Yes, once one learns to read for meaning in Dewey's sense, and mine,
marvelous things may result.
The acquisition of reading, however, is not governed by phylogenetic
constraints in the same way that the acquisition of oral/sign language
is. It is a cultural-historically developed mode of mediated meaning
making. With few exceptions, it requires literate others to arrange
for it to happen.
Consequently, getting there through the meat grinder of modern
schooling, is a continuing
issue. As is the notion of the violence of literacy.
mike
(The Dickens freak)
On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 4:51 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
Thank you Michael! It is always such a wonderful thing when
someone reveals to you what was before your eyes but you didn't
see! I had to put down a novel to read your message. I think I
take "the world" to be inclusive of imaginative world evoked by a
text, and suddenly, yes, I can see that youngsters generally read
lots of fiction and if they enjoy it, that is a royal road to
becoming a reader - even though, in a sense, the printed words
disappear under their gaze as they evoke that imaginary world. I
also think the social motivations are broadly covered by my
initial very 'utilitarian' view of the object of reading. But what
you describe as "the intellectual pleasure of figuring something
out," which I guess is one of the things that used to motivate me
at school with maths, and that is something else! Thank you. The
world is always richer than what one at first thought, isn't it?
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
MICHAEL W SMITH wrote:
A colleague and I just completed a study of the nature and
variety of pleasure adolescents take from their out-of-school
reading that draws on Dewey’s delineation of four kinds of
educative interest in /Interest and Effort in Education. /One
kind of pleasure we identified is what we call work pleasure
in which readers use a text as a tool to accomplish some other
end. That’s the kind of pleasure that Andy seems to be talking
about when he writes about someone’s struggling to read a
philosophical text to get something out of it that could then
be usefully employed in some other context. But there are
other kinds of pleasure. As Dewey explains “There are cases
where action is direct and immediate. It puts itself forth
with no thought of anything beyond. It satisfies in and of
itself. The end is the present activity, and so there is no
gap in the mind between means and end. All play is of this
immediate character.” Readers experience the pleasure of play
when they read narratives to immerse themselves in a story
world. What matters to them is the pleasure they get from
living through the experiences of characters in the here and
now not what they can accomplish as a consequence of their
reading at some future time. Another kind of pleasure is
intellectual pleasure. Dewey explains that “instead of
thinking things out and discovering them for the sake of the
successful achievement of an activity (work pleasure),” we may
institute an activity for the intellectual pleasure of
figuring something out. An example would be reading to
unravel the complexities of poem as an end in itself. Finally
there are social pleasures in reading. People read to
affiliate with others. That seems to me to be a kind of
pleasure people on this listserv take. Or people read to mark
their place in the world. They do a kind of identity work by
using their reading to assert their difference from others.
One of the informants in our study avoided reading the books
that were most popular among her friends and instead read what
she called dark fiction. That reading was an important part of
how she understood herself. As she said “I’m weird in the way
that [I don't have] inhibitions like most people. I can read
dark fiction and not be disturbed by it.” I’d argue that
teachers are most likely to foster motivation to read by
creating contexts in which students can experience all four
kinds of pleasure.
On Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 4:43 AM, rjsp2
<r.j.s.parsons@open.ac.uk <mailto:r.j.s.parsons@open.ac.uk>
<mailto:r.j.s.parsons@open.ac.uk
<mailto:r.j.s.parsons@open.ac.uk>>> wrote:
The first thing I thought on reading "assistance is given
to kids to
read in order to find out something they want to know
about the world"
was "This is basic Freire". Adult literacy had the same
problem of
meaningless texts till Freire came along and started
teaching them
about
things that mattered to them. It also made me reflect on
the idea of
motive, whihc has for a long time been a question I have been
intending
to examine "when I have time". When I met the activity
triangle,
one of
the most obvious issues about it was that it contains no
separate
place
for motive. After a while that seemed logical because the
motive
was in
the object, and maybe one of our difficulties is that we
separate
motive
out from object in order to understand it better, and then
forget
to put
it back in again.
