#WResearcher Meme #3 How do you read to learn / learn to read: uncovering / unfolding

How do you read to learn / learn to read: uncovering / unfolding

The idea of an academic having to learn to read is counter-intuitive but resonant. Academic reading is unlike any other reading that we do. In fact – if we adopt the stance of the New Literacy Studies, it is not unreasonable to say that all reading is deeply contextual and particular  to a specific domain. This means, and I think this is true, that the reading I do for my job – reports, emails, assignments, policy papers and texts to inform my teaching, is quite unlike the reading to do for academic research – extended, exploratory, open ended texts, books, bibliographies, research reports, conference listings, chapters, published papers, my own work in the course of revision.

Becoming and remaining an academic involves a process of learning to read.

At the start of my MA I was acutely conscious of this. On one occasion, we had a session where our lecturer sat with a small seminar group and together we read a few paragraphs from a chapter. We then went on to discuss it in detail. The approach was not unlike an activity I might well have undertaken with a group of adult literacy students, although of the course the level and nature of the text and direction of the discussion was significantly different. We were reading about Bourdieu and together unpicking habitus.

I am here making a deliberate and provocative connection. The adults who come to my literacy class have a particular set of quite specific practices they have acquired in relation to reading. Joining an adult literacy class signifies a desire on their part to change, to become someone different. A changed approach to reading is part of that process. This is not unlike the aspiration to become an academic, someone who wants to be something other than who they are at the moment:  a prolifically published writer, a highly regarded academic, a quoted and referenced expert – reading is part of achieving this changed sense of self.

I am here also making a disconnection. With the adult literacy student the actual content of the text is of little importance. What matters is their capacity to explore it independently. That they can read, that I read in identification terms is as important as what I read. Oh, it has to  be interesting - but this is a loop, if it is not interesting, I won't read it. As an academic there is an interplay between what I read and that I read. I invoke the iconic image of the academic standing in front of her books displayed decoratively in the background on rows of shelves. It is being a reader that matters.

Academic reading, reading to learn, is a very particular kind of reading.

Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis explicates the work that texts do. How they position readers – that is the writer constructs an ideal reader inviting the actual reader to fall in with the qualities assumed of that construct. This is what readers habitually do. Usually as readers we are unaware of this process. Once we become aware, we may question the assumptions and negotiate an alternative stance. But this still positions us; if we are not the desired, imagined reader constructed by the writer / the text - then we are forced to re/define ourselves as the actual, desired, imagined, self-constructed reader. We then have to negotiate our readerly selves into an alternative position in relation to text and relation to the text's imagined reader. This happens with – for example policy texts. Texts that talk about education in instrumental terms, about qualification as if it were their exchange value rather than their use value that matter. When policy texts are well written, they are compulsive, seductive, they draw the reader in with warm faltering words. You find yourself engrossed and willingly accepting the stance the writers of policy texts take, the normative truth regime they create around you and them. We are seduced by such texts when we are disarmed by them, when our critical faculty is temporarily quietened and we willingly sign up to their agenda.

Doesn’t happen often and certainly doesn’t happen with anything this particular government has written

The point is that in starting the EdD I found I had to be very structured, explicit about the reading I was doing. These academic texts were not policy texts but still I was seduced. The trouble is – I can be faddy, a 'buy-one-get-one-free' person. I would read text (a) and I love it. I enthuse and think yes! that's it, that's it.  Then I would read text (b) a scathing critique of text (a) and have the same excitement and sense of gosh golly – that is so true. At some point I realise I have to fall out of line. It helped to devise strategies to enable a more distanced, less emotional reading. 

Remembering, that in reading these texts part of what I am doing is creating a new identity for myself: an academic.

We were advised by a lecturer on how to read. Advised to ask a series of questions. I had to translate these into a template. I need to fling words across paper (or screen). It's not all in my head. I need to let it happen on paper, through my finger tips as well – otherwise too much of it disappears.

The questions – I have still have all those notes, somewhere.  

·         What is the main argument out forward by the writer?

·         How is this argument developed?

·         How well is it supported?

·         How does this connect to other things you have read?

