Category Archives: reading

book banning, Censorship, Education, literacy, reading

Banning Books Is Un-American

November 18, 2021 plthomasedd

[Update: Published at the Greenville News (SC); see PDF at end of post with hyperlinks]

person holding Ray Bradbury book — Photo by Will Porada on Unsplash

In the fall of 1973, the Drake School Board in North Dakota banned Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

Vonnegut, born November 11, what is now celebrated as Veterans Day, was a World War II veteran who survived the firebombing of Dresden. That horrific event a couple decades later became Vonnegut’s most celebrated novel, the same novel banned after being assigned in Drake High School.

“I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people,” Vonnegut explained in a letter to the school board. There he also defended the value of his novels: “They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are.”

Ultimately, Vonnegut pronounced the banning of his novel “un-American” and concluded, “you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.”

I have been an educator in South Carolina for almost 40 years, about two decades of that time spent teaching high school English. This example of censorship from the 1970s should be nothing more than a regrettable moment in history, but I was reminded of it because on Vonnegut’s birthday in 2021 I read that SC Governor Henry McMaster has joined Republicans across the U.S. who are not only banning books, but actively calling for book burnings.

A popular truism often cited in times like these is “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” attributed to George Santayana. However, what we are experiencing in Greenville, SC and across America is much worse; this is a purposeful erasing of history.

Here is a history lesson we cannot afford to ignore.

“The burning of books under the Nazi regime on May 10, 1933, is perhaps the most famous book burning in history,” detailed at the Holocaust Encyclopedia. The justifications for the book burnings are hauntingly familiar when paired with comments from governors and school board members:

At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged and “unwanted” books onto bonfires with great ceremony, band-playing, and so-called “fire oaths.” In Berlin, some 40,000 persons gathered in the Opernplatz to hear Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address: “No to decadence and moral corruption!” Goebbels enjoined the crowd. “Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Gläser, Erich Kästner.”
Holocaust Encyclopedia

While there is certainly a place for examinations of age-appropriate texts being taught in public schools, and parents have the right to offer input about the books their own children read, book banning is an act of removing everyone’s opportunity to choose what they read and what they learn.

The current purge happening across the U.S. is not limited to individual student and parent choice, but banning books from school libraries, while targeting the most vulnerable students and authors.

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the largest organization of ELA teachers in the U.S., supports The Students’ Right to Read, including in part:

One of the foundations of a democratic society is the individual’s right to read, and also the individual’s right to freely choose what they would like to read. This right is based on an assumption that the educated possess judgment and understanding and can be trusted with the determination of their own actions. In effect, the reader is freed from the bonds of chance. The reader is not limited by birth, geographic location, or time, since reading allows meeting people, debating philosophies, and experiencing events far beyond the narrow confines of an individual’s own existence.
The Students’ Right to Read (NCTE, 2018)

While political leaders across both major parties enjoy making grand statements and gestures about individual freedom, the American Way, and the American Dream, there is only one way to describe book banning—un-American.

That governors and school boards are actively banning books across the U.S. at the same time that we as a country were celebrating Veterans Day is repeating the offensive history lived by Vonnegut five decades in our past, a past we refuse to acknowledge, a past we seem eager to repeat.

book banning, Cancel Culture, Education, fascism, Kurt Vonnegut, NCTE, Neil Gaiman, parental choice, reading, Teaching

Banned in the U.S.A. Redux 2021: “[T]o behave as educated persons would”

November 11, 2021 plthomasedd 1 Comment

We know of course there’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.
– Arundhati Roy

The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable. It is through these invisible holes in reality that poetry makes it way—certainly for women and other marginalized subjects and for disempowered and colonized peoples generally, but ultimately for all who practice art at any deep levels. The impulse to create begins—often terribly and fearfully—in a tunnel of silence.
“Arts of the Possible,” Adrienne Rich

It is the morning of November 11, 2021, and I spend some of that time creating gentle memes to post in honor of Kurt Vonnegut’s day of birth:

I wanted to highlight Vonnegut’s career-long plea for a secular kindness, rooted in his faith in humanism, and I have long admired Vonnegut as an anti-war crusader.

