycle. When I see small children and inexperienced cyclists along Swamp Rabbit, I see an oddly similar struggle—cyclists wildly fighting the steering by swinging the handlebars aggressively and pedaling in ways that are counter to gaining momentum and balance.

A stark sign of a less than competent cyclists is the weaving motion as the cyclist approaches, a dramatic contrast to the rail-steady balance of experienced riders. But the oddest thing I see in beginning and inexperienced cyclists is trying to start off by placing one foot on a pedal with the crank arm down and then frantically lifting the other foot to start the pedaling with the crank arm that is up.

That technique is a recipe for disaster, but when successful, those first pedal strokes are combined with some pretty awful weaving that covers the space two or three experienced cyclists could fit into easily.

Holding your line (riding rail straight) and riding without your hands are some of the first skills needed to be a competitive cyclist. I have taken off or changed a significant amount of clothing during hard group rides while continuing to ride at the back of the pack; on a couple of occasions, I have taken a multi-tool out of my saddle pack and adjusted my front derailleur also while continuing to ride at the back of the pack.

Ride for Safety 2018 GB
Ride for Safety 2018

Pedaling smoothly and maintaining proper weight distribution allow the bicycle to remain in a straight line, the natural momentum of rotating wheels. Another counter-intuitive behavior in road cycling is de-weighting your upper body so that you apply less effort into steering.

Beginners and inexperienced cyclists over-steer and over-pedal.

Here is an interesting problem about how most people learn to ride bicycles—the use of training wheels. Training wheels seek to address those essential skills I noted above by allowing new riders to have balance while learning to pedal.

The problem? Pedaling and balancing in cycling are not discrete, separate skills, but symbiotic skills. Learning to ride a bicycle, also, likely requires a different series of learning those skills since the balance is more valuable than the pedaling (and likely harder, at least we intuit that it is harder).

While training wheels are a traditional way to teach children to ride bicycles, balance bicycles are far superior ways to help children acquire balancing skills until they are old enough to pedal (likely much later than we tend to expect children to ride).

Now, as I have discussed before, let’s be clear that riding a bicycle is not like writing. Pedaling and holding a straight line while riding a bicycle is an acquired skill, but is not nearly as complex as it first appears; yet, writing is a creative process that involves dozens of decisions and interrelated skills and content, and is even more complex than we think as beginners.

However, our misconceptions about the teaching/learning dynamic for beginner cyclists as well as beginner students-as-writers are very similar.

The skills and decision process needed to write well are also not discrete, isolated skills that we simply need to acquire one at a time and then somehow integrate; as Lou LaBrant admonished, we learn to write by writing (not by doing skill and drill)—which is similar to the best way to learn to ride a bicycle, by riding a bicycle (without training wheels, possibly in a grass field at first instead of a sidewalk or parking lot).

Traditional approaches to teaching writing that impose templates (five-paragraph essay) and canned moves (“In this essay, I will…,” “In conclusion…”) are grounded in the same urges as teaching children to ride bicycles by using training wheels; however, these traditional approaches are as misguided and harmful as those training wheels.

Riding in large packs of cyclists requires each rider to demonstrate a high level of cycling authority, again grounded in holding a line and behaving in steady and predictable ways even while in high pressure situations (pace intensity increasing, cornering, contributing to a paceline, sprinting, etc.).

Writing authority, whether as a published writer or as a student or academic, also requires demonstrating high-level skills that are much more than the content of the writing (organization, diction, style, and having control of conventional elements of language use [grammar, mechanics, usage]).

Students are better served as writers-to-be if we always allow them to experiment in authentic and holistic contexts while seeking ways to foster essential or foundational concepts (openings, focus, elaboration, cohesion, paragraphing, closings, etc.). There is ample evidence, however, that templates and canned moves are not helpful and may even be harmful (they don’t encourage students to set them aside).

Many people still rush to buy their children bicycles with training wheels, but balance bicycles are beginning to take hold. The teaching of writing needs to make a similar transition.

