Re: phonics politics
James Robert Martin (jmartin who-is-at extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU)
Wed, 8 May 1996 09:43:48 +1000 (EST)
Australia presents a different political spectrum around literacy issues
- phonics is backed by market oriented populist new right factions; whole
language replaced phonics as the mainstream literacy pedagogy in the 80s,
during a period when curriculum was more influenced by educators than
politicians, and promoted by what Bernstein calls the new middles class,
his agents of symbolic control (as opposed to old middle class, agents of
production); whole language was then challenged by functional linguistics
and critical theory in the late 80s, a challenge coming from disaffected
agents of symbolic control and socially mobile educators from
non-mainstream backgrounds - most states have now either incorporated
aspects of this critique into their curriculum or gone over to a
post-progressive model, empasizing genre, and drawing on a functional
model of language. Recently, as politicians have tried to influence
education, including especially literacy education, post-progressive
educators have had considerable success in keeping things from lurching
backwards to phonics - by having grammar to offer (functional, not
traditional), by having what Bernstein calls a visible pedagogy
with measurable criteria for achievement that can be made public, by
being able to address market concerns with portable skills for a
post-Fordist workplace, and so on. Visitors from America have often
profoundly misunderstood the Australian context, by mapping it onto their
own phonics vs whole language debate, and aligning genre-based literacy
teaching and its critique of whole language with phonics and the old and
new right. Cope & Kalantzis 1993 The Powers of Literacy, London: Falmer
and Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press provides a good introduction
to this different politics.
Jim Martin