Literacy Instruction and the 21st Century Epistemological Crisis
A Conversation Across Time with P. David Pearson
Letter to the NY Times in March 2006 from P. David Pearson:
To the Editor:
As a longtime reading educator, I share the concern expressed in your article that reading and math are shortchanging other subjects. This development is as bad for reading as it is for science and social studies.
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[To the author from me in December 2023]
I remark the depth and humility in your first phrase. Your stature in the field of reading has grown immensely over half a century commensurate with your intellectual leadership. You kept the barge laden with scientific knowledge moving through the swollen rivers of Whole Language, you brought water to relational readers during the long drought of NCLB (I know you pissed off people from time to time, such an easy thing to do in this field), and you showed up again and again as panel chair or participant representing the science of reading in full force to drive progress in the NAEP reading assessment toward authenticity and therefore utility.
This high-wire academic statesmanship has effected profound, enduring change in the lives of children. Instruction in comprehension is as American as apple pie thanks to you and to those on whose shoulders you stand. Change can be regressive or progressive, and you know better than anyone the two-step forward one-step back dance, inch by inch to the mountaintop. (3+-1)X=Y where X = a complex measure of current progress toward the mountaintop along a timeline, Y = a simple and transparent measure of total progress.
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[From David in 2006]
Without strong knowledge about the big ideas that come from solid instruction in the sciences, arts and humanities, students' reading (and writing) will ultimately suffer.
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[From me today]
Never one for hyperbole nor for mincing words, I know from being called on your carpet once as your Interim Director of Teacher Education shepherding an accreditation document for you as the Dean of UCB GSE. “I don’t want you and [a credential program director] getting in a pissing contest,” you said, wisely nipping it in the bud. I understand the meaning of strong, big, and solid from your pen. I feel the full force of ‘will.’ Big ideas grounded in strong knowledge constructed during solid instruction—the immediate and dire consequences of ignoring your warning again and again, year after year, explains part of the reason this country is teetering on the brink of authoritarianism, the hell with test scores eh?
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[From David in 2006]
Reading and writing must always be about something, and the something comes from subject-matter pedagogy — not from more practicing of reading "skills."
Reading skills are important, but without knowledge, they are pretty useless. We'd all be better off if schools taught reading as a "tool" to support learning those big ideas found in subject-matter instruction.
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[From me today]
I chuckle as I read these words. Pretty useless indeed. On the page (screen) before my eyes right now the message is more profound today than ever. Imagine if starting in 2006 every first grade child in West Virginia was given instruction in topical knowledge regarding the Earth’s climate? What if they studied coal? What if they studied coal mining?
Imagine if Chip Roy from Texas had constructed his own knowledge about the internal combustion engine instead of being taught to read through bracketing his prior knowledge, keeping the world out? Texas at one point refused to acknowledge that prior knowledge had any meaningful relationship with comprehension and worked to design a comprehension test accordingly. I know this because I sat at a table for several days working with a group of high school teachers from Texas three decades ago. They wanted to measure what children knew from the passage, not what they knew before they read the passage.
If every one of these children of West Virginia and Texas who can now vote had absorbed and organized strong knowledge about ants, say, through solid instruction in reading and writing about these topics, they might not be so willing to vote for a President who pledges to “drill, drill, drill.”
Ants are the most successful creatures on the planet, 99 billion years of existence—and even ants are in big trouble because of the internal combustion engine. This shift to reading and writing about something seems kind of important maybe?
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[From David 2006 who can still tell curricular bullies from buddies from a mile away]
It's time to transform reading instruction from its current role as the curricular "bully" in our schools into a role it is better suited to play — being a curricular "buddy"!
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Absolutely. The irony is rich. We have anywhere from 2/3 to 9/10 of the states with Phonics laws on the books depending on how you define a Phonics law and who you read—a plurality in any case. Yet these laws say nothing about knowledge. Skills, yes. Strategies, yes. Nothing against them, but when they are used for nothing… Pretty useless indeed, a recipe for an epistemological crisis at the dawn of AI. Something to think about. Thanks from the future, PDP.
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P. David Pearson Berkeley, Calif., March 26, 2006 The writer is professor and dean of the Graduate School of Education, University of California at Berkeley
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So I sent a draft of this post to David for comment. He agreed that I haven’t misrepresented him on any of the issues and appreciated the analysis, though he thinks I might have gone a little overboard in complimenting him on his incredible service-leadership in the national policy arena. I know there is a whole sub population of educators who would make the counter argument. He has changed the face of reading.
He did want to reframe the issue of the future. I’ve been a bit too careless and even flip in my references to Phonics laws. He thinks the change in the use of knowledge of the natural and social world to ground literacy can happen now. The theoretical and evidentiary pieces are in place. The new laws can help us, he says. I’m going to do a deep dive into these laws to flesh out this perspective. Here’s what David added in a personal email responding to this post after reading the private copy:
“The only thing I might add is that we have many existence proofs which show that we can manage (orchestrate if you will) curriculum that balances processes (skills, strategies, and practices) with content (topical knowledge about the big ideas in our natural and social worlds), and attention to the affective face of learning (engagement, motivation, agency, and identity). Examples come from project- and problem-based learning, integrated curricular studies, even some of the more enlightened instantiations of the CCSS era (like the History teachers I studied in that piece I sent to you). And if the more strident of the SoR advocates can come up for air (buried as they sometimes can be in their own rhetorical sands), we can even manage it in the current era. Many of the SoR laws enacted in the various states give a nod to other facets of reading besides decoding; it's just that knowledge, language, agency, and affect don't make for good headline material in the way that phonics does.
David”
These laws may contain language that could also pry open the doors for responsible research and evidence-based use of natural language bots as curricular buddies as well. It’s hard to conceive of a PowerPoint, say, as a curricular buddy, easy to conceive of AI as a buddy—once you delete images of Mr. Smith in the film the Matrix from your memory and take the first step. Use the bot to learn something about something you know little about. You’ll find the bot pretty useless unless you are truly interested in something. Take a bot for a test drive. (3+-1)X=Y.