Celebrating the birthday of a person after their death is always bittersweet, but on this morning, the act was awash in a very ugly sort of irony. As I loaded The State (Columbia, SC) web page, I saw this as the lead story:

My home state of South Carolina is heavily conservative—first to secede and uniformly conservative in politics throughout the decades of Democratic control of the South and then Republican in the wake of Strom Thurmond changing parties and later Ronald Reagan leading a conservative Christian shift in the South.

Gov. McMaster is not often “first to” about anything, but he is an uncritical and resolute soldier in the Republican culture war regardless of what that means.

Vonnegut—while alive and since his death—has often had his works challenged and even banned; one of the most enduring things he ever wrote, in fact, was a response to censorship:

In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut‘s novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school’s furnace as a result of its “obscene language.” Other books soon met with the same fate. On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn’t receive a reply.
Letters of Note

In part, Vonnegut replied as follows:

Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.

I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?…

If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us….

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
I am very real, Kurt Vonnegut, November 16, 1973

Reading about the censorship wildfire spreading to SC on Vonnegut’s birthday adds insult to injury, but this is not mere partisan politics, not something as innocuous or abstract as a “culture war.”

Just as Vonnegut ends his letter with “I am very real,” I want to stress that the missionary zeal behind removing and burning books from school libraries is also “very real”:

Calls for censorship, book removal from school libraries, and book burning are the logical next step in the Republican/conservative assault on Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project; at the core of this movement is a misguided demand for parental rights that grows beyond any parents’ children to all children.

Some parents and political leaders on the Right have mistaken Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 as a manual for partisan politics instead of, as Neil Gaiman (born a day before Vonnegut 38 years later) explains in the 60th anniversary edition of the novel:

This is a book of warning. It is a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted….

People think—wrongly—that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t; or if it is, it tends to do a rotten job of it….

What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future but the present—taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It’s cautionary.

Fahrenheit 451 is speculative fiction. It’s an “If this goes on…” story. Ray Bradbury was writing about his present, which is our past.
Introduction, Fahrenheit 451, Neil Gaiman

In my early days as a public high school English teacher, I had a book challenge targeting John Gardner’s Grendel, but it was clearly mostly about attacking me as a young teacher. While I think we are careless and even cavalier in the U.S. about any parents’ right to control what their children read and learn, I experienced first-hand the power of a few parents to determine what all students read and learn.

I must return to Vonnegut here and stress, “If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.”

Removing books from libraries, banning books from schools, and book burnings are never justified; these are acts of tyranny, of fascism—and not in any way a gesture of what we like to call “American.”

There is no individual freedom without the freedom of the mind. Banning a book is closing the mind.

In Athens-based R.E.M.’s “Its the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” the lyrics include a verse that is haunting in 2021:

Six o’clock, TV hour, don’t get caught in foreign tower
Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn
Lock him in uniform, book burning, blood letting
Every motive escalate, automotive incinerate
Light a candle, light a votive, step down, step down
Watch your heel crush, crushed, uh-oh
This means no fear, cavalier renegade and steering clear
A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline
“Its the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)”

The Republican assault on teaching, learning, reading, and thinking is nothing more than a “tournament of lies” aimed at partisan political power.

Simply put, censorship and book burning are UnAmerican; to ban a book is to dismantle the American Dream.

Resources

Statement on Censorship and Professional Guidelines (NCTE)

Guidelines for Dealing with Censorship of Instructional Materials (NCTE)

NCTE Intellectual Freedom Center

The Students’ Right to Read (NCTE)

See Also

The 451 App (22 August 2022)

Teen’s Eyes Begin Glowing Red While Reciting Forbidden Knowledge From Book On Critical Race Theory

literacy, reading, Science of Reading

Claiming Teacher and Student Agency in the Era of the “Science of Reading” (RRC)

October 4, 2021 plthomasedd

Reading Recovery Canada

Claiming Teacher and Student Agency in the Era of the “Science of Reading” – presented by Dr. P L Thomas, Professor of Education
December 13 2021 – 6:30pm (eastern time) – session will be recorded for repeat viewing until August 31, 2022

The “science of reading” movement has direct roots in a U.S. media narrative starting about 2018, but the Science of Reading now drives reading and education decisions in many states and provinces. The decisions and legislation often includes policies and practices not supported by research (for example, grade retention) and further de-professionalizes teachers. This session places the Science of Reading movement in historical context and disrupts the “evidence-based” claims of Science of Reading advocates. The goal of the session is to provide teachers the evidence and support needed to assert their professional autonomy in support of their students’ needs and agency.

