Toward Systematic Study of the History and Foundations of Literacy

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Toward Systematic Study of the History and Foundations of Literacy a

James R. King & Norman A. Stahl

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College of Education, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA b

Literacy Education, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, USA Available online: 23 Apr 2012

To cite this article: James R. King & Norman A. Stahl (2012): Toward Systematic Study of the History and Foundations of Literacy, Reading Psychology, 33:3, 241-268 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02702711.2010.507647

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Reading Psychology, 33:241–268, 2012 C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Copyright ISSN: 0270-2711 print / 1521-0685 online DOI: 10.1080/02702711.2010.507647

TOWARD SYSTEMATIC STUDY OF THE HISTORY AND FOUNDATIONS OF LITERACY JAMES R. KING College of Education, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA


NORMAN A. STAHL Literacy Education, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, USA

This study of a literacy course begins with methodological approaches useful in the historical study of the literacy profession, its practices, beliefs, and participants. A model course is presented via “moments” in the history of literacy. Results from implementations of the model course are also presented.

Literacy education has a “secret” history. It is a secret because so few in the profession know about it. Further, it can be said that the difference between “a field” and “a profession” is that the members of a profession not only advocate the quest for new theories, research, and best practice, but also embrace the understandings that have been gained previously through reflexive scholarship directed at the historical foundations of the profession. At this point, the literacy profession is not systematically aware of its own past. Systematic understanding of the development of the field of literacy is essential to its well-being and professional status. Up to this point, little attention has been directed toward the history of the field of reading. The purpose of this paper is to provide interpretive methods for conducting historical analysis in literacy in a graduate course context, as well as to provide an example of such analysis. When literacy historians Cranney and Miller (1987) undertook their survey of graduate programs from across the United States and Canada, they discovered that graduate students were generally receiving very little instruction on the history of literacy. In fact, only about 5% of instruction in general methods and clinical courses at the graduate level was dedicated to the topic of Address correspondence to James R. King, College of Education, University of South Florida, 13301 Bruce B. Downs Blvd., MHC1129, Tampa, FL 33606. E-mail: king@ tempest.coedu.usf.edu

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the history of reading. Furthermore, only nine respondents from the 195 institutions returning questionnaires reported that the respective institution offered a specific course on the history of reading. Nevertheless, the call for institutions to offer course work on the history of reading is voiced regularly by the membership of the History of Reading Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association. This group has gone so far as to establish a section on its Internet site (http://www.historyliteracy.org) entitled “Teaching,” which contains several syllabi for courses primarily targeted at the doctoral level on the history of literacy. These historical perspectives on literacy productively look at the change, the nature of change, and the relationship of the observed change to the continuity of the field (Rampolla, 2004). A course that attempts to capture these changes must go beyond a chronology of events. Changes are products of sociohistorical influences. Therefore, in addition to the specific events in a history of literacy (a fairly typical, chronological approach), this paper offers an overview of philosophy and methods that can be used in understanding and teaching the content and processes within the history of reading and, more recently, literacy. These perspectives and tools follow. Linguistic Inquiry Tools Approaches from other disciplines have been influential in the development of the current approach to historical treatment of the field of literacy. Bynon’s (1977) work on historical linguistics offers several analytic tools that have been imported into this proposed study of reading. Bynon presents both diachronic and synchronic analyses. In diachronic analysis a particular practice or phenomenon (e.g., fluency) is examined across time. In such an examination, the construct of fluency might be observed to change as a function of time. In synchronic analysis phenomena are examined within the contexts of their appropriate time milieu, or “when it happened.” In this regard, the example of fluency, as it is currently construed, would be situated within such measures as oral reading fluency (ORF), and as part of classroom practices that utilize timed readings (without the benefit of prosodic analysis, an earlier manifestation of fluency).


Systemic Study of the History of Literacy

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Two other similar analytic metaphors useful in the proposed historical study of reading are paradigmatic and syntagmatic analyses. These are also borrowed from linguistics and function similarly to synchronic and diachronic analyses, but they do not reference time, as they isolate specific practices or items. In the case of syntagmatic analysis, the focus is on the particular practice (e.g., lists of spelling words) and other functionally similar practices that might be substituted for it (e.g., in-context spelling, developmental spelling models, Elkonian boxes). The purpose of paradigmatic analysis is to collect and compare the set of practices that could potentially be deployed where the focal practice was used. In contrast, syntagmatic analysis considers the use of the item or practice (again, the example of using lists of words to teach spelling) as it relates to the rest of the context and beliefs that are part of the “chain” of related operations in use at the instance. In the case of spelling lists, syntagmatic analysis might look at what would be used in conjunction with the spelling list, such as basal readers with controlled vocabulary, assessment in literacy, and teacher training in literacy, that form a cohesive approach to acquiring spelling competence. These four approaches to linguistic analysis (diachronic, synchronic, paradigmatic, and syntagmatic analyses) productively create methods for manipulating literacy beliefs and practices as historical data in systematic ways toward revealing patterns within the study of literacy, and for charting directions for the future of literacy as a profession. As a result of such systematic analyses, illogical happenings in the field may become apparent. For example, Dennis (2008; 2009) points out that even though many middle school students are more than adequate decoders, they are drilled in phonemic awareness with the mistaken notion that such training will improve their comprehension of content texts. When events like these occur, the metaphor of palimpsest is invoked to account for, though not necessarily to explain, practices that may persist and may suddenly reappear and be championed by a vocal supporter, despite the mounting evidence that such practices are not recommended by the research. Lather (1997) used the term palimpsest to characterize her own work of “writing erased imperfectly before being written on again” and “a palimpsest where primary and secondary texts collapse” (2004, pp. 3–4). Here, Lather’s use of palimpsest is a metaphorical one, like its use in this article. Other