Depending on templates and canned moves creates the sort of wobbly writers that remind me of my harrowing experiences trying to navigate down the Swamp Rabbit Trail confronting those teetering cyclists who have been mislead that it’s just like riding a bicycle.

Education, Teaching, Writing

Expanding the Writing Process: Drafting Edition

To be a scholar is to be a writer—often a writer seeking publication. Part of my career-long journey to teach writing well, or at least always trying to teach writing better, has been to bring the necessarily reduced experience of writing as a student closer to the authentic experiences of writers in situations, for lack of the better phrase, in the real world.

Recently on Twitter, scholars (notably Tressie McMillan Cottom and Jess Calarco) discussed choices scholars/writers make when working through the revise-and-resubmit phase common in almost all submissions for scholarly publication:

Encouraging and facilitating drafting by students has always been a struggle for me. Some students resist drafting at all (I have students who fear sharing drafts with me until they are “perfect” and many students simply do not have the tools to revise and edit in ways that make the process seem valuable), but I also recognize that an authentic writing process and the many ways we draft are often more complicated than we allow in classrooms.

Two problems at the root of working with students and fostering an effective writing process is, first, helping students who have been taught directly and indirectly to write only one draft from prescriptive prompts and rubrics (an unintended but negative consequence of the Advanced Placement programs and assessments in English, for example), and, second, re-teaching students that have come through a highly regimented writing process sequence (pre-writing, drafting, revising, and publishing).

That second problem often shifts most of the writer’s work to the teacher and leaves students mostly being compliant; however, effective writing pedagogy seeks to provide students support while they navigate an authentic writing process that is anchored in making writer’s decisions along the way.

One way I have tried to foster drafting better is to move away from “the” writing process to “a” writing process, one that students explore and create for themselves by considering the many ways that writers navigate moving from a writing idea to a final piece (often published).

Building a writer’s toolbox is incredibly important for students-as-writers because moving from first draft to final draft is about having purpose and strategies. I encourage and build that toolbox by providing feedback that prompts an action, something specific to do to the draft.

But drafting involves many different aspects of a text to be addressed, aspects that are not necessarily of equal weight in terms of creating meaning for the reader.

I have used these categories for years with students: content and organization (highest level to be addressed), diction and style (the next and important level to be addressed), and grammar, mechanics, and usage (the final level that is essentially editing).

Although students often resist the necessity of several drafts for a single essay, I tend to respond to first and second levels more aggressively in early submissions, stressing that we have no reason to edit a piece that isn’t working to begin with, as LaBrant (1946) argues:

[A teacher] may be content if the writing is composed of sentences with correct structure, with periods neatly placed, verbs correctly ended, pronouns in the right case, and all attractively placed on the page. I have heard teachers say that if their pupils do all this, and spell with reasonable correctness, they (the teachers) are content. I am willing to admit that a conventional paper, such as is just described, tempts one to be satisfied; but I am not willing to admit that it represents a worth-while aim. As a teacher of English, I am not willing to teach the polishing and adornment of irresponsible, unimportant writing [emphasis added]….I would place as the first aim of teaching students to write the development of full responsibility for what they say. (p. 123)

Knowing what aspects of a draft to attack first is incredibly important for students, but as the exchange above by scholars shows, students also need to have a range of options for moving from one draft to the next.

Too often, students have been allowed simply to “fix” the areas marked for them by the teacher. This is probably one of the worst unintended consequences of writer’s workshop.

I constantly have to prompt students to work on their drafts from the comments I have offered, but moving through the entire draft, not just where I have commented.

To expand student drafting options, I have shifted a great deal of my feedback from marking drafts to conferencing. In those conferences we focus on what students should do next.

I offer several options: abandonment (starting the essay over and completely abandoning the first submission), revising/editing the draft I have commented on and that we are conferencing about (still the most common next step), or starting a new Word document and rethinking organization, sentence and paragraph formation, and likely significant aspects of the content (adding or changing sources, changing and/or elaborating on examples, reorganizing the development of that content, etc.).