Access presentation PP HERE

Education, literacy, literature, Lou LaBrant, reading

Drama and the Struggling High School Reader

September 16, 2021 plthomasedd

In my current trends in literacy course for our MAT program, I have 7 students across several content areas. Our discussion yesterday confronted how too often teachers (notably ELA teachers) assign texts and reading that discourage students as readers.

One candidate in ELA shared a story of a teacher who declared that most of their students “can’t read Shakespeare” so that teacher has the class listen to an audio recording of the play Macbeth.

I noted that required reading lists often do more harm than good for students as readers and added if I had to choose between required texts that students don’t read or choice texts that students actually read, I always want the latter.

Further, this example triggered a pet peeve of mine about how we teach different forms and genres of writing.

I asked the class what type of text Macbeth is, and they all identified it as a play. I followed up with asking how plays/drama are intended to be experienced, and again, they all noted that plays are written to be viewed, preferably as live performances.

Next, I shared with them recurring experiences I have with my first-year writing students (high-achieving students—disproportionately white and affluent—admitted to a selective liberals arts college).

Often on the first day of class, I ask students what novels they read in high school English, and several students will say A Raisin in the Sun, Hamlet, and such. I then point out that these are plays, and not novels. But the students have mostly read these plays in bound books that look identical to the novels they were assigned.

Also in the first few days, I have students do a writing exercise where they write a mimic passage from a chapter in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, “A House of My Own.” Students are told to mimic the grammar and style of the chapter exactly while changing the content.

The assignment is designed as a first transition to reading like a writer [1] (as opposed to reading text for literary analysis) so that students develop the skills needed to compose and revise with attention to not just what they express but also how they express their messages.

Invariably, several students email me their piece and identify it as their “poem,” despite my noting in class that they are mimicking a prose chapter from a novel.

In other words, very bright and often “A” students demonstrate over and over that they have garbled and often inaccurate knowledge about genre and form—and they learn these flawed lessons in school, typically in English, because of careless approaches to text like the one above concerning Macbeth.

I want to focus here on two aspects, interconnected, about how we teach text to students, particularly in high school.

First, concerning having students listen to or read plays, I always see lessons involving text as essentially lessons in genre awareness, a concept endorsed by Ann Johns instead of genre acquisition (her discussion forefronts composition, but this applies to reading as well):

Russell [and] Fisher (in press) distinguish between two approaches to genre pedagogy, two basic goals for a course or tutorial. The first is GENRE ACQUISITION, a goal that focuses upon the students’ ability to reproduce a text type, often from a template, that is organized, or ‘staged’ in a predictable way. The Five Paragraph Essay pedagogies, so common in North America, present a highly structured version of this genre acquisition approach. …
A quite different goal is GENRE AWARENESS, which is realized in a course designed to assist students in developing the rhetorical flexibility necessary for adapting their socio-cognitive genre knowledge to ever-evolving contexts. …I have concluded that raising genre awareness and encouraging the abilities to research and negotiate texts in academic classrooms should be the principal goals for a novice literacy curriculum (Johns 1997).
This juxtaposition of two quite different goals, genre acquisition and genre awareness, is reminiscent of another pedagogical contrast mentioned by Henry Widdowson years ago (1984) and, later, by Flowerdew (1993): that pedagogies are designed to either TRAIN for specific tasks (i.e., text types) or EDUCATE, to cope with an almost unpredictable future. It is my argument here that education should, in the end, be our goal for novice academic literacy courses, for a genre awareness education will prepare students for the academic challenges
that lie ahead. (pp. 238-239)
Johns, A.M. (2008). Genre awareness for the novice academic student: An on-going quest. Language Teaching, 41(2), 237-252.

