Literacy As Snake Oil : Beyond the Quick Fix (New Literacies and
Digital Epistemologies, Vol. 1)
Literacy
As Snake Oil : Beyond the Quick Fix (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies,
Vol. 1) . Joanne Larson (Editor). New York: Peter Lang
Publishing, 2002, ISBN: 0820450219, 160 pp.
Julie Nora
Education Alliance, Brown University
Author Bio | E-mail Author
Literacy as Snake Oil: Beyond the Quick Fix kicks off
the series New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies , a series
which aims to “contribute to the struggle to understand and develop
effective principles and responses to deep and far-reaching social,
economic, political, and technological changes since the 1950s”
(introduction). General editors of the series are Colin Lankshear,
Michele Knobel, Chris Bigum, and Michael Peters. The volume represents a
good beginning to reaching that goal.
The title of this volume returns us to the 1800s, when the drug
industry in the United States flourished, with medicines being mass-produced
and marketed for the first time. At this time, medicines were sold in
traveling circus-like shows, and often claimed to cure everything from the most
benign to the gravest ailments. While some medicines had real medicinal
value, some were just hard liquor labeled as medicine. Others were laced
with toxic ingredients. It was difficult for patients to tell which
medicines were good and which were useless or even dangerous, as many medicines
were based on ‘secret formulas’ and didn't list their
ingredients. Cynics called these medicines “snake
oils”.
Prepackaged literacy materials have recently entered the education
market and make similar claims as the quick fix solutions to the literacy
“crisis” in our nation’s schools. While some of these
materials may have real value, others are, in fact, harmful to the very
children they aim to serve. Like the consumer of snake oils, the consumer
of these literacy materials has difficulty knowing which of these materials are
good and which are dangerous. In the introductory chapter, “In
Sheep’s Clothing: Literacy For Sale,” editor Joanne Larson promises
that this volume will “help teacher educators, classroom teachers, and
school administrators understand the consequences of commercially produced
literacy packages, or commodified literacy, on literacy learning” (p.
3). The book lives up to this promise by presenting the research,
experiences, and perspectives of an impressive collection of contributors.
The volume begins with chapters by James Gee and Gerald Coles
examining recent, narrowly focused, federal reading
“remedies.” These authors in effect expose the ingredients of
the government’s snake oil. James Gee points out the
“silences and paradoxes” of the 1998 National Research Council
(NRC) report, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, the basis
for recent recommended cures for the literacy crisis. Specifically,
he highlights the report’s silence on how to
define the reading problem, on the relationship between reading and poverty,
and on the role of phonological awareness in preventing reading
difficulties. He argues that reading is much more complex than it is
portrayed in this report, that it is “multiple, situated, social,
cultural,” a perspective notably absent from the NRC report.
Following the publication of Preventing Reading Difficulties, Congress
requested that the National Institute for Childhood Health and Development
(NICHD) organize a study of various approaches to teaching children how to
read. Gerald Coles presents a compelling argument for why the ensuing National
Reading Panel’s report Teaching Children To Read (2000)
fails to justify the “nuts and bolts” of teaching reading. He
first exposes how members of the panel were hand-picked by a division of the
NICHD that was “slanted towards the NICHD direct, explicit
systematic instruction of skills view of the best way to teach, the best way to
learn, the best kind of classrooms, the best kind of training programs, the
best way to explain reading problems, the best way to understand the reading
process, the best kind of research, and the best way to be a researcher“
(p. 29). He subsequently systematically challenges the findings of this
panel. Coles ends by lamenting that teachers are often asked to enact the
policies that result from such “scientific” findings and use the
scripted materials that that publishers create from such
“research.” He compels teachers to
fight for an alternative educational vision, an understanding
which will from the outset, require understanding and countering the
pseudoscience that has been damaging literacy teaching and learning,
bamboozling many teachers and much of the public, and regrettably thwarting the
valuable role science could play in helping to advance educational knowledge
and practice. (p. 42)
Such a stance is successfully taken and detailed in the chapter by
Lynn Asteria Gatto, “Success Guaranteed Literacy Programs: I Don’t
Buy It!” Gatto is an extremely talented teacher, who has
received several local and national awards, including the Presidential Award
For Science and Mathematics Teaching from the White House. She
teaches in a district where teachers are provided with and expected to use a
plethora of commercial reading programs. However, she refuses to use
these commercial packages. Her “’Don’t’ attitude
and ‘I don’t use it’ conduct” (p. 73) have been
tolerated because her students do well on state tests. This chapter
provides insight into her teaching philosophy and techniques, as well as a
testimonial of teacher agency.
Other chapters highlight how commodified literacy packages and
narrow policies can actually harm students. In their chapter
“Literacy Packages in Practice: Constructing Academic
Disadvantage,”Patricia Irvine and Joanne Larson present findings from
their research in a district of primarily low-income, African American and
Latino students where elementary teachers piloted a commodified literacy
package, defined by the authors as those materials produced by profit-oriented
publishing corporations. The authors make a compelling argument for how
the autonomous definition of literacy that underlies the materials, combined
with a deficit orientation towards the students, resulted in teaching practices
that actually disadvantaged the students. In a subsequent chapter
entitled “Smoke and Mirrors: Language Policy and Educational
Reform,” Kris Gutiérrez argues that by devaluing Spanish and other
non-English languages, recent language policy in California serves as a vehicle
to sort children into inappropriate categories and curricular programs.
The highly scripted and regulated programs frequently used are removed from the
learning communities of the students, deskill teachers, and marginalize English
language learners. These chapters highlight cases where the snake oil
might in fact be laced with toxic ingredients.
In his chapter “Fattening Frogs for Snakes: Virtues for
Sale,” Patrick Shannon takes on William Bennett, the most
notable of the “moral entrepreneurs,” who has made a career of
turning morality into commodified literacy packages. Shannon advocates
for a moral literacy that recognizes the plurality of positions and
fundamentals of democracy, as opposed to the fixed, abstract, universal
morality peddled by Bennett.
In what might be the least engaging chapter, Brian O. Brent offers
teachers and administrators a cost-effective analysis in a decision-oriented
framework for choosing literacy programs. He provides a tool for
assessing the cost and effects of literacy programs. Brent may in fact be
contributing to a trend he acknowledges—the recent focus away from
concerns about student equity to concerns about student performance relative to
costs—by creating this tool.
Independently, each of these chapters addresses a specific aspect
of the recent trend towards the use of commodified literacy materials.
Taken together, they represent a near-comprehensive, critical discussion of
this trend that is urgently needed.
References
Burns, M. Susan, Catherine E. Snow, and Peg Griffin (Editors).
1988. Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children. National
Research Council: Washington DC.
National Reading Panel. 2000. Teaching Children to
Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research
Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. National Institutes of Health: Bethesda,
Maryland. Available at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/smallbook.htm
Teachers College Record Volume 105 Number 1, 2003, p. -
http://www.tcrecord.org