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writers have defined palimpsest as a heuristic for poststructural thinking about literary texts. In the case of this article, the use of palimpsest references the historical set of texts in the field of reading that “subvert the concept of the author as the sole originary source of [the] work, and thus defer the meaning of the work down an endless chain of signification” (Keep & McLaughlin, 1995). Therefore, it is not as productive to find the originator as it is to collect the multiple texts on a topic and read through them for the traces of meaning as they occur and reoccur. The following explanation situated the notion of palimpsest for a course related to the current manuscript: In times when paper was either nonexistent or in short supply, individuals wrote on animal hide. When the hide was scraped and reused, some of the inking from previous messages would remain embedded in the skin. Then when the new message was written on the hide, old messages would “bleed through” the current one. This is the actual occurrence of the new and the old at the same time. Palimpsest refers literally to scraping of animal hide in order to remove the ink from previous uses. Intertextuality and poststructural accounts of the circulation of texts have also used palimpsest as a metaphor for the origin and history of texts that are present when anyone writes. All texts are reformulations of previously encountered texts, books, conversations, media scripts, and childhood memories included. (Syllabus, RED 6749: History and Foundations of Reading, University of South Florida)

What is true for sheepskin is also true for the history of reading. In the context of the history of reading, and more specifically, in the context of a history of reading course, palimpsest was used as a metaphoric “catch-all” for methodological and ideological overlap that occur in the historical documents and artifacts of the profession. The visualization of a scraped parchment, with previous inking still visible as seepage into deeper layers, is a potent metaphor for understanding the co-occurrence of seemingly incompatible practices and beliefs in literacy. In fact, we looked for examples of palimpsest in our own practices of reading instruction. Kuhn’s Revolution in Language Inquiry An overall structure for the history of literacy can be found in Kuhn’s (1970) Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Though Kuhn was



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specifically targeting science and its communities of practice, the model has been productively deployed to social sciences (cf. Greene [1974] for linguistics), and specifically to education (Tuthill & Ashton, 1983). The education connections to Kuhn rely heavily on Kuhn’s somewhat embedded notion of communities of shared communication during what he refers to as “normal science.” These communities become fractionated when rifts occur in the explanatory reasoning (models of practice) that guide the profession. When the fissures are significant enough, a subcommunity will break away and form an alternative, presumably more explanatory, model for practice. Kuhn calls the separating and reformulating of one practice group from another “crisis in confidence.” Rather than a model that exhibits the steady and orderly accretion of knowledge, Kuhnian paradigmatic shifts are abrupt, and perhaps querulous. Tuthill and Ashton (1983) suggest that education’s inability to separate and make unique practice communities is what hampers education from becoming more professional. Indeed, if we do not form communities of practice in literacy, it becomes unknowable what factors contribute to success or failure in learning to read and write. Yet, withholding the delivery of any “best practices” from multiple perspectives becomes an ethical issue in literacy as well as education in general. Kuhn argues that scientific progress is a contentious, cyclic rise and fall of successive paradigms, each more expansive and comprehensive in its explanatory power, and each proposed, promoted, and protected by a learning community, which is dedicated to the paradigms’ sustained preference. If the succession was simply a matter of elaboration, then “bigger is better” and theoretical accounts of the profession would fail to be effective because of their own inertia. Interestingly, this weightiness from the adhesion of partial fix-ups (think band-aids) applied to the theory are, from Kuhn’s perspective, one of the causes of the decline of a paradigm. To balance this equation, the notion of Ockham’s razor is used to understand why economy in theorizing is a preferred attribute. From the time of the 13th and 14th centuries, William Ockham (c. 1285–1349) proposed that a theory should be only complex enough to explain the observable data or phenomena at hand. The term “Ockham’s razor” first appeared as a term in 1852, when used by William Hamilton (1788–1856). In Ockham’s words (or at least in a translation), “Plurality ought