Final drafts are greatly improved, I find, when students are allowed a wide range of drafting options and given ample support for making writer’s decisions based on their goals for the writing project.

In our conference, I typically start by asking students to say aloud what they were trying to accomplish with their essay; then we discuss if and how the submitted draft accomplishes those goals.

After that framing, we address what moves and strategies students should follow next, keeping that next step manageable and not necessarily exhaustive. I usually ask what are two or three next things to do with this draft while also stressing that the full drafting process for the essay may take three or four (or more) drafts to reach a satisfying final version.

Drafting must be purposeful, goal oriented, and grounded in actionable strategies for the student/writer. But drafting should never be reduced to simply following a set sequence or “fixing” what the student initially submitted regardless of the quality of that submission.

As LaBrant adds:

All writing that is worth putting on paper is creative in that it is made by the writer and is his own product… . Again there may be those who will infer that I am advocating no correction, no emphasis on form. The opposite is really true. The reason for clarity, for approved usage, for attractive form, for organization, lies in the fact that these are means to the communication of something important. (p. 126)

For scholars as writers, that “something important” is often about publishing as part of academic and scholarly careers, and while revise and resubmit can be tedious and frustrating, how to move through several drafts has an authentic purpose that is too often missing in traditional classrooms for students as writers.

That said, we as teachers of writing can foster something much closer to authentic than a lockstep writing process and reducing drafting to “fix what the teacher marks.”

One way to teach writing better is to expand the what and how of drafting for our students, in ways that look more like drafting among writers in that so-called real world.

 

Education, poetry, Teaching, Writing

The Writing Models Dilemma: On Authentic Writing and Avoiding the Tyranny of Rubrics

While my journey to the fields of English and teaching started with science fiction and comic books, a love of reading that was steered to so-called “literature” by my high school English teacher, Lynn Harrill, I walked into my first high school classroom as a teacher of English primarily committed to teaching young people to write.

My goal was not simply to have my students write well, but to write authentically, to write in ways that existed outside traditional classroom essay writing.

Teacher preparation for teaching high school English was for me (and remains mostly so) grounded significantly in teaching literature. As a result, I spent the first 5-10 years as a teacher teaching myself how to be a writing instructor.

Far too many of my practices were quite bad, even harmful. However, one thing kept my writing curriculum afloat—volume. I somehow recognized very early that people learn to write by writing (see LaBrant, 1953).

But I also began my career as a teacher of writing by embracing two contradictory commitments: (1) I was always anti-five-paragraph essay; however, (2) I tended to remain grounded in a (ridiculous) commitment to using an authentic-template approach.

It took me several years to recognize that teaching writing wasn’t about finding the right template, but about rejecting the tyranny of the rubric/template approach.

Without rubrics/templates, however, teaching writing to a relatively large number of students, most of whom are not genuinely motivated to become writers, is incredibly challenging. None the less, rubrics/templates are conducive to managing the teaching of writing, but they are essentially the enemy of authentic writing.

A watershed moment for me in teaching writing came with helping writers who wanted to write poetry. Writing poetry and teaching people to write poetry are very similar to writing and teaching students to write essays in that both can be accomplished in some superficial way with rubrics/templates, but that those outcomes are only pale imitations of the forms being attempted.

Most of us have participated in the clunky 5-7-5 approach to writing a haiku poem for class just as most of us have performed the five-paragraph essay.

The watershed moment in understanding how to approach the teaching of poetry included a direct move away from templates and mechanical structures (haiku, sonnets, etc.) and toward the conceptual elements that define a form or genre.

While prose is driven by the formation of sentences and paragraphs (both concepts that are not as easily defined as many think), poetry is most often characterized by lines and stanzas (even prose poetry is anchored to the norms it resists).

