RM Winter 2016 FLIP

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Reading Matters
Commentary
| 78| Reading Matters | Volume 16 • Winter 2016 |
in the work of improving adolescent literacy while pursuing
questions impacting the literate lives of teachers and adolescents.
3. The push for more engaged literacy learning needs to resist
the desire to prescribe literacy activities and programs.
We cannot attempt to teacher-proof a literacy curriculum. Read to
Succeed can be interpreted in two ways, either as a collection of
ways we want our PSTs to think about and plan disciplinary literacy
instruction in a classroom or as a list of prescriptive activities and
assignments that limit teacher creativity and responsiveness to
the classroom and the individual student. Prescriptive literacy
is not something that R2S advocates for, especially in relation
to adolescent literacy, but there are prescriptive elements of
the bill, including the requirement that struggling readers
complete ninety minutes of supplemental instruction per day
after they are identified. It is a very real possibility that limited
resources will reduce the richness of the legislation to the easiest
implementation. For example, teachers are already reporting
that there are department and county requirements for grammar
instruction and daily oral practice, even though research indicates
that grammar is best taught in context within mentor texts
(Wilde, 2012). We need to ask ourselves how we integrate what
we know about effective literacy engagement and what we
know about effective teaching. We use the term engagement
deliberately-- particularly in the secondary school setting,
student engagement is one of the key aspects to cultivating deep
literacy. Regardless of grade, however, motivation is a key aspect
of literacy engagement, and prescribing a step-by-step activity
guide will do more harm than good. On the contrary, when
we pursue disciplinary inquiry with students and focus on the
unsettled questions in our discipline, literacy practices become
purposeful and essential to adolescent disciplinary learning.
4. Use a yes/and perspective about student competency rather
than a deficit perspective of student disciplinary literacy.
It is easy for teachers and students to measure worth with the
tests, and to use what they believe the tests reveal to prescribe the
potential of students. This is where sociocultural theory helps us
understand the range of experiences and ways of engaging with
text that fall outside testable competencies. We need to teach PSTs
in ways that allow them to see a test score as one potentially useful
piece of data amongst many other pieces of data. We need to teach
PSTs to administer low stakes literacy surveys, to critically observe
adolescents out-of-school activities, and to carefully observe what
students are doing and saying before they make an assessment
of student literacies. Focusing on limitations places a ceiling on
student success, but using that information to design instructional
responses allows teachers to provide students with the respectful
instruction needed to scaffold disciplinary literacies. This is a
subtle shift in orientation, but to put it plainly, if we are assessing
literacy only to identify student deficits and this assessment
of literacy is always formal, we see students as failing from the
onset. If we see the assessment of literacy as a way to enhance
already existing competencies and tie it to classroom practice, we
see students and their interactions with text as places to grow.
Conclusion
These four recommendations offer us a starting place for
translating policy into practice; in this case getting that transition
right is crucial not only for teachers but also for students.
In South Carolina, Read to Succeed represents a new influx
of resources as a response to data indicating longstanding
reading challenges at the secondary school level. The state has
committed money to support the establishment of programs
beginning even before schooling to improve performance on
literacy indicators. Teachers are an important part of this multi-
pronged advocacy that expands far beyond their classrooms
into the quality of life of the larger community. However, the
way we conceptualize literacy is key to helping students see
how different literacies have meaning in their lives. Improving
adolescent academic literacy necessitates a broadened
understanding of the reading, writing, reasoning and discourses
within each discipline as well as the design of disciplinary literacy
pedagogies that apprentice students into the practices used
to construct knowledge. Unless we resist deficit perspectives
of traditional print text, resist the desire to prescribe blanket
solutions, and support teachers as they deepen understandings
of literacy in their discipline, and create collaborative school
communities dedicated to helping each student expand
and grow, we run the risk of turning literacy instruction into
even more detailed documentation of student failure.
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