Making literacy policy and practice with a difference.

Making literacy policy and practice with a difference. Policy matters My talk today is about educational policy and, more specifically,literacy in education policy in Queensland and Australia. Typically, ineducational taxonomies and cycles of research and development we get topolicy last, as the 'application' or the consequence ofsomething we know or have learned interpretively or empirically. Formany educators policy is treated as a necessary evil but not somethingthat anybody would ever profess doing. Everybody loves to hate policyand nobody really wants to do it, but everybody loves to hate you whenyou're doing policy. But policy matters--and what policy enables and disenables iscrucial to our work as teachers and administrators, teacher educatorsand researchers. The time that I spent working for the QueenslandGovernment in 1999-2000 gave me a better understanding of what it isthat people try to do when they make policy. To take a metaphor from theliterature on globalisation, policy is about constructing andregulating, critiquing and engaging the flows of fiscal and materialresources, flows of human bodies, and flows of discourse fromgovernments and central offices out into schools into staffrooms andclassrooms, into communities and peoples' lives and, indeed, backagain. All this occurs in some kind of chaotic loop--although we act asif there is intention, dominant ideology The dominant ideology, in Marxist or marxian theory, is the set of common values and beliefs shared by most people in a given society, framing how the majority think about a range of topics, The dominant ideology is understood by Marxism to reflect, or serve, the interests of the , order and plan to what sooften involves local uptakes, accidents of discourse, idiosyncratic id��i��o��syn��cra��sy?n. pl. id��i��o��syn��cra��sies1. A structural or behavioral characteristic peculiar to an individual or group.2. A physiological or temperamental peculiarity.3. material and human responses. Teachers are artists at resisting, undermining and ignoring policy.For their part, many policy makers know that teachers ignore centraloffice, disregard curriculum reforms, and devote substantial work togetting around policy. As for academics, we too earn our keep throughthe intellectual work of critiquing policy and policy makers. The utterfreedom of the academy to critique government, to critique policy, todeconstruct de��con��struct?tr.v. de��con��struct��ed, de��con��struct��ing, de��con��structs1. To break down into components; dismantle.2. is important not just to the sustainability of educationaltheory but to the task of continually remaking and transforming everydaypractice. (1) But when we are actually given the keys to the car andasked to drive, the result is utterly predictable: fear and panic. This was my experience three years ago when Terry Moran Terry Moran (born December 9, 1960 in Chicago, Illinois) is the co-anchor of Nightline. He had been ABC News' chief White House correspondent from September 1999 to November 2005. He often anchors World News, Nightline, and other ABC News broadcasts. , thenDirector--General of Education in Queensland said something to thiseffect: 'Well, you and your colleagues in professionalorganisations and universities have been telling us what we've donewrong for several years. What would you do instead?' Today I wantto describe what I and many colleagues (teachers, academics andbureaucrats) have tried to do in Queensland over the past four years,and discuss three aspects of that work. These are: the New Basicstechnical paper (Luke et al., 2000); the work I did with Peter Freebodyand Ray Land entitled Literate Futures (Luke, Freebody & Land,2001); and The Queensland School Longitudinal Restructuring Study(Lingard et al., 2002). These texts are policy texts and discourses notwithout flaws and problems, ruptures and contradictions, speculationsand risks. But they are crucial moments in an ongoing attempt inAustralia to make and think policy differently. Over the last few years I and many other literacy educators,researchers and teacher educators have had ample opportunities to takeAustralian literacy education into international forums. It is importantto acknowledge that we have achieved a great deal. We lead the world inapproaches to teaching writing and writing curriculum. We lead in theteaching of critical literacy Critical literacy is an instructional approach that advocates the adoption of critical perspectives toward text. Critical literacy encourages readers to actively analyze texts and it offers strategies for uncovering underlying messages. , in the development of linguisticmetalanguages, and in our capacity to talk about language and text. Wesurvived the 1980s and 1990s without ripping ourselves to pieces overreading wars. We have maintained a consistent commitment as a professionto social justice, even at those times when some governments and stateshave not. Australian literacy educators have remained staunchlycommitted to literacy as a powerful force for equity and a powerfulforce for redistributive social justice. We have reached another interesting historical moment: the junctureof taking leadership again in the development of digital literacies andmultiliteracies. These are fields, disciplines and discourses information, where classroom teachers and seven- and eight-year-olds knowmore than many researchers and teacher educators, academics andcurriculum developers. From Dewey to Freire to Garth Boomer Garth Boomer (died 1993) was an influential educationalist working in Australia. Since 1995 there has been a Garth Boomer Memorial Lecture in his honour. He was particularly influential in the teaching of English, and he was President of the Australian Association for the Teaching , we have advocated negotiatingthe curriculum. Of course, this was always pretty much a con, because wealways knew better than the kids, especially in relation to thetechnologies of print and spoken language. If Vygotsky's model oflearning applies, then we must by definition have mastery (and advancedand specialised epistemic ep��i��ste��mic?adj.Of, relating to, or involving knowledge; cognitive.[From Greek epistm authority) to teach, to profess, to induct in��ductv.To produce an electric current or a magnetic charge by induction. youth into specialised cultural technologies and artefacts. But we areat a moment where the kids know more about the technologies than wedo--where their mastery of practices and, indeed, mastery of new formsof reason, bypasses ours. Despite the gains we have made in the last ten years, somesubstantially new challenges have been laid on the table. But thechallenges are not the challenges of falling test scores, they are notthe challenges of reading wars, and they are not, nor should they be,challenges of spelling or numeracy numeracyMathematical literacy Neurology The ability to understand mathematical concepts, perform calculations and interpret and use statistical information. Cf Acalculia. benchmarks. It is quite remarkablethat, given the powerful issues of cultural and economic change andconflict that have been put on the table for us, the US continues to bemired in an educational debate that focuses on phonics. These areimportant issues, but they should not be the centre of our debates.Those are the persisting challenges of the 1980s or maybe the challengesof the 1970s or, as the late Jeanne Chall (1996) of Harvard University Harvard University,mainly at Cambridge, Mass., including Harvard College, the oldest American college.Harvard CollegeHarvard College, originally for men, was founded in 1636 with a grant from the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. pointed out in her prototypical description of the great debate, maybeeven of the 1950s. But they are not the challenges of New Times. If we play the game of what in the United States United States,officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. has come to becalled 'evidence-based' policy and 'evidence-based'decisions about classroom practice (for critical commentaries, seeCunningham, 2000; Garan, 2001; Coles, 2000; Luke, 2003; Stevens, inpress), I want to outline and describe Australian data that governmentsdo not often share (one exception being the Education 2010documentation, available at the Education Queensland website). This paints a very different picture from the naive view that ourprincipal problem as literacy educators and our principal challenge aspolicy-makers is one of eight-year-olds struggling with decoding, thenational policy obsession in the US. The challenges are those of newidentities, of new economies, of very tenacious poverty taking hold inthis country in particular areas, of teachers and teacher educators asan age-bifurcated workforce. They are challenges of curriculum,epistemology epistemology(ĭpĭs'təmŏl`əjē)[Gr.,=knowledge or science], the branch of philosophy that is directed toward theories of the sources, nature, and limits of knowledge. Since the 17th cent. and knowledge, as much as they might be about skills andhuman capital per se (Luke, 2002a). The identity and generational issuesare not solely about our students. About half of the teaching workforceare thirty; half are in their fifties. Half of us remember ELIC ELIC English Language Institute/ChinaELIC Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran book)ELIC Extended Line Card Interface Controller andgenre wars; half of us entered the profession in the last decade. We are a workforce with an average age in the mid-forties,struggling to keep the car that has been bequeathed to us on the road.We are struggling to run education systems and teaching systems acrossthis country that are composites of curriculum and assessment policiesand practices patched together in a sometimes ad hoc For this purpose. Meaning "to this" in Latin, it refers to dealing with special situations as they occur rather than functions that are repeated on a regular basis. See ad hoc query and ad hoc mode. fashion over thepast 30 years. We are the 'cultural custodians' of a systemthat has in recent years lacked vision, and whose answers to these newchallenges of new identities and new cultures, new technologies and neweconomies are more tests, outcomes of different kinds and levels madly mad��ly?adv.1. In a crazy way; insanely.2. In a wild manner; frantically.3. In a foolish manner; rashly.madlyAdverb1. proliferating (what Viv White of the National Schools Network calls,'death by a thousand outcomes'), and an increased move towardsUS-style commodity based instruction. That is, the signs have been theresince the first critiques of 'technocratic education' by Apple(1978) and others twenty years TWENTY YEARS. The lapse of twenty years raises a presumption of certain facts, and after such a time, the party against whom the presumption has been raised, will be required to prove a negative to establish his rights. 