Without using syllable count, then, line formation and line breaks are something many poets intuit or feel—stanza formation as well.

When I work one-on-one with an emerging poet, I attack lination (line formation and breaks) and stanzas by asking the poet to be aware of the “why” in those formations and whether or not there is any pattern guiding that “why.”

It is about having a purpose, not that one purpose is correct.

This work is very complex, but it is at a conceptual level, not the mechanical framing of rubrics/templates.

Teaching writing at the conceptual level, however, can seem abstract to students (who lack the rich experiences with text as writers for those concepts to be concrete); therefore, I soon began seeking ways to merge concepts to the concrete.

Here I also began to blend more intentionally my responsibility for literature and reading instruction with my writing curriculum by presenting our text readings as models for our journey as writers.

To be authentic in our pursuit as writers, I eventually realized, ours was not to reject rubrics but to reimagine our paths to rubrics. I knew that handing students stilted rubrics/templates was mostly about compliance and did not foster the sort of conceptual understanding my students needed.

The teacher-created rubric makes most of the writer decisions for students that they need experiences with in order to be authentic and autonomous writers.

However, I needed to help students develop their own toolbox of rubrics drawn from a wide and rich reading of texts that model the many ways that writers produce any form or genre.

Poets create poetry always in conversation with forming lines and stanzas just as essayists are aware of beginnings, middles, and ends as they navigate sentences and paragraphs.

For at least thirty years, then, I have been providing my students compelling models of the sorts of essays they are invited to write and walking them through reading-like-a-writer activities (see here and here).

And for the past two decades, where I teach undergraduate and graduate students, I have worked diligently to provide my students detailed models with my comments embedded to walk them through some of the more mundane elements of writing in formal situations (college essays, scholarly writing, public commentary)—citation, document formatting, etc.

Two of those models (linked above) are for cited scholarly essays using APA and public commentaries. Periodically, I create new models and revise my embedded comments, seeking always to refine the effectiveness of using models for teaching writing.

Now here is the dilemma.

Many years ago I had to accept the sobering fact that research shows that teaching writing by models is only modestly effective, far less so than something as clunky and inauthentic as sentence combining (sigh).

But I also live the reality that models often fall short of why I use them and how they should support students writing authentically.

This spring, in fact, I have implemented two new models with embedded notes, and I have been increasingly frustrated by the jumbled efforts at public commentary in my upper-level writing/research course.

That frustration, however, has led to a new understanding, coming 36+ years into teaching writing.

My models with notes are primarily generic examples to walk students through some of the structures and formatting expected in formal cited essays or when submitting a public work for publication. While I am frustrated always with students failing to format as required with these models right there in front of them, I have resolved myself to this process taking several rounds for students to “get” these (trivial) elements of submitting original writing.

My ah-ha! moment this semester has been to recognize that students have repeatedly ignored the public commentary assignment and have clung instead too directly to the model by creating a backward rubric/template for their public commentary submissions.

I soon realized that many of the students simply mimicked exactly my number of and types of paragraphs provided in the model (much of which wasn’t appropriate for this specific assignment).

Of the two major writing assignments, of course, writing a public commentary is the one more foreign to my students, the one about which they have the least expertise. In desperation, they have reverted to the inauthentic process most of them have experienced as writing instruction—prescriptive prompts and conforming to rubrics.

I have been long aware that my writing instruction is mostly unlike what students have experienced. What I ask students to do is extremely hard, often frustrating, but something they genuinely can just suffer through briefly and return to the normal ways of writing essays in college.

There is little I can do about this outlier aspect of my classes and practices, but I am now better equipped to have the rubric/template urge conversation earlier and more directly with students.

Using models and models with embedded notes can be more effective with greater intentionality and my diligence in responding to students who resist working toward conceptual levels of understanding by defaulting to rubric/template mode.

The dilemma with using models to teach writing is a subset of the larger problem with nudging students away from performing as students and toward performing as writers (or whatever role we are trying to achieve—pianist, scientist, historian, etc,).