·         Does it convince you?

·         What other reactions do you have to it?

·         What key concepts does the author develop or use?

·         Any particular vocabulary that you want to make a note of?

These questions stopped quite early – I didn’t need to be so specific, so focussed and interrogated the text in different ways. Usually in ways that was more related to the question I had in mind for a research project and paper.

This is a kind of uncovering, or at least an unfolding; it seeks to make bare what is hidden. Hidden: not through artifice as such. But is a natural process. We present the text not the draft and redraft that created it. We present a completed garment; the stitching is on the inside. Reading involves reminding yourself of the inherent sociality involved in learning. These are not truths being presented but biographies.  Someone persuasive attempt to persuade you – the reader –that this is how it is, a plausible account of how things might, just possibly might, be.  The inherent sociality of learning means reading is not a process of reading as such, as in decoding text and understanding what it means, it is a social process of conversing with someone, the person or persons who have written the text.

And so the final take on reading: unfolding

One that is I think at odds with what I would normally associate with reading, but which explores uncovering, unfolding. Fairclough suggests that the reading associated with critical discourse analysis is no more than what readers do with texts anyway. The process formalises, records and annotates this. We read text as social theorist and as ‘consumers’ professionals charged with implementing the policies they display. But what about reading data. How do we read data – this is surely all at once reading to learn and learning to read. What Faorclough describes as a process readers engage in anyway perhaps does not appreciate the extent to which the reading, re-reading, annotating and recording of readings changes the process. It slows it down. It compels connections. It is not dissimilar to the Rorschach ink splodge test. Do we create images from the random splattering of human life to meet a deep seated yearning for order, coherence, narrative thread?

May be so.

Reading data: what and how do we do this?

I refer here to something I posted earlier this week. I have now gotten over my anxiety about the UCET presentation. What is left is not the frustration of a paper that felt truly terrible – but the pride with having broken my self-imposed silence: good. And more – with looking again at my analysis and seeking to understand the source of my discontent.

To clarify. Last Thursday I presented a paper at a conference, University Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET). The paper presented was a background paper, a contextualising draft. The data that will eventfully shape the paper had only just been gathered and was largely not collated. I had 1 quote from research participants based on earlier interviews. I have often chosen to avoid speaking to peers in public situations –  if I possibly can. And so this presentation thing is quite a challenge to me. But mostly, when I present, the nerves and dread are vindicated: the session goes well, the feedback is good and I feel exhilarated. I did not enjoy UCET. I felt stilted and that I did not cover new ground. I felt it was simply a re-churning of what I already know and that I think those who chose to attend the session also knew. It ended 20 mins early and I missed whole chunks of the paper out. This feeling of dread – post presentation dread has stayed with me.

But once it subsided – a little. I thought again about the quotes I bought with me. The tiny bits of data. 

I was asking the data one question – reading the data with a particular focusing mind. As such I fear that the elephant in the room (far from couching in the corer trying to hide) was sitting and sipping coffee without my noticing. The text does not address the question I was asking – and actually does not do so for a very particular reason. That is the context within which the participants work does not allow them the exploration an answer to this question implies. In one instant at least, a participant is clearly deeply unhappy with his professional situation. Is distressed by it and seems to feel in something of a cul-de-sac. Mostly the qualification they achieve is a means of moving toward something, for him it is means of escape.

Research participants find it difficult to answer the question – what do I mean by literacy and how to I reconcile literacy as social practice and literacy as skills – because – any attempt to move beyond literacy as skills is curtailed. They recognise it but – as one participant has said, ‘at the end of the day, I still have to tick that box’.

In the assemblage that is a policy driven, research based literacy pedagogy – professionals are compelled to play dead: to appear as if they have committed the epistemic suicide that Taylor-Webb so evocatively talks about.

