Ilda,
I would have to agree with you. I have my share of personal experience and
struggles with exactly the students you share about. My daughter has been
through several individualized programs including reading recovery, and the
more title phonics based. I struggle personally with the
developmentalist-readiness approach on one hand and the more explicit
instruction on the other. Before she entered the life stage of public
education, while not reading, did enjoy books and being read to. Now, it
is a constant struggle to get her to read. She completed all the remedial
programs successfully and did fine while she was in the garden as Mike
might say, but upon leaving that garden all strategies, skills were lost
(transfer). My fear with many remedial programs is the assumption they
can't hurt and my experience is they can. If I remember correctly the
reading program discussed in Cultural Psychology were students with similar
experiences in which you mentioned. What I liked about the program was
cognition was not solely put on the shoulder of one particular child.
For me, its kind cylical, as in, in order to learn the rules the text has
to have meaning, but the text is not meaningful if you don't know the
rules. There are children like my daughter in which "schemes" rules,
patterns etc are not naturally constructed. It is important to explicitly
draw out these connection within the context of its use. But the
explicitness is not normally done is this way, some states its illegal,
rather there is an emphasis on these strategies, skills etc. out of the
context of its use. One SPED teacher was puzzled because after several
sessions of drill and skill (words in isolation) those strategies did not
transfer to the act of reading.
I will probally regret saying this but I am seriously beginning to question
the privledged position that reading has in our schools. Why is reading a
book a more legitimate way of getting information than a T.V. show (X-Files
is very educational)? I do not remember reading a book (after public
education) of any sort unitil my belated college career. I always used to
joke in reference to a book, I'll wait til the movie comes out. Don't get
me wrong I think reading is important, but do we all need to be super human
readers? I am reminded of one of Ken's example in On Reading, correct me if
I'm wrong, in which a gifted school had outside peoples assess students and
a large portion of the school population was labled as deficient.
I very much agree with you in reference to an individualized educational
plan, if it truely individualized. Too often in my experience the
individualized instruction tends to be deficit driven rather than creating
a methodology and context in which reading can be successful. Fitting a
child into a theory rather than constructing a theory that fits the child.
In a special education class I took awhile back one of the biggest
complaints was lack of reading materials for children struggleing with
reading. The books that were readable were preschool age or very dry, and
the ones that sparked the children's interests were beyond their zone.
While student teaching I brought in many of my own books for children
because of the lack of appropriate books in the library. One reason for
this problem is developmentalism in which certain content is only
appropriate at certain age ranges and all children of a given age should be
reading at the same level.
Nate