A dialogue with Brian Cambourne

Brian Cambourne raises an issue

Here's the issue I'm trying to unravel.  I've tried to set it out in "logical" ( to me) steps so if there's any flaws in my thinking you might be able to identify them and point them out.

 1.The so-called 'reading wars' are essentially about what a 'scientifically valid pedagogy' of reading instruction should look like.

2.  As a 'theory of pedagogy' can only be derived from,  (and based on) a 'scientifically valid' theory of learning,  then the 'reading wars'  should more accurately be described as 'learning wars'.

3. Why, after more than approximately 120 years of research in the field, hasn't psychology as a domain of inquiry been able to come to some sort of agreement on  what human learning is and how it works?  

4. Why in other scientific disciplines ( e.g biology) can the field come up with a theory like evolution and psychology cannot do something similar with respect to 'learning'?

5. I think there's some kind of 'malaise' affecting psychology but I don't know what it is when it comes to 'learning'. I just know that psychology as a field hasn't ever really seemed 'comfortable' with learning as many of the theoretical squabbles which erupt in the field are often about learning. 

6. I certainly don't believe that those who do the research in learning are poor researchers, or scientifically illiterate or 'dumb', but I have no other hypotheses to explore as to why, as a field of inquiry, psychology ( and therefore education) has not converged to a single fully tested theory of learning?

 

Brian C

 

Here’s my take on your important question

First we I think you and I know that “the reading war” was as David Berliner said a “manufactured” war over a manufactured crisis with those with a political agenda of using reading to attack public education and completely privatize it. 

So setting that aside . What comes next. Well you’re talking about a scientifiic pedagogy of reading but that ought to depend not only on a theory of learning but an understanding of the reading process itself.

There are three aspects of research that should be involved

Reading process: how do we make sense through written language?

How do people learn to read (develop literacy)?

How is instruction successful in supporting the learning?.

But as you know most of what is called reading research starts with the last aspect. The entire National Reading Panel only looked at instructional research and with that only experimental research.

So the first part of the answer to your question is . There is a lack of base in an understanding of reading as a language process .  Second as you say there is no examined base in understanding the learning of reading (no learning theory)

But the major reason why psychology has failed is its commitment to the experimental paradigm in research.

They design experiments with control group, hypotheses and  fancy statistics. But 1. The experiments are not rooted in a theoretical model (or perhaps we should say they start from an unexamined view of what they think they are studying) 2 Experimental research is an inapproriate way to study language and learning( at least in humans) Experiments require that you hold everything constant while letting one thing vary. Language doesn’t work that way .

To sum up it is their worship of the experimental model of research which causes them to be atheoretical and thus not to examine what reading actually is.

So now in England you have everything reduced as far as  the government is concerned  to which should we use synthetic or analytic phonics in teaching reading ? The psychologists are comfortable with that but the reading professionals and teacher educators are not. Because they understand reading and how it is learned (at least they have a broad  sense of that.)

Einstein , perhaps the most important scientist of our era never did an actual experiment. Physics has two aspects- theoretical physics and experimental physics. Each depends on the other. There is little respect in psychology  particularly educational psychology for theory.

Ironically, the linguists, whether Chomsky or Halliday equate learning with Skinnerian behaviorism.

As you know wCHomsky, Lenneberg and most other linguists accept the notion that language isn’t learned but is innate.

I thought  that my social-personal theory of language learning was consistent with Haliday’s but he told me has no theory of language learning- in fact he said the psychologists had their turn and now it’s our turn.

If I keep talking about a theory of learning and a theory of language learning as interchangeable  it’s because in my own view languge is learned in the same way anything else is learned.

I’ve always sought to develop a theory of learning because as a scientific realist I do research not to find cause and effect but to develop a theory of the underlying structures and processes of Reading , language and how both are learned 

My own theory is that what is innate in humans is not language but the ability to think symbolically. That makes language possible. Our human need to connect with each is what makes language necessary. So all humans have the ability to invent language and do so throughout their lives. But this invention has to move toward or expand on the social language of their family and community so that they can communicate and connect so the too forces that shape language development are personal invention and social convention.

