Re: phonics politics

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Wed, 08 May 96 13:38:09 EDT

I'm struck in Jim Martin's brief account of the different political
scene regarding literacy pedagogy in Australia (with which I have
some familiarity) with the significant role of _third parties_ in
politics.

A lot of the worst of demagogic and empty-symbol politics (create
an emotional symbol to argue over and neglect substantive issues)
arises in situations of socio-political _polarization_, where there
are only two competing views, and the whole political universe
gets aligned along a single axis, reducing the dimensionality of
its complexity from very high (too high for humans to cope with)
to too low (a single polar axis). Third parties mess up this neat
playpen and expose complexities underlying the oversimplifications
of ideological polarizations.

There is something fundamentally destabilizing to our habits/needs
for simplification of having three, rather than two (or four, I
think) basic viewpoints set off against one another. Dichotomies
are dangerous theoretical tools, as any experienced theorist will
tell you, while trichotomies, even if still susceptible of ossification,
give a lot more resource in ratio to risk (Peirceans of course will
agree!).

Phonics, Whole Language, and Genre pedagogies make a nice triad
for descriptive purposes. Maybe a better one for theoretical
purposes might be: Forms-and-rules-as-tools, Contexts-and-functions-
for-meanings, and Communities-and-values-for-critique. Culture,
sociology, and history would be most explicit in the third; the
second would be more local and specific to the here and now
purposes and contexts of the activity; and the first would be
looking for the most transportable and generalizable tools. My
triad and the literacy triad, of course, do not neatly map
onto one another, and this affords us quite a lot of options for
thinking about them all.

In the Australian context various forms
of Critical Literacy are proposing some bridges between Genre
and Whole Language, while critiqueing them both from a more
historical-sociological perspective. Jim alluded to this in his
meta-comments on the social positioning of the agents who support
the various pedagogies, and on the historical changes in the
economy of work; but most of this is still restricted to
discourse _about_ literacy pedagogy, rather than being in any
useful way as yet included _in_ a pedagogy.

Teachers have usually found, so they and a fair bit of the
literature tells me, that what works best for different classes
of students is some, often different, mixes and combinations
of pedagogic practices. Whole Language in its most sophisticated
forms has tried to be a philosophy rather than a recipe (and their
are philosophies to go with each of the other views as well, some
of them fairly intelligent ones), providing a rationale rather
than a fixed set of practices. Ken Goodman said here recently that
there is no prohibition of a little phonics when needed in W-L,
so long as it does not dominate the curriculum to the exclusion
of other educationally important goals (e.g. attitudes to reading
outside school). I have talked with teachers who often tell me
that some groups of students seem to benefit from a substantial
dose of phonics at particular stages of their literacy development,
but that they would not want to give up the many good ideas of
whole language just because of that need (which they meet with
phonics or a mixed approach).

Polarizations lead to a discourse of right and wrong, better and
worse. The complexity of lived reality cannot thrive if we have
only polar discourses to guide our practice. Maybe we should talk
less about _which_ method is better, and do more to open up larger
spaces of third and fourth options (and the combinations and
reconceptualizations a third induces in a first and second, etc.).
In such larger spaces teachers will need 'navigation aids' to
link theories to practice. They will need philosophies rather than
recipes, and their philosophies will probably need to be pragmatic,
eclectic, and fluid; sustained and informed by experience and by
the sorts of individualities and specificities that arise in the
complexity of real lived interactions with unique human learners
in unique communities and moments of history, which no philosophical
or theoretical approach can do more than caricature.

Two theories, bad; three theories, good. But no theories worth
fighting over to the exclusion of concern with the particular. JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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