Therefore, when I teach a genre or form, I typically invite students to ask questions and develop or refine their internalized rubric for what constitutes that genre or form (or medium): What makes a poem, a poem? What makes a comic book, a comic book? What makes a film, a film? What makes an essay, an essay? etc.

Reading and critical literacy require that the reader come to a text with some awareness of form and genre, and that awareness helps the reader navigate the text for meaning.

Sitting down to read Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Gate A-4,” for example, often challenges people since I have seen it identified and heard students refer to the work as a poem, a story, and a non-fiction essay (it is a prose passage, fictional, in Nye’s Honeybee: Poems & Short Prose).

Finally, we must confront why Macbeth was taught to these students through an audio recording—the conclusion that high school students couldn’t read Shakespeare.

I am deeply skeptical of the rush to identify high school students as struggling readers for several reasons:

Many high school students are non-readers and it is too easy to conflate non-readers with struggling readers.
Often, even in ELA courses, lessons and assessments are designed in ways that allow students to pass or even excel in a course without having to read [2] (students can access information on novels and plays or simply depend on the teacher to cover everything to be assessed in class, which most teachers do).
Students who are non-readers are not necessarily demonstrating they have decoding, vocabulary, or comprehension problems, but that they lack motivation to read texts assigned to them and to perform in ways that are not authentic. Many non-readers in the classroom go home and perform complex and advanced literacy that teachers do not see and traditional schooling does not acknowledge (video and board gaming, binge-watching TV, reading and collecting comic books, reading novels they choose such as YA lit or science fiction and fantasy).
Students who “struggle” with assigned texts and performing in ways that are often required in school (narrow analysis and multiple choice testing) may be struggling due to those expectations as well as lacking adequate experience reading (since they have passed courses without reading). I think “struggling” is a misnomer for that phenomenon.

Lou LaBrant warned in 1949, “We should not, under the guise of developing literary standards, merely pass along adult weariness” (p. 276).

And LaBrant (1937) held that belief because “the adolescent has much greater power to read and to think intelligently about reading than the results of our conventional program have led us to believe” (p. 34).

We ask too little of students when we fail to honor the fidelity of genre, form, and medium, but we ultimately fail students when we assume their lack of reading lies in a fault with them (“struggling”) instead of interrogating what we require them to read (or not read) and our reductive approaches to text and literacy.

[1] See here and here.

[2] I saw a former students several years after he was a marginal and combative AP Literature student of mine. He smiled and announced that he expected I would be surprised to know he earn a degree in English in college. Then, he added that he did so without ever reading a book assigned to him.

Sources

LaBrant, L. (1949, May). Analysis of clichés and abstractions. English Journal, 38(5), 275-278. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/807545

LaBrant, L. (1937, February 17). The content of a free reading program. Educational Research Bulletin, 16(2), 29–34. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1471836

Education, education reform, literacy, reading, Science of Reading, Teaching

Moving from “All Students Must” to “Each Student Deserves”

August 24, 2021 plthomasedd

Since publishing my book, How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students, that examines the current “science of reading” (SoR) version of the Reading War, I have given several interviews and presentations on that work.

I have also continued to blog about the movement, and in all of these experiences, I am forced to rethink and think more complexly through what I know and understand about the SoR movement as well as how to teach reading and literacy.

The most recent interview, by literacy expert Sam Bommarito, proved to be an enlightening experience on several levels.

First, Sam’s experience and expertise in the field of literacy were a welcomed change from being interviewed by generalists and journalists because his questions dove directly into the core of the issues surrounding SoR and those questions challenged me to think more deeply and carefully.

Our exchange between people with similar levels of expertise on the subject allowed (or even required) us to focus on how best to offer any viewers nuanced but clear explanations of a deeply complex topic; as I noted (and emphasize often now), the evidence on teaching reading is not simple, and not settled.

But the larger take-away for me after the interview was that Sam’s third question—Does it make any sense to effectively ban selected practices found in balanced approaches to reading, e.g., reading recovery, workshop teaching or guided reading?—prompted me to explain in greater detail a core concept that grounds a fundamental reason I reject the SoR movement.