This newest round of better understanding how to teach writing is yet another adventure in teacher humility—confirming that I must always be diligent about what I am doing and how they guides (or misleads) my students in pursuits we share.

Teaching and learning are different sides of the same complicated coin.

Education, memoir, Workers

Worker’s Dilemma

A former first-year student of mine, about to graduate during the Covid-19 pandemic, emailed me recently since we will miss the chance to talk face-to-face before graduation. This student was incredibly kind about the role I played in their undergraduate journey, offering this as well: “I came to you with concerns over a major sophomore year, and instead of lecturing me you asked me what my dream job was.”

This student made some dramatic changes to their life and college career then, and now, I think is on a path that will be far more fulfilling. But this situation plays out over and over, and quite differently, at my selective, small liberal arts university.

The students at my university are often socially and economically conservative, or at least come from homes that are socially and economically conservative. These students are keenly aware of viewing a college education in terms of return on investment.

In other words, is there major going to lead to a career that justifies the price tag of those four years (and often the additional years of graduate school that follow)?

More often than not, I interact with students who want to follow their bliss, but their parents want them to respect their investment—by preparing for a high-paying career.

My journey to and through college was quite different in most ways than the students I teach. I grew up in a white Southern working-class home, where my parents’ generation was just beginning to tip-toe into college but had firmly accepted that college was an essential goal for their children.

My mother completed only one year of junior college, where my father finished both years. But four-year college was rare throughout both sides of their families, although college was part of the aspirational narrative that all of my family voiced and instilled in me.

I had no knowledge of concepts such as return on investment, but my academic journey was a given that included going to college and turning that degree into a stable career.

Although I fumbled with deciding on a major throughout my first two years (also attending the junior college my parents had)—from physics to pre-law to architecture—by the time I transferred to a satellite campus of the state university, I was staring at needing to commit fully to the sort of major and career that justified my parents paying for my college experience.

I am not entirely sure why, but I always felt deeply obligated to my parents and their funding my college (although I did earn several academic scholarships along the way and also tutored for additional income). I had grown up in a home where school was first, athletics second, and as long as I attended to these commitments, then I was not asked to work or “pay my way” in much of anything (although I did hold jobs throughout the summers and into college).

As I entered my junior year, although I wanted to major in English, I was acutely aware that this sort of major wasn’t practical (no one expressed that to me, not even my parents) so I chose to be a secondary (English) education major to become a high school teacher.

This meant that I sat in English courses (taking far more than was required to certify) where the professors routinely identified me as education, not a real English major. Because I graduated in December, I immediately entered an MEd program (more practicality since that insured a pay raise) that spring before becoming a full-time high school English teacher that coming fall.

A bit over a decade later, I continued that trend by entering an EdD program, earning my doctorate in 1998. That entire journey consisted of academic choices made at the margins of bliss, grounded always solidly in being practical.

You see, I had not lived the comment that I made years ago to my student.

I am very fortunate and happy to have had a career as a teacher; it has been a fulfilling dream career. But I consider myself a teacher and a writer, with the latter always lurking in shadows and being tended only secondarily and gradually as my life became more and more conducive to that dream deferred (moving to higher education was a huge boost to being a writer, but greater and greater financial stability has been significant as well).

My student I reference above has been on my mind as I have witnessed the disturbing reality of being a worker in the U.S.—emphasized by the pandemic that has stressed our medical system, exposed the failures of private work-based health insurance, and tossed people out of their jobs and careers.

In the U.S. (to the bafflement of much of the rest of the world), most people have their health insurance and retirement anchored to their jobs—being a worker is a necessity to have what many would consider essential elements of being fully human in 2020.

The pandemic has not only unmasked how inhumane these practices are, but even when stimulus legislation was passed, much of the money to help people remained grounded in the people who were (or had been) workers.