Drafted Wednesday, 09 November 2011 03:04:57

First edit Wednesday, 09 November 2011 22.17.25


ALBRIGHT, J. & LUKE, A. 2008. Pierre Bourdieu and literacy education, Routledge, Taylor & Francis: London.
BARTON, D. 2007. Literacy : an introduction to the ecology of written language, Malden, Mass. Oxford, Blackwell.
TAYLOR & WEBB, P. 2007. Accounting for Teacher Knowledge: Reterritorializations as epistemic suicide. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 28, 279-295.

something I am passionate about

What do you feel passionate about: write about it

I went to Leeds University in the mid-80’s to do my PGCE in Sociology and English. I loved studying there. I think they must be one of the teacher training departments that the government  felt most bothered about. Not because of the standards they achieved.

My PGCE has had a profound impact on me.

In two ways

Firstly - all my lecturers were out and out left wing progressive Marxist. I have this impression of an entire year of lectures all of which were focussed on a single subject elaborated upon in extraordinary detail  - the education system served to effectively filter people according to race, gender and class. In was an inherently unequal system that served the interests of capital. We had a lecturer who once offered a different slant. He went through all the arguments that analysed discriminatory processes and ridiculed them.   He was a lively lecture, witty and entertaining. But his message was clear and chilling. We discussed it afterwards in seminars: if all these social explanations for inequality were unsound, the argument he was for was one that established the educational order as natural as the outcome of intelligence. Middle class, male and white students did better because they were more suited to academic education.  But he was a one voice and one we rejected. Everyone else elaborated on variations on the theme education, sociology and inequality.  I can’t quite remember the Sociology team but I do remember the English teaching team and they were great.  But I was happily indoctrinated by Leeds University and year later, I thank them for it.

I was one of two black girls on the course. I meet at Leeds (not at the University, in Chapeltown in a night club – the first person who was black and doing a PhD). It did not occur to me in those days that I would be even remotely capable of a PhD. At the time probably wasn’t.

Secondly – years later, this passion for, commitment to, insistence upon equality – continues to saturate me. This is what I am and it is what I do.  I qualified to teach in secondary schools but after spending 3 months in a school (on the PGCE course) I left because I realised these were not the relationships that I wanted to have with young people.  Having chanced upon adult education, I stayed because I loved it. The looseness of it. The informality of the teacher – student relationship. Boundaries are different in community education. Professionalism is defined in other ways. In community ed there is a commitment to equality. I liked the fact the students could join management committees and be members.  The commitment to equality was translated into practice: praxis in community education. I felt as a young strutting 20 something year old black girl, and a teacher that I was undermining the education system. There were several, but particularly, there were two black guys in my first cohort of students. They had just left school and joined the local adult education institute to take GCSE English and Sociology having failed a year earlier. They passed. I liked the fact that having failed after 10 years of schooling, they were able to pass after a year n adult ed. I guess with a bit more experience, it was not as simple as school = bad and discriminatory, adult ed = good and committed to equality. I loved being a teacher, the black girl and going out blusing in the evenings, I’d bump into my students who seemed pleased and surprised that I was part of my community. This is another line of narrative – but the Leeds was the first time I’d felt part of a black community. I loved it.

So now – some years later – what do I feel passionate about?

Well, thanks to the formative influence of Leeds University – equality is still my passion. I want to create change through the work that I do: through my teaching, through my writing, through the systems and structures I establish.

I’d forgotten this.

It’s important that I return to this and remember it. It’s my passion. Without it what I do has little meaning. The gratification that rewards what I do is constantly deferred. And what happens to a dream deferred?

More than deferred. It is made irrelevant.

I have recently started reading a colleague whose work I have read before Taylor-Webb, he writes these impassioned essays about teacher knowledge, the choreography of accountability, the anatomy of accountability. He writes about the performativity culture in schools and its impact on teachers.

I am most interested here in his ideas – these I recall at a distance and now loop back to connect to my research – on the reterritorialisation of teacher knowledge.  Asking and answering the question – what happens when teaching is made teacher-proof. What happens when teachers’ knowledge is made irrelevant. When teachers ‘deliver ‘ the commodity knowledge  that have been created elsewhere, by someone else.

He refers to this as epistemic suicide.

What happens when the dream of equality is constantly deferred? 