2. ago--educational systems face a range ofnew social and cultural, material and empirical 'anomalies'and matters. Certainly these include the powerful changes outsideschools I have described here, but also in many sites we face veryconservative and immobile im��mo��bileadj.1. Immovable; fixed.2. Not moving; motionless.immo��bil bureaucracies and administrators, and schoolsand universities that tend towards inertia. These conditions requiretheory-busting, theory building and paradigm shift A dramatic change in methodology or practice. It often refers to a major change in thinking and planning, which ultimately changes the way projects are implemented. For example, accessing applications and data from the Web instead of from local servers is a paradigm shift. See paradigm. . Yet the response ofmany educational systems has been to move to forms of governance,management and ideology that have the effect of 'micronising'curriculum and teaching, and of deskilling Deskilling is the process by which skilled labor within an industry or economy is eliminated by the introduction of technologies operated by semiskilled or unskilled workers. teacher work. So let's look at a picture of responses of New Times. I willuse Queensland as an example because it is the context I know best. Thepicture is that of a very different set of crises than those that themedia and many state departments have promulgated. It is a verydifferent crisis than George W. Bush and state colleagues promulgated inthe United States through their 2000 federal educational policies. Butthis is one of the dilemmas of policy making: it's difficult to'broadcast' and explain complexity to a public that believesin league tables, to systems, to an increasingly heterogeneous bodypolitic BODY POLITIC, government, corporations. When applied to the government this phrase signifies the state. 2. As to the persons who compose the body politic, they take collectively the name, of people, or nation; and individually they are citizens, when considered , and it's even harder to have a dialogue about complexityand an uncertain future. New economies and new times David Barton For the United States Senator from Missouri, see David Barton (Missouri politician).David Barton (born 1954) is an author, self-taught historian and political activist. , Ros Ivanic and Mary Hamilton ''This is the page for the ballad "Mary Hamilton". For the serial bigamist, see Mary Hamilton (bigamist)"Mary Hamilton" (aka "The Four Marys") is a Sixteenth Century ballad that tells the story of Mary Hamilton, one of the "four Marys", all of whom were (2001, p. i) argue that'all literacy and literacies and literacy education are situated.All uses of written language can be seen as located in particular timesand places,' and can be linked to 'broader socialstructuring'. This has implications for teachers andadministrators. First and most obviously, it means that our teaching,our curriculum and assessment, is optimally constructed and implementedin relation to our understanding of the New Times and places wherelearners use and acquire literacy. Second, it means that theseinterventions are enabled and disenabled by the national, regional andlocal politics and economics of our school systems. How could you make astate or national literacy policy just on the basis of a debate overtest scores and methods, without an understanding of the changing places This article is about the thought experiment called "changing places". For the novel by David Lodge, see Changing Places. The changing places thought experiment was conceived of by Max Velmans, Professor of Psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of and contexts where people are using literacy for their and theircommunities' own cultural interests and capital gains, where peopleare being ripped off with and through literacy, where people areconstructing, hybridising and using traditional and emergent texts,where people are engaging with new technologies with mixes of print andnon-print and so forth? How could you drive a whole state policy simplyon the basis of some belief in a particular method or spreadsheets ofbenchmark test scores? To do so is utterly naive. Many of our international colleagues work in state, regional, anddistrict jurisdictions where high stakes High Stakes is a British sitcom starring Richard Wilson that aired in 2001. It was written by Tony Sarchet. The second series remains unaired after the first received a poor reception. testing and a search for asingle universal methodology become the principal policy approach. Thishas had real impacts on teachers' working conditions, careerpathways and, most importantly Adv. 1. most importantly - above and beyond all other consideration; "above all, you must be independent"above all, most especially , on their capacity to flexibly serve theneeds and interests of diverse students and communities. In some states,such an orientation has yielded short-term test score gains and assistedschools to focus and reorganise their pedagogy. In others it has led towidespread 'teaching to the test and a reduction in focus of othervalued curricular, social and cognitive outcomes' (InternationalReading Association Board of Directors', 1999, statement on largescale standardised testing, in the Journal of Adolescent and AdultLiteracy). I will return to both the IRA and the substantive points inthis piece later. For now note that the data in Queensland shows thatthe principle problem is not our delivery of basic skills, but the'dumbing down' of the primary and middle schooling curriculum(Lingard et al., 2002), and evidence of a classic 'Year 5slump' in overall achievement. Further, the evidence in places likeCalifornia is that the testing / basic skills orientation has in factexacerbated achievement slumps among minority and 'at risk'students in upper primary and secondary school (Calfee, 2003). The Queensland experience provides an important and, of course,situated story. The baseline findings of Literate Futures arestraightforward; literacy education in Queensland in primary andsecondary schools is far from a shining exemplar ex��em��plar?n.1. One that is worthy of imitation; a model. See Synonyms at ideal.2. One that is typical or representative; an example.3. An ideal that serves as a pattern; an archetype.4. with many parallelproblems, similar to situations in American, Canadian, New Zealand New Zealand(zē`lənd), island country (2005 est. pop. 4,035,000), 104,454 sq mi (270,534 sq km), in the S Pacific Ocean, over 1,000 mi (1,600 km) SE of Australia. The capital is Wellington; the largest city and leading port is Auckland. andUK schools. In fact, one of our key findings was that literacy educationhad been neglected in curriculum and systemic policy, which has focusedon issues of school-based management and accountability. This is ironic,given a decade of increasing pressure on accountability for studentoutcomes without a systematic focus on pedagogy and issues of teachingand learning. Our findings indicated that despite improving outcomes onstandardised achievement measures, Queensland schools also need arenewed programmatic pro��gram��mat��ic?adj.1. Of, relating to, or having a program.2. Following an overall plan or schedule: a step-by-step, programmatic approach to problem solving.3. focus and guidance on the teaching of reading,especially for children from indigenous, non-English speakingbackgrounds, minority and low socio-economic communities. We need a shared professional and pedagogic ped��a��gog��ic? also ped��a��gog��i��caladj.1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of pedagogy.2. Characterized by pedantic formality: a haughty, pedagogic manner. language for talkingabout and teaching reading--note I said 'shared language', notsingle method and definitely not single package or instructionalprocedure. In spite of the visible strengths that we have in Queenslandon genre-based teaching of writing, widespread work with aspects ofcritical literacy, our findings indicate that schools and systems needto systematically refocus Verb 1. refocus - focus once again; The physicist refocused the light beam"focus - cause to converge on or toward a central point; "Focus the light on this image"2. and reinvest in teacher professionaldevelopment, in coordinating and articulating powerful and effectiveschool planning and in developing organisational capacity andinfrastructure to support literacy education, in preparing teachers tobetter address emergent student needs with reading and spoken language,to develop expertise in multiliteracies, and, at the same time, tocritically deal with the pitches of pre-packaged curricular commodities. Given the seriousness of these challenges, our intent is to showthat there might be other ways of approaching the development ofstudents' and communities' literacy; the improvement ofclassroom literacy teaching and learning and the enhancement of literacyteachers' work on a state-wide scale. While not overestimating ourpreparedness for dealing with these issues as a field and as aprofession, nor underestimating school-level resistance to policy, whatwe want to propose is an alternative to the 'test andcompliance', 'discipline and punish' model of statepolicy. These are becoming the norms internationally as neoliberal ne��o��lib��er��al��ism?n.A political movement beginning in the 1960s