Even as the stimulus money is dripping out to individuals through the lump-sum check and funds added to unemployment, many conservatives on social media are lamenting that these “handouts” are proving that government money just makes people lazy. The mainstream media are playing right along by posting several stories in which small business owners are complaining that their workers are making more unemployed than when they were working.

Here is something I think many are missing about the $600 per week addition to unemployment: Political leaders of both parties were so eager not to send large lump payments to all citizens ($2400 stimulus checks not linked to unemployment, doubling the current stimulus amount) that they chose a process that has had unintended and negative consequences.

The bad policy and bad politics coming out of the Covid-19 crisis is not driven by good economic policy or even concern for the common good; the bad policy and bad politics are the consequence of a bad and paradoxical mythology.

The first part of that mythology is that to be fully human in the U.S., you must be a worker. The big lie in that myth being debunked during the pandemic is that we are witnessing that the lowest paid, hardest working, and most exposed working conditions—hourly workers and the service industry, for example—are genuinely essential and the workers who are building and maintaining the U.S.—not the CEOs, billionaires, or political leaders.

Along with service workers, health care providers and teachers now sit far more prominently in the minds of people about what sort of workers matter, what sort of workers have the kinds of work conditions and obligations that many people would prefer to avoid.

The second part of the mythology is a paradox, a cruel and ugly paradox: Workers’ lives don’t matter, actually, but being a worker is dangled before the public as a possible way to become what does really matter—being rich and powerful.

The cruel and ugly part is almost no one will ascend to rich and powerful because almost everyone who is rich and powerful had most of that gifted, not earned.

The rugged individual who built his empire completely on his own is a bald-faced lie, a saccharine libertarian fantasy.

We should not be rushing to get back to normal once we find some handle on the Covid-19 crisis because normal in the U.S. means that everyone must be a worker to even have a shot at being fully human.

Our normal democracy has been held hostage by a false truth we hold as self-evident. We deserve a new normal in which basic human dignity is the given and our lives as workers are a part of that but a part that is properly supported by our government and our economic system.

It should not be normal that wait staff must depend on tips.

It should not be normal that you have to work to have health care and retirement.

It should not be normal that minimum wage means that you cannot afford housing, food, and essentials.

It should not be normal that you have to choose between your health and keeping your job.

It should not be normal that a billionaire class continues to feed on the labor of the masses who are systematically being denied their humanity.

I am happy that my former student feels connected to a life and career in part because we talked and he thought differently about who he was and who he wants to be.

I am nervous about the possibility that after Covid-19 we will in fact return to normal where workers’ lives don’t matter.

Education, Teaching, Writing

Teaching Writing Remotely in a Time of Crisis

My students and I are in our last couple weeks of remote learning and teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As I have examined, the transition for me was facilitated by many of my philosophical/theoretical commitments and practices—most of which are non-traditional and tend to cause tension in traditional circumstances.

At the root of these commitments, I think, is that I am essentially a teacher of writing. Therefore, I am prone to creating classroom experiences around workshop formats, open-ended discussions, and text-based examinations that are seeking goals beyond simply summarizing or analyzing the texts for meaning.

Most of my teaching career—almost two decades each at the high school and higher education levels—has involved teaching writing to students who are not trying to become writers. My writing instruction is primarily grounded in fostering the power of writing as that is valued within academic and scholarly contexts.

Photo by hannah grace on Unsplash

One of my best assignments, I think, is that I ask my first-year writing students to interview faculty at my university about how they conduct scholarship and research as well as about their lives as writers. Much to their surprise, students discover that most faculty are begrudging writers if not openly antagonistic to writing.

I work much of the time to balance my commitment to the field (and career) of writing with the reality that the vast majority of my students are attempting to navigate academia well, but may be as resistant to being and becoming writers as many of those professors.

My university now has only two writing-intensive courses for students—the first-year writing seminar and an upper-level writing/research course (intended to be taken in a student’s major department if offered).

I teach the upper-level writing/research course for my department, and we are currently navigating that remotely.