Whether I am addressing literacy specifically or teaching pedagogy broadly, I have relied for many years on the best practice concepts expressed by Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde.

Each chapter in their book (now in its fourth edition) ends with a chart that suggests instructional practices that teachers should increase or decrease; for example, on writing instruction (download sample here):

Key to note is that best practice is grounded in broad and diverse bodies of research on teaching and learning, and that best practice philosophy neither requires nor bans any specific instructional approach; whether a teacher uses any pedagogy is directly linked to student need (not a prescription form some authority such as standards or an adopted program).

When SoR advocates call for “all students must” (for example, systematic intensive phonics for all students and universal screening for dyslexia), they are misrepresenting what we know about teaching and learning: There is no universal silver bullet for “all students.”

Best practice structures promote research and evidence as a spectrum, a range of practices for every teacher’s toolbox; best practice also recommends that instruction begin with individual students, their demonstrated known, unknown, and misconceptions.

If we think carefully about decoding and direct instruction in phonics and phonemic awareness, teachers will face a wide diversity of students in any class in terms of where they are in their reading development; in short, there simply is no situation where “all students must” serves students well.

Literacy is not simple, and literacy development is not linear, sequential, or systematic.

For example, most people do not accumulate vocabulary in order to be able to read, but develop their vocabulary by reading.

Context (in terms of so-called literacy skills) and engagement are extremely important when students are developing their literacy; regretfully, many misguided movements during the history of the Reading War have eroded an essential aspect of literacy that must be honored—literacy as holistic.

Here, we must address a fundamental paradox in the SoR movement.

Several different kinds of advocacy are fueling the SoR movement—from parents advocating for greater awareness of dyslexia to Black and poor parents advocating for under-/un-served populations of students to advocates for the needs of emerging bilingual students.

The common denominator here is a genuine concern for the under-/un-served student, a pervasive belief that for a number of reasons, too many students are being failed by the system itself (although some elements of the SoR movement are also directly blaming teachers and teacher educators for those failures).

The paradox is that the aggressive advocacy behind the SoR movement is driving an all-or-nothing silver-bullet approach to teaching reading, which will mis-serve students as much or more than the current conditions of teaching and learning in U.S. public schools.

So this leads me to Sam’s effort to bridge the divisions in the Reading War (something I am far more skeptical about, as I address in Sam’s question 5: Cambourne and Crouch recently said we should stop using the Reading Wars metaphor and replace it with the metaphor of the Reading Quilt- with different “sides” adding different pieces to the quilt. Do you see any hope for that point of view? Do you see hope for an end to the divisive discourse? Do you see hope for ending the reading wars? [13:20]).

I am no fan of compromise (as I explain in the interview) but I think we do have common ground in terms of two beliefs: (1) Far too many students are being under-/un-served in our current K-12 public school system (notably in their literacy), and (2) the under-/un-served are disproportionately marginalized and vulnerable populations of students (Black students, poor students, emerging bilinguals, students with special needs).

Not a compromise, but my modest proposal is that all of us concerned with reading and literacy among K-12 students need to set aside the “all students must” mandate and commit instead to “each student deserves.”

“All students must” be screened for dyslexia is a guaranteed disaster for students (consider the over-diagnosing of ADHD as one example), but “each student deserves” access to ample books and other texts in their homes and schools fulfills what we know about literacy development without being overly simplistic or harmful.

Each student deserves whatever teaching and learning experiences they need and want in order to grow and develop at the rate unique to them (not some manufactured and artificial “grade level” proficiency).

This commitment shifts our instruction and assessment gaze away from compliance to a reading program or to a set of prescribed standards and toward the demonstrated needs and wants of each student who enters any classroom.

The ultimate irony here is that the whole language (WL), reading/writing workshop, and balanced literacy (BL) movements (all falsely demonized since the 1990s) offer that exact commitment along with very high standards for teacher expertise (each of us in charge of any student must have a very complex toolbox for teaching and also must be prepared to individualized instruction).