Language is what makes human learning unique among animals. It becomes the medium of thought and communication and learning. Through it we magnify the intelligence- we can learn through language what others have learned through experience. If we understand that then we understand that written language is learned in the same way as oral. When our personal and social needs for connection go beyond face to face we develpop forms such as print .

That’s enough for now

Ken

 

 

 

Getting government out of the way

Tuesday 9/20/2012

As I’ve been working on the Hall of Fame book” Whose knowledge counts in  Government literacy policies.” Something finally came together for me.

The basic political aim of the military industrial oligarchy is to diminish governmental controls  and taxation on their business activities. Romney ‘s only carrying out this mission. They don’t just want to limit government- in fact they want government to provide them with contracts and to protect their access to markets. What they don’t want is regulation of how they conduct their business, pay their workers, or accumulate their wealth. They want to move easily without   restrictions across borders, producing their goods where labor is cheap and selling them where prices are high without  having to support the economic, social, health and educational needs of their workers or anyone else who they don’t need as employees or consumers. And they want to stash their wealth where it costs the least to keep it there and it won’t be taxed.

This is of course the ultimate goal of capitalist economics;  and the rest of us are chumps who won’t take responsibility for ourselves. In this context anyone on  a government payroll or anyone getting support from any kind of social program is at the best of no interest and at worst an enemy.

In that "Off the cuff" speech to those fat cat donors in Florida we finally see what Romney is really running for.

A recent presentation on Asian Literacy Book-click on slide to view slide show.

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IRA: The old and the new

I'm  just back from IRA in Chicago. I was President in Chicago 30 years earlier. Ira Aaron liked to tell the story that when I gave my Presidential speech only my nine-month old grandson Reuben turned his back on me. Debi had put him down in the aisle and he began to crawl away from the podium.

IRA has been through some hard times lately. Executive directors have come and gone amid rumors and lawyer imposed secrecy. The staff has had an almost 100 % holdover. Income and membership are down.

The new executive director,Marcie Craig Post met informally with past presidents and promised transparency.
She wants to visit us and get our advice. All signs so far are good.

One thing I ohpe we can turn around is the rampant commercialism. The badge holders had PEARSON on them  Pearson is underfire for being one of the corporate sponsors of the political group that's being writing the extreme legislation. . Yetta led a campaign to turn them around to get rid of advertising Pearson.

The opening session began with a commercial with a talking giraff advertising an alphabet phonics prorgram.
A young chorus sang (where did they find so many white kids in one place in|Chicago?)
And then came the major speaker  who reminded me of the spoof they do on Saturday Night LIve of the motivational speaker. Fortunately those of us on stage couldn't make out what he was saying. There is an explosion of protest on the internet on having this self-promoting, anti teacher anti teachers' union speaker .
I assume he came free with his publisher supporting his appearance.

This commercialization of IRA has to stop.

Viva La Aurora

On Monday and Tuesday Yetta and I got our reality fix. Pretty heady stuff.
Imagine going into beautiful  well-kept schools, teeming with
multicolored, multilingual youngsters and meeting with young teachers and their not
much older coaches  who can speak the language of RMI and RMA. Each
came to share with us the case studies they are doing of sixth to
eleventh grade students who read at various levels of proficiency and to talk about their plans to

    engage their students in a range of literacy experiences. The

case studies will be part of a research project being conducted by
Lisa Escarcega, the research director for the district and
Charlotte Butler, the secondary English director who conceived the

idea of turning English classes into literacy workshops using miscue
analysis and retrospective miscue analysis as central tools. It's
Charlotte who hand picked and continues to nurture this remarkable group of
educators. She expects  a lot of them and gives them a lot of support.
 Her Toyota Avalon has its own phone number and she was busy
orchestrating her program on her hands free phone as she drove us to
the schools.

 Each of the teachers we met with was excited about the tools they were
using to understand their students and they asked questions which
stretched our thinking  about what was going on in the heads of these
teen and preteen readers.