This is the opening quote from a paper I am now writing.

doesn’t always fit in. It’s great theory; it’s good. You know, we’ve talked about how to contextualise it and the wheel, all of that.  It was very refreshing. But my [manager], all she’s interested in is, ‘Oh! He failed. Can we get him back in?’ Not, ‘Can we develop this individual?’ ‘Can we get him back in? What do you think he failed on?’ And that’s the environment we’re in. And with the contracts coming up for renewal.           

It’s very target driven, when you are in a target driven environment professional judgement goes out the window, it suffers, because, that’s the main critique of my teaching, it’s not an excuse, it’s a business. They want more for less. It’s stressful; they are asking you for what you can’t deliver. It’s terribly stressful. I’ve had 10 years of it and I’m burnt out from it.  10 years.  It’s too long for this environment.  It’s too long. You should probably have a shelf life of 5 years.

I worked with this quote as an early example of some of the ideas trainees have in reference to their teaching. But I was asking the data one question while ignoring that it  was telling me something  else – ignoring it because this was not the question I was asking.

This student is clearly unhappy in his work. Clearly unhappy with teaching and clearly feels that the professional frame that surrounds him, what he is required to do – has no meaning for him. Worse still, has a meaning that undermines is sense of who he is and what he is meant to be doing,

He finds what he is learning refreshing – but this is made stale by the voice of his manager. 

He is asked to critique his teaching – his main critique is the environment the works in and the limitations that this imposes.

Situational analysis – I think – invites us to analyse situations to explore our themes. This implies a more open ended data analysis, rather than one that focuses exclusively on our concern but one that reads the situation. I may have an interest in conceptions of literacy, but may find that my answer lies in first of all analysing the situation in its entirety and reading the data in the first instance at face value.

I have chosen to answer my question I passing That is I am asking – not the direct question : what do you think of literacy, but in passing, what conception of literacy emerges in the course of this programme.

Everybody quotes Silverman – so I will maintain the tradition. This is just a nodded acknowledgement rather than detailed referencing. There are some narratives of methodology that I love and will refer to in another blog.  What I am thinking of here is the idea that if you ask a direct question, for example, if you ask about a culture directly you get everything included in our answer; its like asking fish what water is like. The answer offers little insight. Instead, put your hand in the water, compare it to land, send a dog or cat into the water. Heat the water up or cool it down. Add things to it. Or at least, invite the fish to tell you about his life in the water - what she can and can’t do.

And so in the quote about Joseph,   my trainee teacher,  provides an example of the epistemic suicide, the dis/connected ventriloquised self that teachers experience. This sense that there values are not even allowed full articulation. What does it mean to describe yourself as a holistic teacher? How do you in the context of a literacy class develop the whole person? What aspects of your professional judgement go flying out of the window?  What would your teaching be like if theory was able to fit the possibilities of practice? There is a sense of potentiality being stalled before it has tine to flourish. There is hankering, desire but no space to explore, embed and develop.

it’s not an excuse, it’s a business.

What strikes me here – is the professional cul-de-sac that Joseph seems to inhabit.  The trouble is there may be critiques of his teaching – even within he realms of a target driven culture – but the all pervasiveness of the context obscures the possibility of him seeing this.

So – with the desire to push the boundaries of my thinking, to cover new terrain – the ideas to further explore.

Taylor-Webb on teacher knowledge and epistemic suicide

The data may answer a question that wasn't actually asked, allow yourself to read the data in ways that enable it to speak to you – open up different explorations

Sometimes a question asked in passing is more valuable than a direct question: there is little to gain form asking a fish to analyse water 

Where and how and is there any point in creating space for teachers to explore their values and reasons for teaching, if these values are unlikely to find institutional expression

I like this image, I know too little about it.

Maeve Rendle, Blackpool: Rendle takes the inspiration for this, her first solo show, from a line in Marcel Proust's reflection on the nature of memory, In Search of Lost Time: 'I could not help being saddened by the fact that there was now nothing left of my former frame of mind.' Her series of installations is on show at the Grundy gallery, Blackpool, until 5 June 2010

The broken letters of a typewriter – I wanted to start thinking about the moments when literacies can be dysfunctional. I have to be careful here – because literacy is always told in terms of limitation, lack, deficit and I have no desire to fuel this. But, I want to explore the idea of independence. This seems to be something that those who come to literacy classes value. It can be a strong motivator.