that blends traditional liberal concerns for social justice with an emphasis on economic growth.ne policy, focusing on markets, on reductionist re��duc��tion��ism?n.An attempt or tendency to explain a complex set of facts, entities, phenomena, or structures by another, simpler set: "For the last 400 years science has advanced by reductionism ... analyses of institutionalperformance, and on 'steering from a distance' spread frompostindustrial post��in��dus��tri��al?adj.Of or relating to a period in the development of an economy or nation in which the relative importance of manufacturing lessens and that of services, information, and research grows.Adj. 1. countries to emergent economies (through, among otherthings, the 'structural adjustment policies' required for IMF IMFSee: International Monetary FundIMFSee International Monetary Fund (IMF). and Asia Development Bank funding and state bailouts) (Stiglitz, 2002).In doing so, what I want to propose today is a focus on communityanalysis, on whole school renewal and whole school planning, and onteacher professionalism and an intergenerational in��ter��gen��er��a��tion��al?adj.Being or occurring between generations: "These social-insurance programs are intergenerational and all change between the35-year-olds and the 55-year-olds (Luke, 2002b). We wanted to put together a literacy strategy that began with ananalysis of our student bodies and workforces, of our institutionalcapacity--in this analysis state test scores played a part, but not themajor part, in what amounted to a wholescale 'environmentalscan' of our system. We began with a view of the new population ofQueensland and the new economy of Queensland. I think you will findparallels in the other states. We found first of all that at any given moment roughly 20% of ourkids were living below our own government benchmarked poverty line. Thismeans that 20% of Queensland families are living and trying to raisekids on less than $23,000 a year. Persistent poverty remains a realproblem and a real issue. Yet this poverty is highly spatialised, unlikepoverty of the past; that is, it isn't evenly cut or distributed.It is located in rural areas and traditional Aboriginal communities, butalso in suburban-edged cities with emergent Anglo-Australian and migrantunder-classes that had struggled to adopt to the flows and'scapes' of globalised economies (Luke & Carrington,2002). Many of these areas have shifted their partisan politicalallegiances away from the traditional parties and towards One Nation andother alternatives. I will return to this issue of spatialised poverty when I discussour literacy test Literacy Test refers to the government practice of testing the literacy of potential citizens at the federal level, and potential voters at the state level. The federal government first employed literacy tests as part of the immigration process in 1917. results. We found a growing proportion of our kids(15-20%) to be first and second generation non-English speakingbackground and over 20,000 Indigenous kids, many of whose English is asecond dialect, or a foreign language. These are needs that were notbeing recognised by the Commonwealth or our system (Luke, Land, Christie& Kolatsis, 2002). We found that 26% of the economy in Queensland was based onmanufacturing; we remain an engine room of primary industry for theAustralian economy. But in the last decade, over half of Queenslandersworked in what we could term semiotic semiotic/se��mi��ot��ic/ (se?me-ot��ik)1. pertaining to signs or symptoms.2. pathognomonic. economies. That is, their capacityto deal with signs and symbols either as service workers or informationor finance sector workers was more important than their capacity to workwith raw materials. And the shift documented by all ABS and labour-forceplanning prognoses is simply this: that employment in Australia shows agradual but steady decline in jobs that require physical and manualdexterity and a persistent increase in jobs that require our capacity tosign, to code, to language, to text, to discourse. Hence, in the New Basics model, we focused on multiliteracies. Ourcapacity to represent ourselves, whether verbally, through drama,through the lost arts of rhetoric and forensics, through graphic andplastic design, on-line or through traditional print, becomes the coinof the realm in an economy that is based on semiosis Semiosis is any form of activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. The term was introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce to describe a process that interprets signs as referring to their objects, as described in his theory and information,inexorably supplanting an economy that is based on digging stuff out ofthe ground, moving it around and turning it into goods. So we found aQueensland economy that was changing, in which women were beingpositioned as low level service workers, where Indigenous and manymigrant people were working at the margins, where there was an emergenceof a white male underclass of long-term unemployed. I mention this inrelationship to the discussions of boys and literacy, because I thinkthat is probably the root cause of much of the problem: not just theintersections of poverty and gender, but also the degree to which theemergent economy may be leading to a 'regendering' ofdifferent kinds and levels of work. We found at the same time, as in many other states, that theoverall proportion of students retained in the state system wasdeclining. The state system had 73% of students, and this was droppingoff as the Commonwealth retipped the playing field of funding towardsprivate and independent schools. Gradually the upper middle class andthe middle class had begun to move their kids out of the state system.Looking across Australian states, retention rates which had peaked outin some states in the low seventies and sixties of Year 12 completionhad begun to drop off, so that we were twelfth among OECD OECD:see Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. countries interms of the percentage of kids who were completing Year 12 orequivalent (Luke, in press/a). These were not good signs. Clearly, state education faced problems of great complexity, depthand breadth. But it is not a matter of declining test scores. We arelooking at a composite of new educational anomalies that have emergedwith new economies, with new cultures, with the making of the newQueensland, and new Australia New Australia was a utopian socialist settlement in Paraguay founded by the Australian New Australian Movement. The colony was officially founded on 28 September 1893 as Colonia Nueva Australia and comprised 238 adults and children. . And our educational systems are'coping' by offering up with state of the art 1980s answersand interventions. But this is merely the visible surface of the iceberg. There aretwo further, more intriguing findings from our experience in Queensland.By now all states will have undertaken 'pathway' studies oftrying to track kids from Year 10 out in the workforce. And I cannottell you how complex the data is. What we found is that there has been'a delinearisation of life pathways from school into work forkids' (Luke & Luke, 2001). In another economy in another time we asked kids at Year 9 whetherthey were going to go into academics or vocational programs. We trackeda cohort as if they were going to go to become plumbers, get unionisedjobs and work for the council for thirty years. We tracked others as ifthey wanted to do medicine or science at University of Queensland The University of Queensland (UQ) is the longest-established university in the state of Queensland, Australia, a member of Australia's Group of Eight, and the Sandstone Universities. It is also a founding member of the international Universitas 21 organisation. orUniversity of Melbourne AsiaWeek is now discontinued. Comments:In 2006, Times Higher Education Supplement ranked the University of Melbourne 22nd in the world. Because of the drop in ranking, University of Melbourne is currently behind four Asian universities - Beijing University, or Tasmania. As parents and teachers, we knowthat kids in Years 9 or 10, when asked what they wanted to do with theirlives, always utter a kind of a half truth for the sake of the relativesand domestic peace. So few 14- and 15-year-olds can know what they wantto do with the rest of their lives--and counselling professionals whooften know more about personality assessment and learning style than achanging service and semiotic economy are hamstrung in their efforts tohelp. When we looked at the Queensland data showing where our 30,000 plusYear 12 students went, we found a very complex picture. We found firstof all that 40% plus of the university entries in Queensland werenon-school leavers. We found that kids were constructing new routes intoand out of work, education, unemployment: some who were dropping out ofschool at Year 10 might complete a Bachelor's degree a few yearslater, after re-entering through TAFE TAFE(in Australia) Technical and Further Education , taking any one of a number ofmore vocationally or professionally oriented Bachelor's degrees. Wefound also that 13% of University graduates returned to TAFE forspecialised training. We found also that there were over 10,000 subjectcombinations, that our vocational education enrolments were increasing,but our actual certificated attainment levels lagged far behind. Andperhaps most worrying, we had no systematic way of tracking these new'choice biographies', 'life trajectories' orwhatever we may wish to call the non-linear, risky pathways into and outof work, leisure, consumption, education that students were fashioning. Now, if any department of education in any OECD country placed thiscomplex, difficult and partial data on the table, it would probably getthem shaken out of office. I believe that the data is symptomatic of adeeper problem: we have a secondary school system which is trainingpeople for an economy that no longer exists. We have actually got a Year10, 11, 12 tracking system with huge money and personal investments incurriculum, in HSCs, in tests, in vocational education, in competencystatements, that is training people for a dual pathway economy thatexisted in 1985 and 1992, but is being increasingly variegated anddestabilised in the current de-unionised, out-sourced, sub-contracted,casualised economy. So, we are tracking people towards a post-war economic world when,in fact, life pathways have begun to shift and morph morph?1?n.An allomorph.