Meyers, Monaghan and Saul

Meyers Changing "Our Minds: Negotiating English and Literacy" and Monaghan and Saul "The Reader, the Scribe, the Thinker: A Critical Look at the History of American Reading and Writing Instruction."
Both of these pieces helped to situate my understanding of why writing instruction is so often subordinated to reading instruction and to give me a historical overview of why the IRA and NCTE exist as two separate entities (although they now put forth joint position statements and created the Read. Write. Think resource jointly). I also paid very close attention to the dates of both articles. If I am correct, both pre-date NCLB (2001) and the National Reading Panel (2000). That changes much about my reading of each.

Monaghan and Saul argue that there has been a surge in research on writing, and while I would agree, I would say that again the political pendulum has swung back to the need for a greater governmental, nee societal, control of reading. Monaghan and Saul point to, “A study of the teachers guides put out by two publishing companies between 1920 and 1980 documents a decline in trusting the teacher as a professional.” (p.93) I would argue that with certain government approved, “scientifically-based” reading programs that emerged from Reading First that we are again at a time when societal forces are trying to “teacher-proof” reading instruction. Writing, on the other hand, takes the back seat because subjects that are not tested is often less valued – and it is my understanding the state of Ohio has removed the writing assessment from all grade levels except the OGT. Although I would argue, at least in Ohio, all of the subject-area tests test writing to some extent through extended response questions. If Governor Strickland prevails, the ACT will replace the OGT (are you keeping up with all of this), but the ACT (and SAT) have recently reintroduced writing components. (So the issues of reliability the authors outlined on page 100 seem to have again gone by the wayside…for now.) So the reading crisis the emerged from Sputnik and the Great Society that was then replaced by the writing crisis of the 1970s has again been replaced by the reading crisis spawned by NCLB and the NRP in response to whole language… I’m very interested in investigating the research, “…studies that show that children who learn to read while very young actually prefer to start on the road of literacy by writing, not reading. (Durkin, 1970, as cited by the authors)

This year, NCTE went so far as to create a “National Day of Writing” to attempt to convince policy-makers and every day Americans just how important writing is to all of us, everyday. Perhaps the latest emphasis on “21st Century Skills” will again bring writing to the forefront? Monaghan and Saul point out that “…reading has been defined more clearly than writing.” (p.87) Reading also seems to allow societal forces to exert greater control of students as well as teachers, as the quote on page 91 outlines, “Society has focused much more on children as readers because, historically, it has been much more interested in children as receptors than produces of the written word.”

Monaghan and Saul outline to some extent the changing definition of what it means to be literate (to read is to say, to read is to decode & respond to literal questions, to read is to understand), but I found that the Myers chapter provided a richer, historical overview. While Monaghan and Saul’s main point seems to be that reading is more political because it is about control (of teachers, of students, of content, of values), Myers more skillfully outlines the epochs of literacy in America. I truly had no idea that recitation literacy was the focus of American literacy instruction until almost 1920. I guess I never realized that the definition of what it meant to be literate changed dramatically three times in the course of American history – and perhaps given that these chapters have a 1996 publication date, you could argue that with web 2.0, they have changed again. The vignette Myers highlighted that captured the first shift so well was on page 87, when the author pointed out, “In 1916, draftees into the US Army were encountering a new definition of reading: reading is silent decoding and analysis of the parts of unfamiliar materials. These recruits were being criticized for not doing what they had never been taught to do.” I haven’t gotten my Tyson book from Amazon yet, but I’m wondering if that shift from recitation to decoding, defining and analyzing is when the “New Criticism” paradigm emerges. Although the article places the end of this era roughly in 1983, I would argue that much of my experience in high school English classes mirrored the work that students did in this period more so than the transition to a new standard of literacy. It wasn’t until I starting teaching in the upper grades that I began to read professional texts that suggested students could have their own personal interpretations of text – if those students could ground those interpretations in textual evidence. I seem to remember one way of interpreting literature: the English teacher’s way, which, I realize now, was probably the literary critic’s way. She parroted their interpretations of literature just as we parroted hers.

I would like to hope that we are, by the nature of the workforce, moving toward a different type of literacy marked by higher order thinking skills as Meyers points out, “These gains [in standardized test scores], however, were no longer adequate by the 1980s. Higher order thinking skills were becoming essential for all students, but decoding/ analytic literacy had not attempted higher order thinking for all students,” (p.101) I see a tension today between reading programs that are governed by one day of testing, be it in March or May, and the need for 21st Century skills. I have heard teacher’s stories of warning students not to think too deeply on testing days and of the need to teach the genre of testing. I believe we are at a time of another upheaval in what constitutes a literate person, and I certainly hope that the emphasis on literacy as thinking is what emerges – and not just thinking to pass a test, trying to guess what someone else’s correct answer is or using the right number of sentences in a paragraph.