Potty Mouth

Hmmm,the ‘Literacy Wars‘.

Since the eighteenth century there has been a conversation about the best way to teach reading. Perception and meaning-making is the long standing wisdom. Code making and atomising words is the other side of the reading wars coin. Brian Cambourne points out in his blog post, some of the history and hysteria surrounding the issues.

Let’s have a quiet word on the meaning of ‘words’. The agentive status of ‘words’ is a way of thinking about how words come to have meaning. Meaning inputed by those encoding a ‘word’ and meaning afforded by those attuned to those ‘words’. Okay – so that was not perspicuous at all. Let’s put it this way. There is little disagreement that the whole point of learning to read is to lift off meaning from the written text. It can be argued that authentic human agency is amplified through the skilful use of words.

Words, in this sense, bundle up disparate affordances and are signifiers. The ecology of a word is its etymology, morphology and phonology. The agency of a word is caught up in the contested space between the signifier and the perceiver. This space is contested because the perceiver must be or be able to be attuned to the intent of the signifier. For example:

A recent hot and blustery day found me at Federation Square in Melbourne Australia. Our leisurely summer lunch meandered its way into a late afternoon tea. I needed to find a toilet fast!

My eyes were darting about for one word. “MALE”. I knew that if I found that sign – I could take exactly the type of action that a pint of crisp apple cider demanded. Quickly glancing down the overly bright corridor I thought I’d found what I was looking for. Instead my eyes landed on the slightly confused and somewhat wrinkled face of an elderly man in search of the same sign.

The object of his confusion was the subject of his gaze. The sign. It didn’t say “MALE”. It was more nuanced and thoughtful so as to be authentically inclusive. It was in fact – a gender neutral toilet sign. It was directly opposite the “FEMALE” signposted toilets.

As it turns out, every house I’ve ever been in has a gender neutral toilet. I’ve never had to interpret a symbol or icon or an index to work out who can and can’t use it. The rules are implicit. Tumble out into the public sphere however, and there are all kinds of rules and regulations for the use and non use of public toilets.

The mute Gender Neutral toilet sign, in silence on the Federation Square wall was important. Whoever decided to put it there, and whoever designed the sign and whoever approved and paid for the sign – all of these people were using a worldwide cultural convention of public toilet signs to give people the power to take action. This stuffy afternoon at Federation Square – this intentional break from expected practice was a welcome relief. For some men, however, it constrained their bladders!

Those attuned to the affordances of gender neutral toilet sign iconography could take urgent action. For those not tuned into what the symbol meant, it involved an unbundling of the context, decoding other symbols, seeking reassurances and abducting a best guess before risking action. We call this learning.

Given the lack of puddles on the floor – I expect that most men learned what the symbol meant and which toilet to use and which one to avoid loitering around.

There are some parallels here with the ‘reading’ or ‘literacy’ wars.

Firstly – meaning making is not merely the product of attunement to affordances. Meaning is the sticky residue of bundled contexts, the locus of enmeshment between signifier and perceiver. Meaning involves people – not merely a change in brain state.

So for reading instruction, what comes first? Is it the whole word, broken into constituent graphemes and phonemes – or the parts first – which make the sum greater than its whole? In other words – is it the ‘code’ based pedagogy of part-to-whole word approach the correct way. Or is it the whole-to-part ‘meaning’ based methodology correct?

Five from Five website tells us that: “We get to meaning via our understanding of phonemes, hence phonemic awareness and phonic skills are essential foundational skills for reading.”

This claim that phonemic awareness alone, exclusively affords meaning seems counter intuitive. Clearly, people did learn to read using the so called ‘Three Cueing System’. Over human history, prelinguistic, non linguistic, dyslexic, non middle-class non-western cultures can recognise more than one path to meaning making that excludes phonemic awareness and skills. Whatever it is that curates our ‘ways-of-being’ (such as public toilet use) these ontological affordances residing in a language hold the key to the processes of collaboratively reflexive meaning making. This ontological turn in language is where the agency of the ‘word’ quietly abides.

The author then quotes David Kilpatrick: ‘Skilled word reading does not require context.’

Having conducted the BURT Word tests for many years I can attest that skilled word reading does not require context. Nor does it require meaning. Words, devoid of their enmeshed and bundled toilet doors are pointless – they have no agency – no purpose.

My suspicion and ongoing thinking will dance with the idea that this is really two separate categories.

Firstly – attunement . Attunement to the building blocks of word structure.

Secondly, the affordances of agentive words.

In terms of the ‘Big Five‘ of reading instruction it might look this way:

Phonics Awareness: Attunement to the parts of spoken words

Phonics Instruction: Attunement to the connection between parts of spoken words and parts of written words.

Vocabulary: Attunement to the orthography of words. Affordances with the use of words.

Comprehension: Attunement to the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of words. Affordances of ‘agentive words’.

Structured Literacy Inquiry may be a useful term to describe a pedagogical approach that can straddle the complex demands of understanding the agentive status of ‘words’.

I’ve been typing this for hours – and now I’m busting! A final thought. How can teachers best curate a learning ecology that is likely to draw students into doing the work of attunement and apprehend affordances such that they have the power to shape their world through the skilful use of language?

Hmmm, perhaps is gamification one way forward?

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