[From morpheme.]morph?2?n. in profound waysthat we do not yet fully understand. And the imperatives for thatcliched cli��ch��dalso cliched ?adj.Having become stale or commonplace through overuse; hackneyed: "In the States, it might seem a little clich��d; in Paris, it seems fresh and original" term of 'life-long education' have become even moreurgent as executives have to be re-trained at forty; where the tradeswork by the council has been sub-contracted and out-sourced. In ourQueensland policy deliberations, Richard Smith of Central QueenslandUniversity Central Queensland University is an Australian public university based in Queensland. Its main campus in North Rockhampton Queensland, but it has operations throught Asia-Pacific. has suggested that we need to make a shift towardsreconceptualising the senior school as something less akin to astockyard stockyard1. public saleyard where livestock are sold, usually by auction.2. yards for working cattle or sheep on private property. with two gates, and more aptly as the London Underground The London Underground is an underground railway system - also known as a rapid transit system - that serves a large part of Greater London, United Kingdom and some neighbouring areas. It is the world's oldest underground system, and is one of the longest in terms of route length. , withmultiple entries, exits, recursive See recursion. recursive - recursion paths, alternative ways of getting tothe same place, multiple entry tickets, and so forth. People today mayhave to re-train, or re-enter TAFE or university at several juncturesduring their life. So there has been a delinearisation of adolescence, a materialeconomic reframing reframing (rē·frāˑ·ming),n the revisiting and reconstruction of a patient's view of an experience to imbue it with a different usually more positive meaning in the of the imperatives for lifelong learning Lifelong learning is the concept that "It's never too soon or too late for learning", a philosophy that has taken root in a whole host of different organisations. Lifelong learning is attitudinal; that one can and should be open to new ideas, decisions, skills or behaviors. , and aremaking of the parameters of home/school/work transition. And we, asgovernments, as educators, as researchers are struggling to come to newunderstandings required to build new narrative scenarios about whichkinds of education, of curriculum, of literacy might optimally preparepeople for these kinds of literate futures. We must do this throughpolicy that is developed and tested on the basis of'evidence'--but that evidence clearly must exceed basic skillstest scores and tell us about new conditions of work, of poverty andthese new life pathways. It must be rich, multidisciplinary,theoretically and empirically rigorous, critical and interpretive in themost thorough ways. You cannot have 'smart states' based onanachronistic a��nach��ro��nism?n.1. The representation of someone as existing or something as happening in other than chronological, proper, or historical order.2. and reductionist approaches to social analysis and policydevelopment. Now finally, if this has not indicated to you that the enormity ofthe picture and the task on the table, between 2005-2010 many of oursystems will have a 50% turnover of teachers, a seventy percent turnoverof principals and of senior bureaucrats and a 50-70% turnover of teachereducators and academics. We are preparing right now for the largestgenerational shift and change in the workforce in the history ofAustralian education. That is, we baby boomers who have tenure, who havecontrol over these systems, who hold positions of power in staffrooms,bureaucracies, professional organisations, unions and governments areoffering our farewells between 2005--2015. The resultant questions arethese: How do you mobilise an aging workforce for one furtherpedagogical ped��a��gog��ic? also ped��a��gog��i��caladj.1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of pedagogy.2. Characterized by pedantic formality: a haughty, pedagogic manner. hurrah; how do you generate an inter-generational exchange;and what kinds of systems, plans, strategies and precedents do we wantto hand over between 2005-2015? Nostalgia will not do--holding actions,are, of course, the safest but, in the medium and long term, riskyroutes. Now given this view--I would ask you to pause, take a breath andturn back to the agendas that have been put on the table: benchmarktesting, curriculum commodities and packages, endorsement of singlemethods, performance indicators and accountability systems, what iswrong with this picture? Here is a complex, new world that is upon us, ademand that we actually have the vision to engage in the national andtrans-national debate that we have not had, because we have been miredin a debate over private/public school funding, basic skills andstandardised testing. We need to have a debate about 2010, about 2015. We need to have adebate about new life skills and new life pathways. We need to look atour approaches to curriculum, look at our pedagogies, stop writing offNintendo kids as deficit and start examining the skills, competences andknowledges they do have. We need to be asking which blends of skills,new and old, might be necessary for new and blended cultures, for atrisk communities, for navigating new economies. We need to have thisdebate, even as our systems sit in holding patterns around 1980s and1990s landscapes of vocation, identity, learning. Literate futures Peter Freebody, Ray Land and I were commissioned for a four-monthprogram to develop a Queensland state literacy strategy: LiterateFutures. The debate around the US and UK policies aside, these thingsare part science, part public policy analysis, part community consensusbuilding, part public intellectual work and educational advocacy. Wereceived two thousand briefs. We visited schools and we had fourteenpublic meetings in which people were allowed to show up, get angry,throw darts, advocate, barrack BARRACK. By this term, as used in Pennsylvania, is understood an erection of upright posts supporting a sliding roof, usually of thatch. 5 Whart. R. 429. for a particular method, do whatever theyhad to do. And here is what we found in terms of the state-of-the-art ofliteracy teaching in Queensland. First of all we ran into few indications of any serious problemswith the teaching of writing--the quality of the teaching of writingseemed to be more or less satisfactory. While we were not satisfied withthe degree of expertise at using functional grammar, it was our viewthat the overall focus on genre, on a 'text in context' modelthat had been put in place in 1993, had been effective and was flexibleenough to deal with the emergence of new genres and new discourses. Theengagement with issues around critical literacy was still emergent andquite strong. We looked at our reading benchmark testing and you know how thatall works: a number of kids reach what in both measurement and domainvalidity terms is an arbitrarily constructed cut-off point and areadjudged proficient. Our data indicated to us that about 80% of our kidswere leaving Year 3 with basic functional coding and word attack skills.You could say, 'Oh, my God that's great!', or,'That's not great', and we can see the headlines splashedacross the local press. But recall that Queensland kids are six monthschronologically younger on average than kids in other states. NowFreebody and I discussed what an age adjustment might look like, becausewe know that six months of development means so much between thechronological ages of 3 and 8. This phenomenon of metalinguisticawareness in early reading happens overnight with some kids. So we couldargue something like the following: 'Yes, Queensland kids areyounger, but if we age adjusted it we would probably approach thestrongest state norms'. That would be hypothetical andtheoretically speculative--the adjustment cannot be done with anyaccuracy, particularly given that the high range of measurement error inmost state testing systems mitigates against the direct league tablecomparisons that have become popular with the press. But the single biggest indicator of who fell below that benchmarkwas location, what the social geographers now describe as'spatialised poverty'. Recall my earlier comments: almost afifth of Queensland families are living below the poverty line (yes,this is another hypothetical 'cut point' in data).Aboriginality factored in, non-English speaking background, and genderall factored in. But the single biggest determining influential factorappeared to be poverty. Now we can talk about the complex links between poverty, lowersocio-economic status and early literacy failure. This has been a themein the last hundred years of literacy education, from 19th centurybiological determinist and charity school arguments to the persistenceof linguistic and cultural deficit models. I don't want to getdrawn into debates over Einstein videotapes and the benefits of readingto your kids, or the latest tabloid claims on A Current Affair thatprenatal reading will improve early literacy. Nor brain research and thenew discourses of genetics and biological determinism Biological determinism, also called genetic determinism, is the hypothesis that biological factors such as an organism's individual genes (as opposed to social or environmental factors) completely determine how a system behaves or changes over time. (Luke & Luke,2001). I do want to argue here that the reading problem in this countryis, inter alia [Latin, Among other things.] A phrase used in Pleading to designate that a particular statute set out therein is only a part of the statute that is relevant to the facts of the lawsuit and not the entire statute. , the problem of teachers and schools struggling tocontend with