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never be posited without necessity.” This means that an understanding of reading that accounts for all of the data, and that does not have extra, unnecessary details, is to be preferred. Indeed, the utilization of what has been called Ockham’s Razor can be seen as part of the reasoning used by Kuhn (1970) in his development of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It is reasoning that is particularly well-suited to the first century (1900–2000) of systematic inquiry into reading (and, subsequently, literacy). Reading practice and theory have systematically changed across the century, and Kuhn’s structure helps document the change in an organized way. Moments as Historical Markers in Literacy Inquiry Another structural tool that this study of the history of literacy uses is drawn from the field of qualitative research. Denzin and Lincoln (2000) proposed “moments” of focused inquiry in the emergence and development of qualitative inquiry. Observation and induction have been part of the culture of qualitative research since there was such a culture. But when a field becomes self-evident and self-declared, it is a different matter. In this way, qualitative research has much in common with reading. People have read texts as long as there have been texts. Theorizing about the use of texts is a different matter. For the history of literacy, the benefit of moment is the ambiguity associated with the intended segments. In fact, these moments of qualitative research that were proposed by Denzin and Lincoln were also not discrete units and often overlapped. Nor do the moments that have been chosen for this article claim to constitute the history of reading. Rather, moments in the history of reading are used as convenient, productive locations and perspectives from which to mount discussions about literacy from a particular perspective. Spivak (1993) calls this situated and resituated stance-taking strategic essentialism. In this strategic use of essentialism, provisional binary oppositions are created that allow for interrogation of stance, belief, and practice in reading. In such an approach, a particular moment in the history of reading is temporarily adopted (e.g., clinical moment). Literacy work then morphs into clinical understanding of reading and writing, mediated by body functions (visual perception, neurological functions) and remediated in reading clinics. Reading


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clinicians’ searches for the etiology of reading disabilities make a certain kind of sense within this perspective. Yet, the clinic is but one of the moments from which literacy workers have theorized and practiced.


Time and Language as Research Tools Time is also reconstituted for the purposes of using it as a research tool and uncovering its use as a cultural practice. Fabian (1983) makes a convincing case that the construct of time can be productively manipulated by those who research to achieve a psychological distance from data, and it thus creates the research other , or object of investigation. Fabian critiques the intentional use of time by anthropologists as a way of establishing the other, or the object of investigation or control. In this light, teachers, reading and otherwise, “are controlled by a political use of time as a limited commodity. They are told and believe that time is limited and then told how to spend their time in classrooms” (King, 1991, p. 54). Likewise, as researchers and consumers of research, time can be used as a way of making difference (“the way they used to . . .,” “there was a time in reading . . .,” or “in the clinical moment . . . ”). These distancing moves are counterbalanced by recognition that what was “back then” is also part of “right now.” The importance of this simultaneity in knowing is realized from a Bakhtinian (Bakhtin, 1986) perspective. Multiperspectival understanding is enriched with voices that “speak up” from historical documents and consequently provide hooks, or interpretive anchors, for the repetition of ideas presented in new words. It is necessary and productive to restate these layers of sedimented conversation. Rearticulating what is known as well as what has been known is critical to our students, who come into the conversations in the field as newcomers. Knowing about what has been known invites them into these conversations. Secondly, so that conversations among the current conversants may call upon shared frames of reference, be they chronological, thematic, or even idiosyncratic, the field benefits from an organizing of knowledge of things past within the field. In framing our talk and writing, we can create a metadiscourse that can lead to reified ways of relating to our own profession, or what Gee (1996) refers to as the Discourses. Systematic ways of understanding the history of

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our field as well as shared ways of talking and writing about it lead to a professionalization of the field of reading. Several perspectives and tools for constructing a history of literacy have been presented. These include the provisional binaries of diachronic/synchronic analysis and syntagmatic/paradigmatic analysis. Kuhnian modeling, moments of practice, and uses of time and language have been presented as tools for understanding. These tools and perspectives are now deployed in the form of a masters level course in the history of literacy (Syllabus, RED 6749: History and Foundations of Reading, University of South Florida). An Example Course in the History and Foundations of Literacy History and Foundations of Literacy introduces graduate students to the historical background of reading, historical approaches to the study of literacy, as well as their relationships to current models that guide literacy research, theory, and instruction. With a focus on historical antecedents, students in the course learn the connections between current research and practice and former models and their related instructional practices. In a larger framework, the course connects students with the relationships between professional practices in the field of reading education and the larger social movements that contextualize them. (Course description, http://www.grad.usf.edu/catalog.asp)

With that course description, History and Foundations of Literacy was launched several years ago. Such catalog descriptions seldom reveal what will eventually happen in a given course, or even in a given semester in which it is offered. The purpose of this section of the article is to outline History and Foundations of Literacy in a brief overview, and to highlight how the pervious tools and perspectives might be deployed. This following section is organized with a weekly structure of course offerings. The course purposefully focuses on the 20th century. While certain researchers in the history of reading pedagogy have considered earlier work in literacy practices, reliable applications of literacy inquiry and its applications into classroom practices are a tale of the 20th century. Utilizing Denzin and Lincoln’s (2000) moments of qualitative research, this time span is segmented into eight moments in the history of literacy. These moments are (1) before invention, (2) invention, (3) instruction, (4) clinic,