Again, as I stated in the interview, WL, workshops, and BL did not fail our students, but we have certainly failed the core commitment of those movements—serving the learning needs of each student.

What we know about teaching reading is not simple or settled, but I think we can and must all agree that instead of falling prey to the overly simplistic and harmful “all students must,” a better way forward is a resolute commitment to “each student deserves.”

Education, Educational Research, literacy, Lou LaBrant, reading, Science of Reading

Interview: Paul Thomas & SOR- It’s not settled, and it’s not simple: An interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito

August 21, 2021 plthomasedd

Paul Thomas & SOR- It’s not settled, and it’s not simple: An interview conducted by Dr. Sam Bommarito

Education, literacy, reading, Science of Reading

LitCon 2022: The State of the Reading War: Not Simple, Not Settled [UPDATE]

August 18, 2021 plthomasedd 2 Comments

Announcement

LitCon: National K-8 Literacy & Reading Recovery Conference (January 29 – February 5, 2022, Columbus, OH)

Session Type: Spotlight Continued Engagement Session

Schedule: Thurday, February 3, 2022, 4:00 pm – 4:45 pm est

Session Strand: Reading Recovery

Session Title: TBD

Description:

Topics:

Presenters: Sam Bommarito and Paul Thomas

Featured Speaker

The State of the Reading War: Not Simple, Not Settled

Download PP HERE

P.L. Thomas

Session Type: Featured Session

Schedule: Thursday, February 3, 2022, 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm est

Session Strand: Leadership in Literacy

Session Title: FS21 – The State of the Reading War: Not Simple, Not Settled

Description: A new round of the Reading War embraces the “simple” view of reading, arguing that the “science of reading” is settled. This session interrogates the “science of reading” movement by placing it in historical context and refuting its central claims based on a more complex view of reading and science.

Topics: Equity in Education, Literacy Leadership, Reading

Presenters: Paul Thomas

Recommended Reading

Science Supports Balance, Not Intensive Phonics, for Teaching Reading

Fact Checking the “Science of Reading”: A Quick Guide for Teachers [Updated]

How to Navigate Social Media Debates about the “Science of Reading”

Reading as Comprehension and Engagement: On the Limitations of Decoding

Podcast: Educational Movements and Trends

Talking Points: A Conversation with Paul Thomas

The “Science of Reading”: A Reader for Educators

How Do We Know?: Not Simple, Not Settled

Dismantling the “Science of Reading” and the Harmful Reading Policies in its Wake [UPDATED]

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

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

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

comic books, literacy, reading, Science of Reading

Reading as Comprehension and Engagement: On the Limitations of Decoding

August 16, 2021 plthomasedd

About a year ago, a friend and I introduced my grandchildren to gaming; soon after I bought them a Nintendo Switch.

My granddaughter, Skylar, was immediately drawn to Animal Crossing because she loved that the game allows players to visit each other’s world. But the game also requires a great deal of reading so her initial experiences meant she had to play with someone who could read with comprehension to help and guide her.

Today, Skylar is starting second grade.

Recently, when Skylar was visiting, she immediately wanted to play Animal Crossing with my friend. As they played, Skylar was reading aloud incredibly well, only occasionally stumbling over words that would typically be classified as “above her grade level” (a concept I reject).

Despite Skylar’s ability to decode with speed and accuracy, we noticed something really important.

After reading through the text, Skylar would pause and ask my friend what she was supposed to do. Of course, the text in the game is designed to guide what the player does so my friend patiently explained that Skylar needed to re-read but pay attention to meaning (comprehension).

With that guidance and attention to the need to decode with comprehension and purpose, Skylar began to play the game with more agency (a few days later, she Facetimed my friend to continue having someone to mentor and guide her; in other words, she didn’t magically become an independent reader).

Skylar is 7 years old, my grandson, Brees, is 4 (about to turn 5 in a few weeks).

Watching them navigate gaming as well as learning to read is fascinating for several reasons.

First, Skylar clearly prefers communal gaming. Even as she is developing the ability to read with comprehension and engagement independently, she desperately wants to play the game with someone else.

