Politics in the classroom: A riposte

Critical approaches are based on a simple understanding. Some students may struggle with reading but they can still think. It’s not about suggesting that first we will teach students how to decode and then we will let them comprehend and think critically about a text. It all happens concurrently and has the extra benefit of engaging students in their learning.

As informed educators, AATE has promoted critical frameworks, especially the Four Resources model which was developed in 1990, by Peter Freebody and Allan Luke. This acknowledges the complexity of literacy through teaching skills in code-breaking (phonics), comprehension, understanding the audience, purpose and the conventions of different text genres, and critical literacy. All are important at all stages of literacy development.

The more dangerous intellectual nostalgia, however, is this idea that children, once identified as having literacy “problems” can be “cured” with a shot of a particular methodology. This is a very simplistic notion and does not begin to address the complexities of a student’s life these days.

Teachers today deal with increasing diversity and new information and communication technologies. They do so professionally and need a range of strategies and partnerships with governments and other funding and research bodies to support the use of those strategies.

One such collaboration between the Australian Government, ALEA (The Australian Literacy Educators' Association) and AATE resulted in a program called MyRead. The CD won an Australian Award for Excellence in Educational Publishing. More importantly, it supports teachers in contemporary classrooms by offering, free of charge, an approach to reading that is well founded, accessible and developed through research with teachers. It is offered to teachers as part of a repertoire rather than a definitive approach.

Teachers do not need Basic Skills Tests to tell us what we know. We see and deal with the consequences of literacy skills that fail students every day. We need time to develop intervention approaches as whole schools and as individual teachers across all learning areas.

Dr Nelson’s newly established NIQTSL (National Institute for Quality Teaching and School Leadership) might have a role in literacy development. It could choose as its first major research project to support teachers in developing literacy approaches.

If the institute needs a model of collaborative research that recognises the voices, practices and experiences of teachers in a wide range of contexts, it might begin with another AATE/ALEA’s collaboration STELLA project (Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy in Australia). The model clearly takes up NIQTSL’s motto: “Of the profession, by the profession, for the profession”.

We are all concerned with levels of literacy however they are defined and measured. We also care passionately about equipping students to be positive about their futures. We want them to be confident with a range of computer literacies and we want them to understand that texts from Shakespeare to Australian Idol are profoundly shaped by contexts and open to a range of understandings.

Donnelly damns critical approaches and yet teaching students to be critical as they read and write texts is pivotal to a democratic society so that, as adults, they think about, rather than blandly accept, political, cultural and media viewpoints without question.