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(5) cognition, (6) collaboration, (7) critical moment, and (8) media. Of course none of these moments is discrete, and they overlap as well as make “jumps” in their respective coverage of literacy phenomena. The purpose of partitioning according to these moments is to provide a descriptive, time-related model, but one that is not tied to a lockstep chronology. In fact, we cycle through recursive iterations of practice as well as continue to utilize previous practices in anachronistic noncompliance (palimpsest). The following content outline for the course will serve to introduce the moments and their potential impact on students’ thinking during the course, and across a standard semester. Introduction to Paradigmatic Shifts (Class 1) In this first meeting, students examined Kuhn’s (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Examples from the stages in the development of the history of linguistics (Greene, 1974) provided students with a parallel model for how the course would evolve. Students were asked to recall and share personal memories of their own reading instruction. Their memories as students were used to establish shifts in reading pedagogy in recent history. Questions about how and why institutional change occurs (Rogers & Shoemaker, 1971) were then directed toward education culture (Fullan, 2007) and then specifically toward changes in literacy (Tierney, 1994). The purposes of the course emanated from this discussion. The organization of the course was clarified by a grid that schematized different moments in 20th-century literacy. Kuhn and Before Invention (Class 2) “Invention” was coined for the first moment that eventually occurs in class 3. But class 2 sets the stage by considering reading philosophies, models, and methods that existed prior to invention. After a review of readings on and by Kuhn (1970), class discussion focused on the beginnings of the modern literacy field. Classic inventionist texts such as those by Huey (1908/1968), Thorndike (1914), and Cattell (1886) were examined in class to reveal “The road not taken,” a metaphor adapted from Stahl, King, and Eilers’ (1996) work on postsecondary literacy. While Stahl et al. compare instructionally, the same metaphor can be used to look at older


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studies to see what might have happened if certain circumstances had been deployed differently at the time of the study. It is, of course, a vantage point only possible with hindsight. Yet the connection that it provides students is riveting. To capture the power of hindsight, small groups analyzed several studies from this moment for connections with current reading practices. The resulting class discussion focused on applications from this early research that would have a place in current classroom practice. For example, an in-class analysis of Thorndike’s (1914) classic study on the measurement of reading ability also provided examples of comprehension process research that were current in the teachers’ classrooms. Research findings that were not taken on in mainstream classrooms at the time, but later recognized, were discussed as lost opportunities (Stahl et al., 1996). Students were sent to their school sites to discuss other teachers’ awareness of lost opportunities in their teaching careers. The Moment of Invention, Part 2 (Class 3) Invention represents the formation of the field of literacy. Invention was based on the occurrence of several systematic studies in reading behavior that emerged to make the field of reading possible. After the previous investigation of invention in class 2, and a visit with teachers at their school sites, students presented findings from their look at the history of the times. The sociocultural milieu is characterized by significant events, objects, and artifacts that are logged on the accompanying course wiki page. The course wiki page (http://jking.pbworks.com/) provides numerous examples of cultural events and educational contexts that are used to characterize the various moments in the history of literacy. The wiki page enhancement and maintenance are course projects that are completed by the students for each course offering. During this moment of invention and continuing throughout the semester, the students read and used historical research methods such as document analysis and oral history, with a focus on societal issues (Butchart, 1986), on literacy teaching (Gilstad, 1986), and on literacy research (Monaghan & Hartman, 2000; Stahl & Hartman, 2004). As students completed analyses of primary source materials from research and writing during the invention stage, they critiqued the research from within that historical


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paradigm (synchronic analysis), and comparatively from their present knowledge (diachronic analysis).


The Moment of Instruction (Class 4) During instruction, the moment’s research was grounded in what was seen at the time as the “best way.” Results from research during the moment of instruction then entered classrooms as models for what was seen as “best practice.” Students in the class explored connections with Taylorism, Fordism, and other models of culture and business efficiency for their implications for education and transference to educational practice (Seashore, 1939). Classic studies on the best ways to teach, as well as the best ages to teach, as exemplified by Morphett and Washburn’s (1931) notions of neural ripening and reading readiness, were examined. Neural ripening, or the idea that developmental levels will happen of their own accord in time-related orderly progression, was contrasted in class with the eugenics movement (Burt, 1946; Guyer, 1927; Robinson, 1932) and IQ testing development (Terman, 1916), which was also a powerful social and academic influence at the time. The point that reading readiness and emergent literacy continue to coexist in literacy practices was made explicit in class. It is also important that these notions from a time of desires for “race purity” through eugenics remain entrenched in school practices through palimpsest, and a documented history that stretches to Galton in 1901. (For an interesting perspective and a tangential connection to reading, see Cattell, 1933). Instructional Moments Now (Class 5) A survey research assignment from the previous week sent students back to their own classrooms. Results from the returned surveys form the data. With an examination of their own practice, as well as the teaching of their colleagues, they checked on the currency of such concepts as readiness and neural ripening. In the previous week’s class, the students had generated an interview protocol that queried their colleagues’ use of readiness and development as well as instructional decisions related to these beliefs. Class discussion of the data that they brought back to class targeted how we (all) can simultaneously hold conflicting knowledge

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about given issues (such as readiness). In early elementary classrooms, in the name of children and literacy, we may protect children from reading, because it is developmentally inappropriate, and simultaneously place them in early literacy intervention programs. Such conflicts were the focus of the discussion, which was partially resolved with the concept of palimpsest.