Brees, who has chosen Minecraft [1] as his go-to gaming, is a solitary gamer. While they were over for a pool day, Brees took a break and happily lay on a lounge chair playing Minecraft on his iPad.

Minecraft mania extends to Lego as well.

Second, Skylar’s gaming and reading journey dramatically reveals the limitations of decoding—notably the danger of assuming that proficiency at reading aloud (words pronounced quickly and clearly) results in comprehension and engagement.

Here I want to stress that without Animal Crossing and an expert mentor (both at the game and reading), Skylar could well have remained at the level of “going through the motions” of reading aloud.

She didn’t hesitate to re-read and work toward comprehension so that she could fully engage in the game.

In other words, literacy is ultimately about autonomy, but it is also a profoundly important aspect of community.

During the Facetime session, Skylar was seeking a mentor to confirm the decisions she was making. Even though she was decoding with comprehension, she kept asking for confirmation that she was navigating the game the right way (or more accurately, a right way).

Before I go further, I want to stress that Skylar clearly has acquired some very powerful decoding strategies based in what most people call “phonics,” but when she is in the real world of gaming, she often comes to situations when those blunt decoding skills are not only inadequate but distracting from the flow of the complicated act of reading and acting on the comprehension.

I also want to stress that watching a 7-year-old play a reading-intensive video game complicates the simplistic and misleading faith placed in “grade level” texts. Like almost all real-world texts, Animal Crossing simply uses words (no concern for “grade level” and no “context clues”), often very common words mixed in with exact vocabulary that is uncommon.

Overly simplistic views of reading and vocabulary tend to conflate the “easy/hard” binary for vocabulary with “common/uncommon.”

Uncommon words that Skylar could not decode, and often has never encountered before, were not “hard” since with a mentor to pronounce and explain the word, Skylar very quickly adapted and with repetition in the game, those words became common to her (and thus, “easy”).

Finally, this experience with my grandchildren, at different stages of development and reading, helps personify some of the significant problems with the “science of reading” (SoR) movement that advocates for the “simple view” of reading and for systematic intensive phonics for all students.

Decoding is a necessary but small aspect of the reading, which ultimately must be an act of comprehension with engagement.

But the SoR movement also will fail our students because it centers systematic programs, silver-bullet thinking, and a misguided emphasis on decoding (and blunt decoding strategies).

However, what all students need and deserve are real-world experiences with and reasons to read.

Those experiences include activities too many people still stigmatize as “bad” for children—comic books, gaming, and even Lego.

Skylar as an emerging independent reader has had some wonderful traditional school experiences, and loving teachers. But her journey to reading is much larger than that, including her current fascination with Animal Crossing.

My beautiful and eager grandchildren are powerful examples that when it comes to teaching reading, nothing is settled and nothing is simple.

Reading is comprehensions and engagement, and as Skylar demonstrates, reading is about community, a shared purpose that is filled with pleasure and the joy of creating without a finish line.

[1] Writing as a Minecrafter: Exploring How Children Blur Worlds of Play in the Elementary English Language Arts Classroom

by Cassie J. Brownell – 2021

Background/Context: Educators have considered how Minecraft supports language and literacy practices in the game and in the spaces and circumstances immediately surrounding gameplay. However, it is still necessary to develop additional conceptualizations of how children and youth’s online and offline worlds and experiences are blurred by and through the games. In this study, I take up this call and examine how the boundaries of the digital were blurred by one child as he wrote in response to a standardized writing prompt within his urban fourth-grade classroom.

Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Through snapshots of Jairo’s writing, I illuminate how he muddled the lines between his physical play experiences and those he had in the virtual world of Minecraft. In doing so, I argue that he carried over his personal interest as a fan of Minecraft into the writing curriculum through creative language play. As Jairo “borrowed” his physical play experiences in the virtual world of Minecraft to complete an assigned writing task, he exemplified how children blur playworlds of physical and digital play in the elementary ELA classroom.

Research Design: Drawing on data generated in an 18-week case study, I examine how one child, Jairo, playfully incorporated his lived experiences in the virtual world of Minecraft into mandated writing tasks.