Children are just like people, they do need a reason to do
things.
I've
always been puzzled by the idea of andragogy, the
suggestion that
adults
learn differently from children. Proponents usually list
several
reasons
which usually make no sense to me. One of the reasons
usually given is
that adults need to know why they are doing something, the
unspoken
contrast being presumably that children happily do what
they're told.
The kind of research you refer to here, Andy, suggests that
children do
need to know why they are doing something, but lack the
power to
say so.
Hence, I think, a lot of the problems evident in our UK
schooling
system
(lots of great schools, in my opinion, dreadful
educational policies
dictate that children are machined through exams in order
to maintain
the school's place in the league table. So there is a
reason why the
children do what they do, it is just not relevant to the
child.)
Rob
On 28/08/2013 08:27, Andy Blunden wrote:
Re: Peg Griffin -
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Mail/xmcamail.2011_05.dir/msg00530.html
and Peg and Mike et al:
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/People/NEWTECHN.pdf
The first article sets up a scenario in 5thD where kids
"sneak" a look
at piece of writing in order to find an answer to a
current
affairs
question. As opposed to telling the kids to read a
text and
then (for
example) testing them on it.
The second talks about "reading for meaning" where
assistance
is given
to kids to read in order to find out something they
want to
know about
the world. As opposed to decoding "Jack and Jill" stories
containing
nothing of interest to them at all (and actually
humiliating).
I am trying to get my head around the issue of the
motivation
which
the teachers are trying to engender in the child which
facilitates
learning to read.
Following A N Leontyev, Peg talks about the "merely
understood" motive
for the child "to be a productive, informed, literate
citizen"
which
is what the education system is supposed to be doing.
Peg says
this
motive was "in the social interactions and ready to
replace the
'really effective' motives that got the kid to come
to/put up
with our
reading group." ... *in the social interactions*!
Generally speaking I think there is no doubt that the
distinction
between "really effective" and "merely understood"
motives is
valid,
and that in general children who have difficulty in
reading,
read only
for "effective" but "external" motives which do not
succeed in
them
learning to read effectively. Further, the task of the
teacher
may be
or may be supposed to be to get the child to learn to
read so
as "to
be a productive, informed, literate citizen." This
objective is
somewhere in the complex of motives underlying a teacher's
motives,
certainly in 5thD, but I suspect often a "merely
understood"
motive
for many teachers, alongside earning a wage for their
own family,
having a quiet day and the kids getting good test
scores, etc.
But I question whether it is *ever* the child's motive
"to be a
productive, informed, literate citizen." This may be
an "internal
reward" for learning to read, but not for learning to
read any
particular text or even a particular type of text.
Would this explanation make sense: Learning to read is
like
happiness.
It does not generally arise through being the
motivation of the
activity which produces it. People learn to read as a
byproduct of
struggling to get something they want out of
particular texts. And
this applies to adults as much as children. I think
people can
only
learn to read philosophy if they are struggling to get
something out
of a book on philosophy (other than pass the exam or
acquire
an air of
erudition). In Peg's email message we learn that the kids
jumped on
the newspaper article to extract information they
wanted in
(what they
took to be) /another/ task. In the QAR story, adults
mediate kids'
relation to a text which is in turn mediating their
real and
meaningful relation to the world. (I think if a kid is
strongly enough
motivated to pass a reading test, and assisted, they
will usually
manage to learn to read, but it is for those for whom
this doesn't
work that the issue arises, isn't it?)
But in general I think it is neither necessary nor
likely that
a child
has their eye on becoming a literate citizen when they
struggle with a
text and learn to read in the process. Isn't it always
more
proximate
motives? The "internal" reward in reading a particular
text is the
particular content of that text, not actually anything
to do with
books, or texts, or reading or citizenship.
I know there are dozens of experts in literacy
education out
there, so
please help me.
Andy
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