This is my third time through the course; therefore, I have continued to revise and better focus my goals for the course and the assignments. Teaching this course remotely has been another, and unexpected, way to rethink what works when teaching writing.

First, a fortunate accident of the move to remote learning/teaching is that it occurred in the middle of the course, which I have designed to be text-based and direct-instruction focused in the first half and workshop oriented in the second half (see the schedule). As a result of the shift to remote, all of the major assignments in the course have been submitted without our having traditional face-to-face class sessions.

The assignments have included annotated bibliographies, a cited scholarly essay, and a public commentary. Students have been invited to choose a topic in education that is being covered significantly in the media, conducting scholarly searches for what the research base shows about that topic, and conducting an informed analysis of how well the media is covering the topic.

I have now received at least the first submissions of all of these assignments, prompting me to email my students about the public commentaries this morning (since it was due yesterday). A key point I made was that the course is designed so that they are experimenting with how different writing purposes have different submission formats, different standards for citations, and different stylistic concerns.

Students are provided several documents to support producing and submitting the assignments. Those materials include a sample scholarly essay with notes and a sample public commentary with notes.

The challenges students face include preparing separate writing assignments and documents with those differences—APA format v. submitting a work of journalism, in-text scholarly citation v. hyperlinking, writing for a scholarly audience v. writing for the general public.

This writing-intensive course, I think, is both quite challenging for students (and the teacher) and a perfect model for helping students move beyond a rules-based or template-driven approaches to writing in academic, scholarly, and public contexts.

The scholarly essay and public commentary force students to see that writing is grounded in purpose and audience—not a simple set of rules demanded by the teacher.

Since workshopping the assignments remotely is not fundamentally different than when we have in-class sessions, I am recognizing another layer of stress because the remote is occurring during a health crisis and the unusual experiences of isolation many of my students are experiencing.

When I have been charged with providing faculty development for faculty teaching writing (as disciplinary professors without backgrounds in composition beyond their own experiences as writers), especially first-year writing, I have highlighted the problem with cognitive overload—asking students to write about new or challenging content while also focusing on being better writers.

If students are overwhelmed intellectually, they often do the multiple expectations poorly (or at least less well than if they could focus on only one) or prioritize by doing one thing well at the exclusion of the other(s), typically choosing to address content and fumble the writing itself.

One of my refrains is that when we are primarily teaching a class addressing writing instruction, we must be careful not to detract from that focus on writing well (or better) by engaging students in new or challenging course content (such as reading a highly technical, complex text to write about).

However, as we move into upper-level writing course, that problem is essentially impossible to avoid. Even in so-called normal circumstances, students have struggled with this upper-level writing/research course because, to be blunt, it is asking a great deal of undergraduate students.

I am accustomed to responding to initial drafts with “Did you look at the sample?” and “You are not doing the assignment.” But during this remote experience compounded by a pandemic, I am giving these responses far more often, nearly to the point of frustration on my part.

As I continue to interrogate my own role as a teacher of writing and a writer/scholar, I have a few key elements of my teaching that need careful consideration:

  • Increasing the tenuous value of providing students with models of writing in academic and public writing.
  • Fairly balancing writing assignments with supporting students making autonomous decisions as writers/scholars.
  • Providing feedback that supports effective and efficient revision (and learning).
  • Disrupting student misconceptions about drafting, written products, and performing as a student instead of as a writer or scholar.

I am not certain that a course shifted mid-semester into remote learning/teaching because of a pandemic can be anything other than a pale version of the original course, but I have witnessed that my courses are providing many if not most of my students quite valuable learning experiences.

The negative consequences of teaching remote during this pandemic are not quite clear yet, but I am certain the added stress of the situation has worked against many of my course goals.

I worry that many of us teaching fail to consider the demands of writing and writing well while students are simultaneously learning and navigating new content. It ultimately may be far too much to ask of students forced to remain in their homes and rooms for weeks on end with a newly uncertain world around them.

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.

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.

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