Conclusions/Recommendations: My examination of his writing is meant to challenge writing scholars, scholars of play, and those engaged in rethinking media’s relation to literacy. I encourage a rethinking of what it means for adults to maintain clear lines of what is digital play and what is not. I suggest adults might have too heavy a hand in bringing play into classrooms. Children already have experiences with play—both physical and digital. We must cultivate a space for children to build on what was previously familiar to them by offering scaffolds to bridge these experiences between what we, as adults, understand as binaries. Children do not necessarily see distinctions between “reality” and play worlds, or between digital and physical play. For children, play worlds and digital worlds are perhaps simply worlds; it is we as adults who harbor a desire for clear boundaries.

Teachers College Record Volume 123 Number 3, 2021, p. –
https://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 23622, Date Accessed: 9/18/2021 7:46:35 AM

See Also

Misreading the Main Idea about Reading

literacy, NCTE, reading, Science of Reading

Talking Points: A Conversation with Paul Thomas

June 25, 2021 plthomasedd

A Conversation with Paul Thomas

Education, education reform, reading, Science of Reading

The “Science of Reading”: A Reader for Educators

June 13, 2021 plthomasedd

How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care, P.L. Thomas

Fact Checking the “Science of Reading”: A Quick Guide for Teachers

Historical Context

What Shall We Do About Reading Today?: A Symposium ( November 1942, The Elementary English Review, National Council of Teachers of English)

LaBrant, L. (1947, January). Research in language. Elementary English, 24(1), 86-94. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41383425

Lou LaBrant on reading

Doing What Matters Most: Investing in Quality Teaching, Linda Darling Hammond (1997)

Whole Language and the Great Plummet of 1987-92: An Urban Legend from California, Stephen Krashen

Silver Bullets, Babies, and Bath Water: Literature Response Groups in a Balanced Literacy Program, Dixie Lee Spiegel (The Reading Teacher, 1998)

Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions, Jeff McQuillan

National Reading Panel (NRP)

The Federal Government Wants Me to Teach What?: A Teacher’s Guide to the National Reading Panel Report, Diane Stephens (NCTE, 2008)

Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: A Critique of the National Reading Panel Report on Phonics, Elaine M. Garan (2001) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003172170108200705

Babes in the Woods: The Wanderings of the National Reading Panel, Joanne Yatvin, The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 83, No. 5 (Jan., 2002), pp. 364-369 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20440142

I Told You So! The Misinterpretation and Misuse of The National Reading Panel Report, Joanne Yatvin (Education Week)

My Experiences in Teaching Reading and Being a Member of the National Reading Panel

“Science of Reading”

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?

The Trouble With Binaries: A Perspective on the Science of Reading, David B. Yaden Jr., David Reinking, and Peter Smagorinsky

Where Is the Evidence? Looking Back to Jeanne Chall and Enduring Debates About the Science of Reading, Peggy Semingson and William Kerns

The Sciences of Reading Instruction, Rachael Gabriel (Educational Leadership)

The Science of Reading Progresses: Communicating Advances Beyond the Simple View of Reading, Nell Duke and Kelly B. Cartwright

Science of Reading Advocates Have a Messaging Problem, Claude Goldenberg (Education Week)

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

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

Reading Policy

Making Early Literacy Policy Work: Three Considerations for Policymakers Based on Kentucky’s “Read to Succeed” Act (NEPC)

Red Flags, Red Herrings, and Common Ground: An Expert Study in Response to State Reading Policy

Phonics

Phoney Phonics: How Decoding Came to Rule and Reading Lost Meaning (TCR)

The Phonics Debate: 2004, Stephen Krashen

Defending Whole Language: The Limits of Phonics Instruction and the Efficacy of Whole Language Instruction, Stephen Krashen

Does Phonics Deserve the Credit for Improvement in PIRLS?, Stephen Krashen

Reconsidering the Evidence That Systematic Phonics Is More Effective Than Alternative Methods of Reading Instruction, Jeffrey S. Bowers (2020)

To read or not to read: decoding Synthetic Phonics, Andrew Davis

Cryonics Phonics: Inequality’s Little Helper, Gerald Coles

Grade Retention