the effects of poverty and its impact on kids who aresocio-economically at risk. It is not a methods problem, it is not aphonics problem; it is not any of these things per se. It is a matter ofus coming up with a common vocabulary and a set of shared strategies andapproaches that are appropriate and effective for communities, targetedat particular linguistic and cultural demographics, and built at thewhole school level that begin to turn around the most at risk kids. Andthere will be no one single method that will do this--rather arepertoire of approaches that range across and might include earlyintervention ear��ly interventionn. Abbr. EIA process of assessment and therapy provided to children, especially those younger than age 6, to facilitate normal cognitive and emotional development and to prevent developmental disability or delay. programs, Reading Recovery, ESL (1) An earlier family of client/server development tools for Windows and OS/2 from Ardent Software (formerly VMARK). It was originally developed by Easel Corporation, which was acquired by VMARK. and EFL EFL - Extended Fortran Language instruction,bilingual transitions, learning support and special educationinterventions, home/school community partnerships, and so forth. More onthe requisites for 'turning around' the medium to long termacademic achievement of the most at risk students momentarily, but fornow, let's stick with the Queensland situation. We found that 80-90% of the kids quite likely had reached somemodicum of functional decoding by the end of Year 3. Teachers alsoreported to us that there was a lack of shared vocabulary on reading,that the Year One teachers were struggling to tell the differencebetween an NESB NESB Non-English Speaking Background problem, an ADD problem, a speech pathology speech pathologyn.The science concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of functional and organic speech defects and disorders. Also called speech-language pathology. problem, ahearing problem, home/school socialisation transition issues, and soforth. Teachers did not have the diagnostic capacities to actually knowwhat they were looking at in many cases, as these kids entered Year 1and Year 2, in spite of their approach to the Queensland Diagnostic Net.This is not surprising: there had been no systematic professionaldevelopment on reading since the early 1990s for many teachers acrossour system, and over this period, not coincidentally co��in��ci��den��tal?adj.1. Occurring as or resulting from coincidence.2. Happening or existing at the same time.co��in , the mainstreamingof kids with special needs and the increase of the NESB studentpopulation has complicated teachers' classroom work. As a result, and facing anomalous and, for some, economically'brutal' new conditions in communities--teachers in schoolswere enticed by commodity purchase: buying into the assumption that ifthey adopted this approach or bought this package it would solve thesevery complex problems, often in the absence of evidence. So surveyingthe reading data, it was clear to us that there was no'crisis' in early literacy, in fact that we were quiteadequately serving the early literacy development of basic skills formost students--but that we as a system were struggling to address theneeds of the most socioeconomically 'at risk' students(finding the right vocabulary is problematic no matter which way weturn, socioeconomically 'at risk' seems marginally better than'disadvantaged'; the Commonwealth prefers 'targetgroups', a military metaphor at best). Also, we found, in Queensland at least, that systematic schoolprograms around literacy were very patchy. Victoria has very much ledthe way in this regard; like its UK and American counterparts it hadmandated a uniform set of materials. Yet the fact was that not all ofour schools have systematic school programs in literacy. The picturelooked something like this: we encountered programs that were extremelyunbalanced in their orientation. We went into one program that declareditself with full parental support a 'basics' school, committedto phonics, word study and quota spelling, and that was their totalemphasis for about the first three years of schooling. Their readingcomprehension scores at Year 6 were low and there were real problems inthe students' writing, but the kids could spell really well. Fed bya rhetoric around 'basic skills', the parents had supportedthis, and the principal had supported it, though some of the teacherswere disgruntled dis��grun��tle?tr.v. dis��grun��tled, dis��grun��tling, dis��grun��tlesTo make discontented.[dis- + gruntle, to grumble (from Middle English gruntelen; see . So, if we just took single benchmark tests on spellingthe school could show it was doing very well. On functional decodingthey looked pretty good, but on every other indicator and more complexindicators of academic achievement they had problems. This is the kindof program 'skew' that leads on from an over-reliance on testscores (and a lack of understanding of literacies, new and old). I feltthat the kids were going to leave primary school with poor content areasecondary reading comprehension and with a very limited command ofwritten genres. So that was an example of the kind of unbalanced programthat emerged through commodity purchase and single method approaches. Another issue was that at the same time we found a tremendousnumber of 'pull-out' programs that had proliferated throughvarious state and Commonwealth initiatives over the years. That is,schools did not really have an approach to literacy, but many hadlearning support programs, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Torres Strait(tŏr`ĭz, –rĭs), channel, c.95 mi (153 km) wide, between New Guinea and Cape York Peninsula of Australia. It connects the Arafura and Coral seas. Islanderprograms, perhaps they had an NESB person and a speech pathologist,Reading Recovery and LOTE n. 1. (Bot.) A large tree (Celtis australis), found in the south of Europe. It has a hard wood, and bears a cherrylike fruit. Called also nettle tree ltname>.1. (Zool.) The European burbot.v. i. 1. To lurk; to lie hid. . In most cases there was no total educationalplan, and in many instances there was limited coordination, and oftencompetition between the various players for resources. So a studentmight actually be diagnosed as NESB and special needs, but there mightbe minimal communication between the student's two specialistteachers. In fact a lot of this had come about because the programs hadbeen developed by different groups over the years with different tiedfunding sources. In a lot of schools, there was no coherent coordinationbetween these various 'pullout programs', and we had verylittle state-wide data about which combination of pull-out programswould have been appropriate for this community. We also found that'gains' achieved through pull-out programs were difficult formany schools to sustain when there had been little focus on the core ofmainstream pedagogy. The effect was that many schools had simply added on programs overthe years. Nobody pulled the money away so they kept doing it. Schoolshad never been asked to develop literacy programs that said, 'Wellhere's how Reading Recovery should fit with the NESBorientation', or, 'Here's how the special educationlearning support teaching work should fit with our basic approach toliteracy'. So, although there were some exemplary programs, wefound many school programs were all over the map. Our fourth observation was that literacy across the curriculum is afailed project in this country. In fourteen public meetings, we had onlyone secondary teacher who was not an English teacher show up. Wereceived one submission (from over 2,000 briefs) from a secondaryteacher who taught something other than English. This, in spite of allour efforts in the 1980s, with three level guides, the teaching ofreading comprehension across the curriculum, with the introduction ofgenres into science and history and so forth. In spite of the fact thatour huge curriculum documents always have sections that mandate literacyacross the curriculum. In other words Adv. 1. in other words - otherwise stated; "in other words, we are broke"put differently , it gets mentioned. What appearsto have happened is that the content area teachers have withdrawn fromseeing literacy as part of their core business. They too are sufferingunder work intensification, many of them are saying, 'You want usto roll out this new syllabus and, by the way, you want us to doliteracy too.' The effect is that the job of teaching reading andwriting has again fallen back to the English teacher in the secondaryschool, as opposed to being a shared responsibility. So we foundsecondary school after secondary school without a systematic literacyprogram, without systematic entry-level diagnostics, using ad hoccombinations of old standardised achievement tests--secondary schoolswhere no systematic approaches were used at all. We also found some Year 5 and 6 teachers who folded their arms andsaid, 'If the early primary teachers would just get on and teachreading properly I could get on and do my job.' Finally, everybodytalked about multiliteracies but no one knew where to begin; theengagement that we have with the new technologies and the dovetailing ofnew technologies with the cultural analysis undertaken in literacystudies is ad hoc and occasional. In fact, in most schools the ITco-ordinator is still a Maths/ Sciences person and the dominantdiscourses around IT are about the psychology of teaching and learningtechnical skills. The literacy work is going on somewhere else, inanother industrial and professional 'silo' separate from thetraditionally defined areas of language arts language artspl.n.The subjects, including reading, spelling, and composition, aimed at developing reading and writing skills, usually taught in elementary and secondary school. , English and literatureteaching. If this is not a complete enough picture, we also encountered agenerational blame game in many schools. Many of the forty-five andfifty year-old teachers explained to us that the younger teachers didnot know how to teach reading. I