The Moment of the Clinic (Class 6) “The clinic” references the adoption of medical models into school literacy practices and also acknowledges the impetus for much reading intervention. Beginning with the clinical moment, medical models of learning were used in education, particularly in understanding children who had difficulties in learning to read. Despite the lack of clear or consistent instructional implications coming from such models, reading educators persisted in explaining literacy, or the lack of it, from such hypotheses as preeclampsia (DeHirsch, Jansky, & Langford, 1966), minimal brain dysfunction, and neural lesions. Notable in this moment of literacy’s paradigmatic development was the prominence of dyslexia (Morgan, 1896; Orton, 1937). One of the goals of this in-class examination is that the students deduce and interrogate the influence of constructs such as authority, blame, etiology, and modern science for their roles in the emergence of the “dyslexic.” Typically, students have also shared connections to dyslexia in their personal lives. More current readings on fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and brain imaging bring a relative currency to the previously discarded notion of dyslexia (Spache, 1976). With Manzo, Manzo, and Albee’s (1997) matrix that schematizes the causes of dyslexia, the class debated the relative efficacy of different cause factors. Manzo et al.’s more recent use of dyslexia can be understood as yet another instance of palimpsest, as Spache’s 1976 review largely repudiated the explanatory power of the construct. In contrast, dyslexia can also be seen as a recursive concept that reoccurs in a later moment (critical moment) when newer technology (fMRIs) revitalizes a long-retired idea from literacy. Recursive concepts are those with reiterative power in the history of literacy. They provide analytic opportunities to compare ostensibly different cultural moments for factors that might co-occur each time a


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recursive concept surfaces. The actual difference between a recursive and a palimpsestic concept is that recursive concepts surface with new research support, whereas palimpsests appear to recycle independent of new research support.


The Birth of the Clinical Nightmare (Class 7) As part of the clinical moment, its effects were examined in Class 7. Using a model based on Foucault’s (1963/1994) Birth of the Clinic, students examined classic texts (e.g., Gray, 1933; Harris, 1940 and additional editions; Monroe, 1932; Robinson, 1946) for their invention and use of specialized medical vocabulary that created insider and outsider players in literacy. In determining the discourses, medicine also determines its products. Foucault (1963/1994) established the formation of medical discourse that created both patients and their diseases as its products. In examining schooled literacy contexts, the course draws particular emphasis to IEPs (individualized education programs) as a legacy of the clinical moment. Parent involvement, which is often cited as a productive goal in literacy, was reviewed as “a problem” when school-based language about reading processes was kept purposefully opaque to outsiders, such as parents of children with reading difficulties. The clinical report as a literacy genre was also examined for its predetermined notions of literacy and illiteracy. The Cognitive Moment (Class 8) The cognitive moment was treated with a case study approach. The Center for the Study of Reading (CSR), housed at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, was adopted as a prototype for cognitive research into literacy processes. The several volumes of research findings, published primarily by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (e.g., Spiro, Bruce, & Brewer, 1980) and studies issued as CSR Technical Reports or CSR Education Reports (through ERIC release) were used as course texts and as artifacts to determine the themes that were guiding research. Students were directed to the “instructional implications” sections of the various research reports when these were offered. Of particular note was the emergence of “comprehension processes” and speculation about the mental processes of readers. This was contrasted

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through diachronic analysis with the word reading behaviors and etiological speculations of earlier paradigms, such as the clinical moment (diachronic analysis). Difficulty with word meaning in the clinical moment might have been related to neurological lesions. Difficulty with word meaning in the cognitive moment might be related to differing schema due to background knowledge.


Experimenting With Cognitive Experiments (Class 9) Several examples of experimental materials from the cognitive studies of literacy were examined in class (cf. Anderson, 1976; Dreher, 1981; King, 1980; 1984; Weaver, 1979). Participating in the “treatments” that were constructed for cognitive experiments with text processing provided some insight into the experimental manipulations of literacy. Alternative explanations of related studies’ findings was one of the class activities that occurred. The students also made connections to psychological aspects of their current approaches to teaching reading comprehension. A case study of Anderson’s (1976), Dreher’s (1981), and King’s (1980; 1984) use of instantiation, or the use of an inferred, more specific example for a general noun, was examined. The case study attempts to reveal the subtle differences in materials and methods used in cognitive-literacy research, as well as yields an understanding of how comprehension was manifested as strategic processes. The Collaborative Moment (Class 10) In this moment, literacy was viewed as a set of relations. The collaborative moment was characterized as relationships between student and teachers. It was also a relationship between reading and writing (Smith, 1983; Tierney & Pearson, 1983). It was a relationship (transaction) between reader and text (Rosenblatt, 1938; 1978). It was the relationship (or lack of it) between theory and practice (Bartholomae & Petrosky, 1986). Consequently, this moment had a focus on teachers as researchers, readers as writers, teachers as learners, students as teachers, and school connections to outside the school culture. Constructivism in literacy was compared across cognitive (psychological structure) and collaborative


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(interpersonal relations) moments. Constructs such as collaborative learning (Jacob, 1999; Johnson & Johnson, 1985), and discussion and identity formation (Alvermann, O’Brien, & Dillon, 1990) were examined for their influences on reading practices in classrooms.