A common concern of the bright young literacy experts ( remember I'm 84 so
20, 30 and 40 some things are young to me) are bilingual Spanish

    English students who make few miscues but have weak comprehension.

   On the other hand there was one Korean- American seventh grader who made

    many miscues but produced an impressive retelling.

Aurora Pubic Schools has a policy of spending 10% of its budget on
staff development.

Charlotte  brought together literacy educators from the surrounding
area and  from local universities for a lunch meeting. We were
reminded of the other political reality as they shared their concern
over Colorado's version of the "must read by the end of third grade
law". Local educators have apparently won a victory in that the law
will not make failure mandatory but there seems to still be a
requirement that the test used must involve a hand held device for
recording and reporting scores. And guess which test that would mean?

Our experience in Aurora was a real world demonstration of what should
be happening in American schools everywhere as real professionals use
their knowledge and expertise to work collaboratively to produce confident eager readers.
Instead of course teachers and other educators have had to fight to
protect themselves and their students from the imposition of DIBELS
and worse.

Charlotte will be presenting with Debi Goodman at WLU in St.Louis.in July.

Glorious lingustic imperfection

Last night I had one of my epiphanies. It came to me in the privacy of the commode.

Language is gloriously imperfect. It is a marvelous achievement of our species but it isn't perfect. Though it is rule governed virtually every rule has its exceptions.Why in every language does the same word  have many meanings and why are there many ways of saying the same thing? Why are there homophones, homographs and homonyms,? Language is constantly changing but as language communities become more sophisticated, knowlegeable and educated shouldn't that change be toward a more perfect form? Shouldn't language become more regular and simpler as it matures and changes? Why do strange phenomena such ass the many different forms of be- is am,was were, be, been, being persist? Why do some languages lose future tense  or second person plural. If alphabetic writing is the end product of evolution why do non-alphabetic forms of writing continue in use?

And why is language perception so clearly based on illusion?

 I want to argue that language is imperfect because:

1. It needs to be. If it were perfect it would not serve our needs. It has to be dynamic and easily changed because our need for it is always changing.

2. It can be. By that I mean that our brains are comfortable with all this imperfection. Not only can they make sense of imperfect language, they thrive on it. Our brains are equiped with a set for ambiguity. They thrive on redundancy. Something in the way the human brain uses language requires it to be imperfect, to be malleable, flexible , and recursive.

It is easier to argue my first point than the second because the manner in which the brains represents meaning to itself is not well understood. We all have the experience of knowing what we want to say but not finding the right way of expressing it. I'm avoiding talkng about how the brain "stores " meaning, or ideas or words because I'm not convinced that's what it does. There seems to be some way the brain constructs and organizes what it "knows".

This is not to say that there is no need for language to be consistent in the way it is used. It wouldn't work if we didn't share in the way we used it- if we didn't "play by the rules" But it wouldn't also work if it required each of us to use it precisely and perfectly either. 

I'll have more to say about imperfection. What do you think?

Yetta was a keynote speaker at Central Connecticutt University. last week.
This came today from Lois Bridges:

Here is some good news for you.  The Connecticut Corporations paid $35,000 to have Michelle Rhee speak. They ran full page ads in newspapers and 30 second spots on TV . The talk was free and 75 people showed up. Yetta Goodman spoke two days later at Central Connecticut University because Jesse invited her despite protest from the department saying she was 'old hat.' They charged $60 a person and they did not have enough chairs.  Over 400 teachers came to take notes and learn about a real way to teaching reading."

Louise Rosenblatt  a decade or two older than us, used to wag her finger at us and say " You young people....
We "old hats" appreciate the work you young people are doing to keep the flame of holistic scientific wisdom brightly shining. What goes around comes around- which is what my linguistic friend Pete Friies would call formulaic language as is "old hat"

Frame us as you will: we've miles to go before we sleep- and  books to write and battles to be fought- vebal ones=that is.  And who is this Rhee lady?

Ken Goodman