trained as a primary teacher in 1976and I do not think there are many of us who could say that we knew howto teach reading when we left teacher training. The teacher educationliterature tells us that we probably learned how to teach by bringingour preservice training to bear on our classrooms over the first two tothree years of our teaching (Luke, in press/b). Yet there is a tendencyto want to write off the younger generation of teachers as somehowdeficit or unable to do whatever we were able to do, and a failure toappreciate that they are better with the new technologies than us, thatthey are generationally closer to what a lot of these kids can do andthat we actually need to engage with them. What is needed is anintergenerational exchange and dialogue around literacy, rather then adefinition of new students and new teachers as deficit. In the face of this complex picture--the easiest and typical thingfor any government to do is to offer an over-simplified answer, andinternational prototype is to target short-term results that we knowmight make us look as if we are making accountable, and'countable' progress and development. So we spent time lookingat the UK literacy hour. We spent time looking at the State ofCalifornia, where they put in standardised achievement tests andsubsequently set about realigning their curriculum to their assessmentsystem (Calfee, 2003). We looked at the mandatory use of basal readingseries in many US jurisdictions. The US and UK solutions seemed to besolutions to significantly deteriorating school infrastructure, to othercurrent contexts and historical issues that did not seem to apply to us.It was obvious that the single approach that was being takeninternationally was, 'Test everybody, make the test high stakes,mandate a single program, put everybody in the single program'. Andthere is no doubt that you will get better results on your testsbecause, by definition, if you take variegation VariegationPatchy variation in color.Mentioned in: Malignant Melanoma and chaos and you bringsome degree of order to it, generate more time on task and instructionalfocus you are going to get immediate rises in your test scores. I willdiscuss these issues further below. Basic skills and intellectual demand But, wait. This is where the picture is going to get a little morecomplex. At the same time, a team led by Bob Lingard and Jim Ladwig werewell under way in a study commissioned five years ago called TheQueensland School Longitudinal Restructuring Study (QSRLS), an empiricalstudy that looked at the effects of school-based management and reformon pedagogy and student outcomes in 1,000 classrooms. This is thelargest scale study of what goes on in Australian classrooms in thehistory of the country. In this study, we visited 1,000 classrooms atYears 6, 9 and 11 in Social Education, English, Maths and Science. Weobserved what went on in these classrooms in terms of twenty items andwe coded these on a one-to-five scale. The Productive Pedagogiescategories below stand as a matrix for discussing and identifyingdifferent strategies, or a 'repertoire of strategies', we putto work in classrooms each day. The Productive Pedagogies categoriesprovide teachers with a vocabulary for talking about teaching. We coded classrooms, for instance, on higher order thinking--thatis conceptional work, synthetic and analytic work. We looked at whatFred Newmann in Wisconsin called 'deep understanding' and'deep knowledge', which involves substantial engagement withkey concepts and understandings of intellectual fields and with socialdiscourses. Simply, we looked for substantial engagement with anything.We coded for what Courtney Cazden (1989) has described as sustainedconversation or exchange in the classroom that ventured beyond the quizshow quiz shown.A television or radio program in which the contestants' knowledge is tested by questioning, with some contestants winning money or prizes. , 'initiate/response/evaluate' (IRE) questioning cyclethat tends to dominate instruction as a 'default mode'. So wecoded for where classroom exchanges actually went beyond fact recall IREpatterns: 'What is the capital of Tasmania? Yes, good, what is thecapital of Brisbane?' We added problematic knowledge and critical literacy ascategories--and asked whether kids were being encouraged to criticiseknowledge, to argue with books, ideologies, to contest canonical anddefinitive interpretations and discourses and so forth. Following theprototypical applications of Hallidayan linguistics to Australianclassrooms, we coded for metalanguage: for whether there was a languagefor talking about, weighing, and manipulating language in classrooms. Wealso coded for whether the teaching was interdisciplinary ormultidisciplinary, whether there was background knowledge andschema-building occurring in the instruction, and, crucially, whetherthe tasks that the kids were being asked to do had any connection to theworld. We coded for whether there was problem-based learning in theclassroom. And we had extended sets to assess social support andinclusivity of curriculum and pedagogy. Our findings were that Queensland classrooms were very stronglysocially supportive--they are humane social environments. Queensland andother Australian teachers are very good at creating supportive andhumane environments for kids. And I think that we should be proud ofthis--it is to the credit of our teacher training systems and the majorinvestment in behaviour management and school climate of the lastdecade. What we did not find, however, was enough kids doing anythingthat was connected to the world. How do we create motivation andbehaviour management problems? Run a curriculum and typicalinstructional modes (featuring worksheets, copying, answering questionsat the end of chapters) that have no visible connection toanybody's lived experience. This is a recipe for trouble, foralienation, resistance and disengagement disengagement/dis��en��gage��ment/ (dis?en-gaj��ment) emergence of the fetus from the vaginal canal. dis��en��gage��mentn. , particularly in the middleyears. We found that teachers are struggling with recognition ofdifference. As I said earlier, we have difficulty dealing with culturaland linguistic diversity, with issues of gendered equity ofparticipation in classrooms, with the inclusion of kids with learningdifficulties. Often our rhetoric in teacher education, in policy isgood, but our actual practical strategies are limited and many teachersare frustrated. Most importantly, we encountered low levels of intellectualengagement and intellectual demand. About half the lessons we visitedhad something of intellectual substance occurring; but about half thelessons were very superficial. I cannot put it any other way: there is a'dumbing down' going on in our classrooms--worse at some gradelevels and in some KLAs, but visible across the board in 1,000 lessons. Let me give you two exemplary lessons that I observed as part ofthis study. One was a shared book experience on Flipper. It was about a40-minute lesson and it was wonderfully orchestrated. The Year 3 and 4kids watched the video Flipper, and they did some enlarged printmaterials with Flipper. All of these things in a wonderfully sociallysupportive environment. At the end of 40 minutes, what had the kidsgained? Flipper. They knew Paul Hogan For other people named Paul Hogan, see Paul Hogan (disambiguation).Paul Hogan AM (born October 8, 1939 in Lightning Ridge, New South Wales) is an Australian actor and comedian. had starred in Flipper. They knewthat Flipper was a dolphin that could talk and that it had been a movie,but that was about it. That is what I mean by 'dumbing down'of the curriculum. Jim Martin once called it'infantilisation'; Garth Boomer had, I am told, some even lesskind, more colourful, terms for it. I think there is more of this thanwe would like to admit occurring in our classrooms. Content-freeteaching, or teaching that is supportive, but in which no substantiveengagement with intellectual fields and discourses is common. By contrast, I observed a shared book lesson with Paperbag Princessin which the kids and the teacher did a shared book experience and thenthe teacher said, 'Well kids, what questions would we ask of thetext?' And I thought, 'Good critical literacy lesson.'The kids were generating the questions and not answering the questions.She listed them. Then she said, 'Which of these questions gotogether in the same family?' Then I thought, 'What'sgoing on here?' And then she said, 'Who can write a questionthat actually can cover the other three questions in the samefamily?' She was teaching taxonomy and meta-language and doing itwith a fair degree of technical precision. Our findings corroborated what Fred Newmann and colleagues (1996)found in the Wisconsin-based CORS CORS Continuously Operating Reference Stations (NOAA)CORS Corners (street type)CORS Continuously Operating Reference StationCORS Canadian Operational Research Society study over a decade ago: that for yourmost at-risk kids, these two things--connectedness to the world andengagement with knowledge--have to be there to turn around their mediumto long term performance. And I will make the point that Freebody and Ihave made in relation to the four resources model again: basic skillsare necessary but not sufficient to turn around the performance of yourmost at-risk kids (Freebody & Luke, in press). No matter what we dowith them in terms of basic reading and writing skills, numeracy andliteracy skills, unless the activities are somehow connected to theworld and unless there is a critical intellectual engagement withknowledge--unless there is an educative ed��u��ca��tive?adj.Educational.Adj. 1. educative - resulting in education; "an educative experience"instructive, informative - serving to instruct or enlighten or inform act going on--we might as wellpack up and go home. A democratic, supportive and safe classroomenvironment is important for development and for our work--but in and ofitself it is not sufficient to turn around the performance of our mostat risk learners. Scenarios and alternatives A principal lesson I learned during my brief time as a