Collaboration and Evaluation (Class 11) The moment of collaboration happened concurrently in education with calls for greater accountability that have impacted its implementation. Consequently, a back-to-basics demand that relied on fixed notions of static literacies and emerging as “assessment” and “accountability” was seen as a necessary component. Accountability in literacy was situated in the Reading First legislation (2001) and anchored in the National Reading Panel report (2000). These two constructs (collaboration and back to basics) were examined for their contrasts: creativity and accountability; authenticity and validity; collaboration and authority. Back to basics was also critiqued for its outcome of offering different literacies to at-risk and ethnically diverse students (Delpit, 2006). The use of these provisional binary comparisons also allowed students an opportunity to compare the halves of these different binaries for their original source moments. The Critical Moment (Class 12) Collaboration and the border crossing (Giroux, 1991) that it encouraged were presented as enhanced literate possibilities and opportunities for diversity and inclusion. However, calls for standards and resistance to a shifting of the canon were also part of the picture. Conflict between different ideological stances became apparent in the field. Issues of gender, class, and race became important aspects of literacy theory and practice (Cochran-Smith, 1995; Luke & Freebody, 1997; Weiler, 1991). If one of the purposes of the collaborative moment in literacy was empowerment (Friere, 1970), the critical moment demands “empowerment to what?” and “whose definition of power?” Indeed, students were led to ask who is defining literacy, and to what purpose. These questions are layered with co-occurring alternative approaches such as Direct Instruction (Carnine, Silbert, Kame’enui, & Tarver, 2004;

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Engleman & Carnine, 1991), and No Child Left Behind (U.S. DOE, 2002), the report of the National Reading Panel (2000), The Voice of Evidence in Reading Research (McCardle & Chhabra, 2004), and its neuropyschological underpinnings (Kamil, 2004).


Media Literacies (Class 13) As students progressed through the previous moments, they used various modes of media in their coursework (e.g., blogs, iMovie, PowerPoint). These media modes are now reflexively interrogated as forms of an emerging media moment in literacy. For example, students have presented research projects that compared literacy approaches and situated them both historically and within current classroom practices. Student projects have characteristically examined the historical development of specific literacy practices such as literacy circles, reading assessment, trend analysis on comparisons of basal readers teachers’ editions, teacher in-service, histories of content reading, and the emergence of early intervention in literacy. The presentation of their projects is required to go beyond a paper and slide presentation. The students are asked to examine their literacy practices in light of readings from Alvermann (2002); Knobel and Lankshear (2007); and Lemke (2006). The purpose of the analysis is to focus on adolescents’ competence with multimedia, in a comparison with teachers’ relative lack of competence. Course Themes From Several Implementations Theme 1: Kuhnian Perspective: The first theme is the use of a Kuhnian perspective, which introduced several terms into weekly discussion. Interpretive communities, normal science, and crisis science were applied to changing moments in the history of reading. For example, in the moment of collaboration, relationship and communication among equals was extrapolated to the classrooms of the teachers in the course. Scenariating (Knobel & Lankshear, 2007) what a democratic communication-based class would look like led to a “crisis” in the History of Literacy course. The students wondered together who would make the decisions about what to study, and what teachers (including the authors) would do if students made “unproductive” choices for books and



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projects. This discussion led the class to a reconceptualization of the imagined classrooms from a perspective of the critical moment. Who should be making these decisions about curriculum in reading? Can the collaborative moment be considered authentic if the teacher makes all the communication decisions? The point is not necessarily to answer such questions. It is engaging in the questions as a professional community that matters to the course, as well as to the profession. Theme 2: Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Analyses: Research studies were analyzed both paradigmatically and syntagmatically (Graddol, Cheshire, & Swann, 1996). Paradigmatic analysis engaged students in examining similar phenomena across time. For example, Durkin’s (1978; 1981) findings regarding the dearth of comprehension instruction might be compared with the previous comprehension taxonomy research of Davis (1944), with a possible finding that definitions of comprehension shifted from skills, to instruction, to process. In syntagmatic analysis, again using the Durkin example, readers might look at the research and reading practices at that time to more fully understand Durkin’s approach. For example, at the time of Durkin’s research and its write-up, certain perspectives on literacy were prevalent. Durkin’s partitioning of her results between comprehension instruction and comprehension assessment should reflect the influence of what was known and believed about comprehension at that time. These instances of situating, however, usually begin with recognition of difference. Theme 3: Diachronic and Synchronic Analyses: The course utilized the framework of diachronic analysis (across time) and synchronic analysis (within a given time) based on the work of Bynon (1977). Kuhn’s successive paradigms of a learning community were treated to Bynon’s historical periodization. The uses of Bynon’s contrast methods, which use diachronic and synchronic analyses, have limits, however. It may seem redundant to monitor and critique the use and influence of time in a historical course, but even so, it is a necessary effort. Narrow or uncritical use of chronological framing tended to over-emphasize and perhaps romanticize the role of time, era, and social practices. In this way, the “quaintness” of a previous era can excuse past practices that would look egregious from a perspective based on current practices (e.g., neural ripening and eugenics as factors in determining