It may also be a metaphor for the dysfunctionallity of skills based approach to literacy. The letters of the typewriter lay strewn and broken,  apart from the machine that enables them to perform. 

Storying literacy pedagogies

Rogers, Rebecca. 2004. Storied selves: A Critical Discourse Analysis of adult learners' literate lives. Selber erzählt: Eine kritische Diskursanalyse über das Lese- und Schreiberleben von lernenden Erwachsenen. 39 (3):272-305.

When I was in eighth grade the teacher said I was slow in reading...she just said, "Well, your reading as got to be upgraded. you know, like you're kind of slow in reading."I knew I was but most of the time I was so bored with school and so I didn't care if I read good or not.... Even now, I read too fast, often missing the decimal point, I mean, the punctuation, often missing words that I read. In order for me to become a good reader, I have to sit down, and I have to read over what I'm reading a couple of times, and then read at a slower pace. I'm kind of short when it comes to punctuation. I don't know punctuation too good. (Jerome interviewed discussing  past and present experiences with school)

[About a letter Jerome wrote to a judge] But then they gave me a court date and I wrote this letter to defend yourself. I , Reverend  Jerome, being of sound mind and body tell this story on paper.... I gave it to the lawyers and they dropped my case. And I often have to wind up writing the hospital letters....I think the hospitals should pay part of the person’s bill, be responsible for the first part of the person's b ill, just like I pay, uh, money to have insurance to pay for my part. I think the hospital should pay a part, too.... I write to the accounting department to let them know that they are responsible for some of that bill, too. (Jerome interviewed discussing family and community literacy practices)

Rogers’ (2004) research suggests that adult literacy learners ‘story’ their literate selves differently depending upon which domain they are operating within.  

She offers a richly textured discourse analysis of extended interviews with various students who talk about learning to read and school, at adult education college and within a family domain. It is interesting that she uses these slightly different spatial and temporal frames to analyse their literate lives and this connects to my desire to view literacy as a pedagogic subject and it constructions by teachers as a) classroom practice b) academic subject and c) personal experience – these categories can be more clearly defined.  I also need to be sure that it is literacy as a pedagogic subject as oppose to literacy that I am seeking to explore.

It is to explore how teachers construct their ideas about literacy / language within these different contexts. I am here suggesting that it can be entirely possible to acknowledge that literacy is purposeful in everyday lives, in their own lives, but in the lives of their learners in class – their purposefulness is it of any great significance. In other words, I am here echoing the hint in interview 2 that ‘literacy as social practice’; is a framing that has relevance for literacy outside of college but less relevance for literacy within the college setting. The language and literacy that we learn / teach is ontologically different to the literacy / language that we use on other settings. One is for the purpose of passing an exam – the other is for a range of other purpose that need not connect – or connect on theoretically to what is taught.

The reminder of

·         informational learning: deep  & pervasive shifts in perspective & understanding                   

       

·         transformational learning: acquisition in more skills and knowledge

Literacy, literate selves and literacy learning each constructed differently within and across the domains.    p15

Very helpful analysis of methodology deployed.

Genre:                   

the sort of language (& other semiosis) associated with a particular activity

Discourse:             

ways of representing – systematic clusters of themes, statements, ideas and ideologies

Style:                                      

ways of being – interpersonal choices active / passive voice; modality – affinity, mood – 

questions statement demands, transivity & pronoun use

An analysis of the role of the researcher is vital for this work. Thoroughly entwined. 

Thrift: non-representational theory.

Text opens with a quote from Taussig - that acknowledges race, gender and nation as constructed, invented and representational yet having the appearance of something immutable, culture appears as the nature order.

The reworked quote referenced to Taussig in 1993, hints at an excitement, an enthusiastic willingness to get involved in an analytical project.

How does some so order come to appear so obdurate.

Years later the brilliance of this revelation remain - as does the slow unpicking of the social.