policy-makeris that a simple test driven basic skills regime will not solve thesecomplex problems. One would no more judge the sum total efforts, needs,successes and failures of a school system by a single high stakes testresult than we would purchase a vehicle on the basis of horsepowernumbers or choose a food solely on the basis of one of the many piecesof data conveyed on the labels. Systems and schools need to use data andevidence smartly. We need to read across and triangulate See triangulation. intra-schoolperformance data with a sharp analysis of extra-school data on communitylinguistic and cultural resources, socio-economic context, populationmovement and student transience. From this picture we can begin toconstruct a literacy program and we can decide how, when, and in whatways to support school renewal, improved pedagogy, and more effectiveuses of central and school level resources. This is a 'smarterway' of doing policy and management than the league tables andmarkets answer. In fact, the latter may well make the situation worse. A 1970sFlorida scenario of declaring minimum competency levels, where entireschools and classes retorque their work to the delivery of basic skills,will not solve the intellectual engagement or the connectedness to theworld problems that the Queensland data has placed on the table. And,recalling the aforementioned IRA Board of Directors statement onstandardised testing of reading in the US, there are three scenariosthat begin to emerge in policy environments that have gone down the testdriven, basic skills, single-method road. The first I will call the rise and stall scenario. By focusinginstruction and norming instructional approaches around standardisedreaders and materials, supporting this with professional developmentinvestment, you undoubtedly will generate some immediate test scoregains. This is in part because you have made order out of chaos, youhave improved time on task and overall levels of focused instruction.You get effects of the kinds that bureaucracies and policies want. Butmany schools and systems then run into a problem of 'stalling'test scores that threshold in particular domains. You are left with aquestion of 'What next?' The problem--basic skills instructionwithout overall curriculum reform and intellectual engagement hasplateau effects. You are able to achieve the necessary but not thesufficient; you have accomplished a bit of the picture, but, as oursecond scenario suggests, you may lose the focus and investment veryquickly. The second is what Robert Calfee (2003) has described as the fifthgrade slump phenomenon. The consistent message from several decades ofAmerican reading research is that we can early intervene substantially,invest all of our money in basic skills programs, remediation andrecovery programs in the early years. This is important. But if wereturn kids from early intervention into an unreconstructed un��re��con��struct��ed?adj.1. Not reconciled to social, political, or economic change; maintaining outdated attitudes, beliefs, and practices.2. Not reconciled to the outcome of the American Civil War.Adj. 1. upperprimary and middle school--in effect putting them back intointellectually unengaged classrooms, the performance gains achieved bythe most at risk children will markedly residualise, such that by thetime they hit Year 6 or 7, your most at risk kids are right back wherethey started. When students return to classrooms with improved phonemicawareness Phonemic Awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to distinguish phonemes, the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. For example, a listener with phonemic awareness can break the word "Cat" into three separate phonemes: /k/, /a/, and word attack skills and go back into a classroom where thepedagogy fails to capitalise on these gains, the phenomenon ofresidualisation of performance occurs. The most recent 2000-2001 DEST DEST DestinationDEST DestroyDEST Department of Education, Science and Training (Australia)DEST Department of the Environment, Sport and Territories (Australia)(2002) data suggests that even where we have made gains at the Year 3level, we have a major residualisation of performance by Year 5 and, onthe basis of state data, further losses by Year 7. The point that Iwould make from the QSRLS study is that, if students return to Flipper,the patterns of disinterest, lowered overall academic achievement andlow level skill mastery will rapidly re-emerge. Related is what I will call the let them eat basic skills scenario.By this scenario, played out first in Florida, and then in otherAmerican states, is that the focus on basic skills generated by a highstakes test-driven environment actually succeeds--and we get preciselywhat we aimed for: curriculum and pedagogy focused on the minimum. Herethe gap between our best and worst achievers increases and, in thecurrent Federal policy debate over the marketisation of school funding,state schools and systemic Catholic schools become purveyors of basicskills to the new working and underclasses. And elite and selectiveentry non-government schools (currently not bound by Queensland orFederal legislation to teach mandated curriculum or to administer tests)are free to engage with higher order thinking, intellectual demand andthe issues we described in QSRLS. In this scenario, we become a twotiered education system, servicing the new binary class divide that isportrayed as one of the major effects of economic globalisation. What do we propose in Queensland? We came up with four programmaticapproaches. First, a state-wide focus on balanced approaches to theteaching of reading based on the four resources model that Freebody andI worked on in the early 1990s (Freebody & Luke, in press). Thisrequires that teachers make principled decisions based on analyses oftheir students on the program that is balanced between coding, semantic,pragmatic and critical practices in literacy. Many literacy educatorsand many states are using this model. We cannot have school programsthat are no more than shopping lists, where you must do languageexperience, phonics instruction, genre writing for everybody. If you aredealing with a high percentage of second language speakers, you aregoing to need to look at some kind of approach to literacy that says,'You know, I think explicit instruction in alphabetical knowledgeis really important for these kids, because many are learning Englishand they are moving into an alphabetic system.' Whereas, if I amdealing with middle class kids in St Lucia next to the University ofQueensland--children of students, academics and professionals--aphonics-based program is likely to be a waste of instructional time. So what we need to do is to do what Barbara Comber comb��er?n.1. One, such as a machine or a worker, that combs something, such as wool.2. A long wave that has reached its peak or broken into foam; a breaker. and others havebeen talking about for years, and what Luis Moll has prototyped at theUniversity of Arizona (body, education) University of Arizona - The University was founded in 1885 as a Land Grant institution with a three-fold mission of teaching, research and public service. (e.g., Comber, Thomson & Wells, 2001). We needto read and analyse our kids, know our school communities,demographically and linguistically, have a realistic analysis of whothey are and what they can do when they enter school, sans staffroom staffroomn → sala de profesoresstaffroomn → salle f des professeursstaffroomstaff n (Scol) → gossip about deficit. On that basis, you use the four resources model,or something equivalent, and build a balanced program that providesdifferent developmental blends of the necessary and sufficient, of code,semantic, pragmatic and critical practices. In the US, Taylor, Anderson,Au and Raphael (2000) and others have proposed other approaches tostaging a balanced program, so there are lots of ways to do this. Then,and only then, with such an analysis we can proceed to set realistic'value-added' and 'distance-travelled' targets forimprovements in student social and academic outcomes, using assessmentdata constructively and realistically. Balanced programs provide coherent consistent vocabularies acrossclassrooms, as importantly they provide the grounds for intraschoolaccountability where teachers as professionals work together, plantogether and share their professional approaches across generations. Infact, the QSRLS and the school reform literature tells us thataccountability to our fellow professionals within staffrooms and schoolsis a stronger indicator of improved schooling and pedagogy than thekinds of accountability to central systems I have described here. Mypoint: though they need not be mutually exclusive Adj. 1. mutually exclusive - unable to be both true at the same timecontradictoryincompatible - not compatible; "incompatible personalities"; "incompatible colors" , accountabilityamongst a professional learning community is more important thanaccountability to central office in setting the grounds for schoolrenewal and better, broader and more effective literacy programs. Hence, our second strategy is a state-wide focus on the developmentof whole school plans that includes analyses of local communitylinguistic and cultural resources, audits of teacher expertise andcommunity involvement. We are going to require that all schools developwhole school programs by the end of 2002. Yes, we know that some willview this as more centrally delivered work intensification, some willfinesse them, and some will subvert them, while others will hireconsultants to write their whole school programs for them. This willinvolve setting distance travel performance targets against like schoolsof similar communities and backgrounds; they will not simply be targetsagainst standardised achievement test scores, but targets also againstother kinds of social indicators such as attendance, behaviourmanagement and so forth. Our third strategy is a state-wide focus on the introduction ofmultiliteracies. Multiliteracies--the kinds of new practices needed todeal with on-line, media, visual and print texts simultaneously--weredeveloped