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readiness for early literacy, as well as selecting candidates for frontal lobotomies). Further, the purposeful use of time to manufacture a past that is then distanced from “the current” is a technique that has long been under critical review in social sciences such as anthropology (Fabian, 1983). The point, of course, is that time and history are both constructed phenomena. And one purpose of the course is to recognize that very fact as it operates within the field of literacy. So we used both frames, synchronic and diachronic, often simultaneously. Fabian’s caution about the anthropological distortion of “time” allows students, as voyeurs, to detach themselves from their own current use of dated literacy practices (e.g., current emphasis on whole-class instruction and round-robin reading used in compliance with Reading First, Florida’s response to No Child Left Behind). Such distance, we maintain, is a critical first step for students’ critical reflection on their own work, and this is a real windfall from the course. Theme 4: Course Texts and Discourses: A second theme that emanated from Kuhn concerned our in-class ethos. We borrowed Tuthill and Ashton’s (1983) Kuhnian construct of scientific community. The class participated as a learning community. With the assigned readings we agreed (after some experimentation on formats) to deconstruct the language of the historic documents. We asked: “Who was the reader that the author had assumed would read the text?” “What uses of language reveal the writer for the beliefs that s/he held?” “What evidence is there for the influence of the times on the style and word choices used by the writer?” We also talked in terms of exemplar studies in preference to the word designation of exemplary studies. The latter designation seemed to carry some kind of quality or fit endorsement with reference to a particular moment. While the selection of readings certainly involved a degree of representativeness, the studies are not necessarily recommended as the “best example.” Exemplar was used to indicate that the study was a member of some type, set, or era, without a specific endorsement from the instructor, or indeed, from the current authors. Course readings based on exemplar studies were read by individual students, who wrote reflexive accounts of their understanding. In the course syllabus, students were encouraged to:


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summarize main points look for and report relationships between the sets of readings create questions/discussion points find connections/relationship to own life/experience communicate reflexive summaries to peers create a shared synthesis response The students in the course each corresponded with response partners via Blackboard communications several times during the semester. Blackboard is an online course delivery and management system. Individuals’ initial responses to assigned readings were exchanged, and the two response pieces were synthesized collaboratively according to observed differences and similarities in the responses. All three documents were submitted for each reading response pair to Blackboard. The rationale for peer response partners was to provide an audience for the writing other than the instructor. The purpose of repeated summarizing was to cause students to synthesize the information that they had read, both within and across moments. Theme 5: Recontextualizing Course Content: Students used the content that emanated from the required readings in their own teaching. There are two additional and related issues connected to the selected readings. These are contextualizing and content acquisition (reported in the following section on appropriation). Recontextualizing the place, impact, and significance of an individual piece of research became a regular, ritualized strategy within the course. With a timeline, we located the “when” of a particular study. But we eventually discovered that the publication date did not necessarily characterize the moment of reading that was the basis of the research. Time was also used as an analogy, in a simile. “That [technique under inquiry] is like 1930’s reading.” The need to recontextualize the studies within a set of readings, and across the 20th century, was an outcome from selecting. Any selection is based on a rubric, either implicit or explicit. Embedded in the rubric are values (in this case the instructor’s). As exemplars, the studies have a stronger impact. To counter the “star status” resulting from the selection process, the studies were resituated in the larger context. For example, Manzo et al.’s (1997) treatment of dyslexia provided a productive summary


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of beliefs held during the clinical moment in reading. But nearly two decades earlier, the same etiological constructs were reviewed critically by Spache (1976). In this example of the persistence of dyslexia (and other constructs like it), it was important to invoke palimpsest to explain a continued use of a largely abandoned aspect of literacy inquiry and practice in recent texts in mainstream literacy. And finally, in contrast, a student in the class reclaimed the productivity of the term “dyslexia” with her updated research paper that included recent studies with PET (positron emission tomography) scans and fMRI’s (Kamil, 2004). Theme 6: Appropriation of Course Content: Another issue connected to the readings was uncovered in the use of the content of the exemplar studies. It happens that information that was intended to represent historical patterns in reading is often new information for students, who are also teachers. Examples are found in Smith’s (1979) chapter in visual and nonvisual information and Goodman’s (1965) early study of miscues. Both of these manuscripts were used in the course design as a bridge from the clinical moment into socio-psycholinguistics as part of the cognitive moment. But because the two readings were grouped together with the end of the clinical moment and its readings on dyslexia, a student understood the entire set of readings (clinical and socio-psycholinguistic) as a single thematic text set. Consequently, Smith’s tunnel vision was understood as a type of physiological impairment. The student reasoned that “cures of tunnel vision can occur when the cause is known.” Indeed, the student’s conclusion may be true. But the student’s positioning of Smith’s psycholinguistic theory in a clinical context could be seen as an anachronism from a course perspective. A second example with Smith brings up the point that the specific content in what were selected as “studies” or exemplar studies was often new and exciting for the students. The Alvermann et al. (1990) study of middle school classroom discussion prompted several students to verbally commit to beginning to try discussion with their students. But information was also used differently than it was intended. In one of the readings for class, beginning readers’ incidental acquisition of letters and sounds was used in the reading as an analogy for higher-level cognitive processes. The article was ostensibly about adolescents’ literacy in the digital age. Yet a student lifted the analogy as independent fact



