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Reading Education: from grade school through college It has always been the sad refrain of educators around the world that the quality of education has plummeted over the generations. Of such note is the work of Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster, 1987). The work of Bloom can be gleaned at once to be the classic conservative lament; and his notion of education is more lamentably so, for he has not become cognizant of the ongoing discussions of various class and ethnic groups that has come to animate the spirit of education itself. Five years after the publication of Allan Blooms book, it is no longer simply old educators who shared the old refrain. President George Bush launched the No Child Left Behind Act (NLCB) in 2002. With its introduction, the level of reading and comprehension skills of students was put under scrutiny, among other areas.
The main thrust of the NCLB is to incorporate the needs of children with language-learning disabilities and children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds into the design of classroom practices (Silliman, 2004). Among the educators that are in the forefront of this ongoing revolutionizing of the reading classroom is Duke K. Nell. In 2004, Nell gave a talk on the use of multiple classroom strategies that would address the needs of students with language-learning disabilities. Nell asserts that reading difficulties are not simple issues of word recognition and decoding. She points to other problems that might be factors in a childs language-learning skills such as difficulties with fluency, speech and language impairments, dialect differences, the Limited Language Proficiency, difficulties with specific genres of the written word, poor short-term memory, lack / poor use of strategies, difficulties related to prior knowledge, failure to apply relevant information, application of irrelevant prior knowledge, lack of reading engagement and other factors such as problems with eye-movement and other self-regulatory or meta cognitive issues.
She is also alerting educators to the existence of language-learning problems such as hypermedia (Nell, 2004). Before presenting the strategies Nell recommends in the classroom, I would like to point the reader to a theoretical discussion by Judith Felson Duchan (2004) in her essay Intervention, Instruction and Support Frames in order to illuminate the clarity and beauty of Nell's design. Among the changes that have swept the educational sector in the last few years and especially since the introduction of the NCLB is the entry of medical discourse into the modalities of the contemporary teacher. In this essay, Duchan delineates the different modalities of teaching practices that must be present in order to ensure the effectiveness of the classroom. The first of the three modalities, Intervention, she says, best fits a medical model of service provision. Intervention is the factoring-in of the specific diagnosis of a child into the way that particular must be approached.
This means working along with the physicians and other practitioners in the field of special education. The second term, Instruction, might be described as the way in which most classrooms today and yesterday have been facilitated by the teacher. The third one, the Support Frame, is one that does not cater exclusively to ordinary children or children with special needs. The Support Frame is one that maybe characterized as a personalized modality of teaching.
It is the mode of tuning-in to the special needs or interest of the child. Duchan explains the support frame by elucidating the control with which children are given when it comes to their learning tasks. Drawing on the work of Mark Fey (1986), she groups teaching practices into three: the intrusive, the naturalistic and the hybrid. The intrusive and the naturalistic might be seen as two ends of the continuum of Naturalness (Fey) with the intrusive characterized by a total control of the educational situation and the naturalistic as the total freedom of the child in his / her learning. The hybrid is in the middle of this continuum. Duchan explains the hybrid as the approach the adult provides the child with many models of a targeted structure conforming the adult specifications and, at the same time, follows the childs lead in the carrying-out of any activity. (2004, p. 74) Meanwhile, Nell's design is a dynamic model that would rest on the use of the three modalities introduced by Duchan.
One of the things that Nell emphasizes is the assessment and intervention in the areas that can cause reading comprehension difficulties. This would entail becoming familiar with the specific condition of a child and making adjustments to this childs needs. Although she made no further reference on how to make such adjustments, it is implicit that when she introduces her strategies into the class they are in the form of activities that might be termed hybrid, activities that almost has the feel of playing. Among the strategies that she mentioned in the book is ambiguity training. She mentions at this point that language intervention is normally the purview of speech and language pathologists but intervention may occur at many levels, including the phoneme, word, sentence, and extended text level. It might be safe to infer that when she says she is making an intervention, it is intervention that is aimed not only to a particular child but to the whole class.
What makes her design beautiful is that although it is conscious of the particular needs of each child, she presents the intervention in such a way that she can level the classroom, make an activity interesting for each child while keeping an eye on those that might need further help. Mike Rose in his autobiography describes the spirit of such a classroom in his book Lives on the Boundary. Mike Rose says of his teacher: Jack Mcfarland established a literacy cuban invited me invited all of us join. (Mike Rose, quoted from The Prentice Hall Guide for College Writers, 4 th ed. , 1998) In this sense, learning may be called an act of invitation. However, unlike Mike Rose, most student who gained the elementary uses of language will continue to have problems with writing as the essay Student Writing in Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Approach attests. In this essay, Mary Lea and Brian Street collaborate to address the problems around the writing of academic paper in college with a special emphasis on the dynamics between student and teacher.
They zeroed-in on the practice of making grammatical corrections on students paper or of making marginal notes that seems haphazard. They are also factoring-in the diversity of knowledge / courses that student writers must familiarize themselves with during the course of their college life. Their major assertion is that failure in academic writing is not always a failure in terms of grammar and organization of ideas. It is rather, a problem of juggling various language-games and deploying them in the appropriate subject areas. However, far from clarifying the problem at the level of discourse Lea and Street seems bent on relaxing the rules of grammar and composition. In a turn that we have come to associate with the movement of multi-cultural ism, Lea and Street are asserting that papers should receive adequate feedback.
What is striking in their approach to student writing is their questioning of the dynamic between students and teachers when it comes to writing. In this sense, even at the tertiary level, students must have a sense of the Support Frame guiding the teacher-student relation. Implicitly, they are asserting that keeping the feedback to a minimum of notes on grammar could very well jeopardize the socialization of individuals into the field. In a certain sense, the bigger question is not on the attitude of professors toward the written work but their attitude toward their students, toward their work primarily as teachers. It is always a bitter thing to note that even though most professors are the best in their field, they lack the teaching skills in transmitting their storehouse of knowledge which leads academics like Carol Mullen to call for more intense mentoring to graduate students. It is safe to conclude then that what the classroom (from pre-school to graduate school) really needs are teachers who can work with the various modalities as outlined by Fey. (Street and Lea, 1998) References Lea, Mary, R.
Street, Brian V. (1998). Student Writing in Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Approach, Studies in Higher Education, June Vol. 23 Issue 2 Mullen, C. (2001). The Need for a Curricular Writing Model for Graduate Students. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 25 (1) (abstract) Duke, Nell K. (2004). Strategies for Addressing Comprehension Difficulties: A Multimedia Presentation from Reading Research.
com Duchan, Judith Felson. (2004) Intervention, Instruction and Support Frames in Frame Work in Language and Literacy: How Theory Informs Practice. Guilford Publications. Silliman, Elaine R. (2004). Collaboration for Language and Literacy Learning: Three Challenges in Language and Literacy Learning in Schools, Silliman Elaine R. and Wilkinson, Louise C.
Guildford Publications. Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary quoted in The Prentice-Hall Guide for College Writers, Fourth Edition. (1998)
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Research essay sample on Reading Education From Grade School Through College