initially in the work of the New London New London,city (1990 pop. 24,540), New London co., SE Conn., on the Thames River near its mouth on Long Island Sound; laid out 1646 by John Winthrop, inc. 1784. Group (1996). Theyalso feature in the New Basics. The Singaporeans are also moving tobuild multiliteracies into their curricula, acknowledging the issuesaround digital and media culture both in terms of student backgroundknowledge and skill, and in terms of the demands of work and citizenshipin new economies. This is new ground, where organisations like ALEA andAATE can lead. Our fourth strategy is a state-wide focus on the regeneration ofprofessional development, to rebuild teachers' social networks andcapital and to facilitate an intergenerational exchange between the babyboomers and the young teachers. We visited staffrooms and would askstaff, 'Who has been 'ELICed'?, and all the baby boomerswould put our hands up. Others thought it was an insurance company orgovernment agency. In fact, there has been no systematic professionaldevelopment nationally in over a decade. And I think many of our localchapters are experiencing the phenomenon in the last few years ofparticipation falling off, or participation being spotty or verygeneration specific. People are tired, and we actually need to rebuildprofessional networks quite substantially. A conclusion and postscript Some concluding remarks. Do we have the right answers inQueensland--or anywhere? Well, there are no right answers, no magicpedagogical bullet. To mix my metaphors further, if we have learnedanything it is that there is no instructional holy grail that isuniversally effective for all kids. People have been searching for sucha method for over a hundred years. But we do know that literacy andliteracy crises act as social shock absorbers; that when we hit times offundamental economic and cultural upheaval schools, teachers andliteracy become almost like whipping posts. Literacy becomes the keypolitical 'issue' or 'nodal point' around which thepublic is mobilised. The picture I have drawn here is more complex thanany single answer will give us. And it tells us that there is somethingfundamentally misplaced mis��place?tr.v. mis��placed, mis��plac��ing, mis��plac��es1. a. To put into a wrong place: misplace punctuation in a sentence.b. about the test and single package approach. Yet our Year 1 and 2 teachers are struggling to actually identifywhat it is they are seeing. And as a result, what we are beginning to doin many of our classrooms is talk deficit again. Everybody is deficit:kids are empty vessels, they're watching too much TV, theycan't speak English properly, parents don't parent, nobodyreads to their kids. The language of deficit is proliferating instaffrooms right across this country as we face the effects of the newpoverty, of culturally diverse populations where before we dealt withhomogeneous ones. In Queensland we have many schools that are doingoutstanding jobs of literacy--by multiple and rich indicators--throughwhole school programs. While it is actually axiomatic ax��i��o��mat��ic? also ax��i��o��mat��i��caladj.Of, relating to, or resembling an axiom; self-evident: "It's axiomatic in politics that voters won't throw out a presidential incumbent unless they think his challenger will that povertyaffects literacy preparedness and achievement, what we know from threedecades of school effectiveness and reform work is that the quality ofpedagogy can influence more than 20% of the variance in kids'performances (Newmann, 1996; Lingard et al., 2001). We have teachers andprincipals who are working in low socio-economic and rural areas, insuburban edge-cities hit hard by the new poverty, and indigenouscommunities--many are running literacy programs that have got 20 or 30%better overall achievement than others. But what is it that makes thoseschools fly? Here's what we found. 1. Strong leadership, a principal who either knows literacy, or issmart enough to delegate responsibility and power to somebody who does. 2. Balanced programs--not shopping list programs, not single methodprograms, but programs in which people have thoughtfully exchangedinformation, audited their staff expertise, enlisted external help andcritical friends where needed, and balanced their program inrelationship to what they know are the needs of the kids. 3. Strong professional learning communities--staffrooms in whichpeople are talking about literacy, aware of it, exploring differentvocabularies for talking about their work. You do not need universitypeople to tell you how to teach literacy--the expertise is in yourbuildings. It is just that it is often hidden in what industrially andprofessionally has become for many teachers highly isolated and'privatised' work. The people who are good at teachingcomprehension need to share that with the younger teachers; the teacherswho are good at word attack and phonemic awareness need to share thatwith some of the other teachers. The young teachers with the ICT (1) (Information and Communications Technology) An umbrella term for the information technology field. See IT.(2) (International Computers and Tabulators) See ICL. 1. (testing) ICT - In Circuit Test. skillsneed to begin mentoring the older teachers who need work withmultiliteracies. The expertise is in the building, but we actually need to set upconditions where it gets exchanged. The schools that made a differenceactually had consistent vocabularies and meta-languages for talkingabout literacy. They had shared vocabularies for talking about literacylearning and teaching running across the staff and across classrooms andyear levels that actually enabled them and the kids to see somecoherence. As a footnote, we also found that the schools that made adifference did not talk deficit. One principal we have worked with foryears actually banned deficit talk from her staffroom. The difference inenvironment that created is significant because unsubstantiated deficittalk convinces us that kids who are struggling with basic literacy areincapable of dealing with concepts, ideas and intellectual substance.Why teach Flipper when we could have done salinity, seagrass beds, JohnLily's speech experiments, dolphin-free tuna, drift-net fishing andfishing rights in the South Pacific? That is what we could have done,and even though some of our students are struggling decoders orstruggling writers, they can still deal with those things. If you do notdeliver to them and 'dumb down the curriculum', they are goingto engage with these things via the Discovery Channel on cable afterschool. When I joined the Queensland state system, in spite of what ourbehaviour management experts say about learning to take responsibilityfor our actions, I found in our educational community a largedysfunctional family dysfunctional familyPsychology A family with multiple 'internal'–eg sibling rivalries, parent-child– conflicts, domestic violence, mental illness, single parenthood, or 'external'–eg alcohol or drug abuse, extramarital affairs, gambling, . We did symbolic violence The concept of symbolic violence was first introduced by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to account for forms of coercion which are effected without physical force, "... to each other in thewaiting room before the therapy could begin. Everybody blamed everybody:the principals blamed the statutory bodies, the statutory bodies blamedthe central office, everybody hated central office. Central officeblamed the teachers, the teachers blamed the principals, the principalsblamed the union, the union blamed the Federal government. In sum, wewere caught in a destructive cycle that was immature and dysfunctional. Since I have returned to teaching and research, I have had theopportunity to meet with teachers and systems bureaucrats throughoutAsia, in the US and the UK. Many of them would give anything to beteaching in Australia now. Why? Because our system and schoolinfrastructure has not deteriorated, we have not descended intotest-driven systems. Our levels of training and professionalism are veryhigh. We are not all being told to use the same textbooks at the sametime every day. The kind of freedom we have to be professionals, to useour professionalism, to expand and develop our craft, is stillsubstantially beyond that of many of our colleagues internationally. Wehave the space, the incentive and the expertise to solve the problems ofNew Times. Acknowledgements My thanks to Charles Morgan Charles Morgan is the name of: Sir Charles Morgan (c.1575–1642), military governor of Bergen-op-Zoom Sir Charles Morgan Robinson Morgan, 3rd Baronet (1792-1875), created Baron Tredegar in 1859. , Terry Moran, Kim Bannikoff, Ray Land,Peter Freebody, James Ladwig, and Gabrielle Matters. References Apple, M.W. (1978). Ideology and Curriculum. New York New York, state, United StatesNew York,Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of : Routledge. Barton, D., Hamilton, M., & Ivanic, R. (Eds) (2000). SituatedLiteracies. London: Routledge. Calfee, R. (2003). Introduction to the state of reading inCalifornia. 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Taylor, B.M., Anderson, R.C., Au, K.H., & Raphael, T.E. (2000).Discretion in the translation of research to policy: A case frombeginning reading. Educational Researcher, 29(6), 16-26. Allan Luke Allan Luke is a prominent researcher in literacy education. He moved to Australia from Canada in the 1980s. Luke is currently Foundation Dean of the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION, SINGAPORE (1) See Derrida's (2001) 'a university withoutconditions' on what it means to profess.Table 1: Productive Pedagogy Categories SupportiveIntellectual Classroom Recognition ofQuality Relevance Environment DifferenceHigher orderthinkingDeep knowledgeDeepunderstandingSubstantiveconversationKnowledgeproblematicMetalanguage Knowledge integration Background knowledge Connectedness Problem-Based curriculum Student control Social support Engagement Explicit criteria Self-regulation Cultural knowledges Inclusivity Narrative Group identity Citizenship* Source: Queensland School Longitudinal Restructuring Study (2001).