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and used it to argue against the National Reading Panel’s (2000) recommendations for decontextualized phonemic awareness. Students also used the information from previous moments’ readings to support subsequent written reactions to readings. They also brought in their own store of researchers. In writing about Alvermann et al.’s (1990) study on discussion, a student referred to Friere’s (1970) “dialogic process” in contrast to a “banking system” of education as an evaluation frame for teacher-controlled classroom discussion. Theme 7: Happenstance, Unintended Meanings, Collocation, and Intentional Bridge Papers: Another theme was the influence of the course structure as it contributed to unintended, idiosyncratic, and even spurious learning in the course. In the sequencing of readings, we attempted to supply some readings that bridged the two adjacent paradigms. For example, Morphett and Washburne’s (1937) study of school readiness, conducted during an era of eugenics and based on “neural ripening,” was used in the moment of instruction. As a follow-up to Morphett and Washburne, and to bridge to the next moment, Gates’s (1937) study was used. Gates found that teacher effectiveness factors were more important than the constitutional factors within students. This subsequent finding would discount the importance of neural ripening (and conceivably other studies of the constitution of readers) to bring the focus to teacher aptitudes. In a second example of using bridge papers, Au’s (1995) work on cultural diversity in literacy research was used to bridge between the communitarian ethos and the relational approaches of the collaborative moment to the critical moment. Au presents a radical stance of reconstructed social practice around new, culturally relevant literacies. In her paper, these radical approaches emanate from a neoliberal collaboration approach presented earlier in the paper. Similarly, Smith (1979) and Goodman (1965) were used to disrupt the clinical moment “nightmare,” pointed out by Spache’s (1976) thorough review and critique of dyslexia. In addressing unseen mental processing, Smith and Goodman were used in the course to lead the way to a cognitive moment. Likewise the limitations that were inherent in the “classroom applications” and “implications” of the experimental findings of the cognitive moment (e.g., Day’s [1980] summarizing research) subsequently led the course into the constructivist collaborative moment.


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The course used a set of fairly structured activities and assignments to perform learning that was acquired from readings, writings, and discussions. On a few occasions, we enacted the crises that we perceived from the readings. For example, class members chose their side in the issue of using standardized intelligence tests to form reading groups. Their positions were derived from readings on IQ, eugenics, and the bell curve by Howe (1997), Pinar (1996), Gould (1981), Carspecken (1996), and Kamin (1974). In another example, after reading Durkin (1978; 1981), the class brought in the teachers’ editions of their adopted basal readers to analyze the quality of comprehension instruction that was embedded in them. A quick comparison revealed a compelling difference between Durkin’s report and the current teachers’ editions for basal readers. This comparison suggested to us that having teachers’ editions from each of the reading moments would allow students to trace the development of instructional techniques (such as comprehension) as they are represented in teaching materials. In the first half of the term, students each conducted an oral history of a veteran reading professional. From the beginning of the course, they were guided in the process with documents from Stahl and King (2000). The students were provided with example oral histories of reading teachers that had been collected previously and written into narratives by in-service teachers and subsequently analyzed (King, 1991). They also had access to the university’s store of previous oral histories of reading educators on the university iTunes site (itunes.usf.edu). The oral histories were analyzed for evidence of thinking on the part of the informants that corresponded with any of the eight moments of reading. When informants stated beliefs from different paradigms (or moments), and especially when we found internal conflict in those stated beliefs, we engaged with the construct of palimpsest. How do we understand the persistence of a reading practice when evidence suggests it is ineffective? One of the intended goals of the course was students’ acquisition of educational critique that used historical perspective. The readings for the course, some of which were drawn from Reading Research Revisited, edited by Gentile, Blanchard, and Kamil (1983), presented classic studies in reading along with more current reviews of the research and its impact. Students in the course used



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the review texts in Reading Research Revisited as models for their own critique texts. Yet, their ability to construct these reflexive analyses was related to particular content/issues. For example, the students were thorough in their examination of standardized IQ testing in the wake of the eugenics movement, a theme in the moment of instruction. Further, students could easily make the transition from the cognitive moment to the collaborative moment. The transition from experimental cognitive research, often not grounded in teachers’ classroom practices, gave way to the collaborative moment, with research about and with classroom teachers. But the move from collaboration to critical was only realized in the context of standardized testing (Florida’s FCAT [Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test]) and its influence on classroom teaching of literacy. The rhetoric and perspective required for critical analysis may have been situated knowledge that the students were experiencing for the first time. The students’ personal involvement as teachers within the context of Florida’s high-stakes testing may have facilitated their understanding of the critical moments, but only as it related to resisting the FCAT. In contrast, students’ ability to formulate independent, written critique was generally not apparent in their research papers submitted at the end of the semester. It may be productive to frame additional critical analysis in class based on episodes drawn from their teaching experiences. This would be compatible with Freire and Macedo’s (1987) “reading the [teachers’] world.” Conclusion While we would be the first to say that candidates for the doctoral degrees and/or masters degrees in literacy pedagogy and research, on the average, suffer from a form of historical myopia and that any attempt to correct this problem in lack of professional vision is a step in the correct direction, course work that has a conceptual framework, whether as presented here or elsewhere, has the potential to lead candidates to assess the past and present in a scholarly manner. A critical understanding of the history of literacy will provide a competency what will span professional life. It is critically important that professionals in literacy have an adequate understanding of the content that forms the history of the profession, as well as the tools of inquiry that guide their future

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examinations of the profession. It is important that emerging professionals have competence with perspectives and tools that will allow them to effectively use the historical legacy of literacy. This article is a first step in advancing the goal of professional literacy informed by its distinguished past.


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