Reclaiming the CenterThe Search for Common Groundin Teaching ReadingOver the past few years, the rhetoric surrounding the debate about how to teach reading, particularly beginning reading, has grown sharper and more acrimonious. The adversaries in the debate, the champions of whole language and the defenders of phonics first, have gathered their forces and readied themselves for the challenge over curriculum control. This is not a new debate. It has been going on, in one form or another, for decades, perhaps centuries—for as long as the tension between child-centered and curriculum-centered views of teaching and learning has been a part of our professional consciousness. But several factors have conspired at this point in history to ignite the discourse and the dialectic. First has been the incredible success of the whole language movement in the past few years. In many parts of this land, the past decade has witnessed, if not the demise, the substantial decline of largely curriculum-centered views of the language arts curriculum—these days often caricatured as a basal reader accompanied by a set of skill tests—that dominated the field from at least World War II until the late 1980s. The decade has, at the same time, witnessed the ascendancy of highly constructivist, child-centered views, usually traveling under the moniker of whole language, but often adopting the label of one of its intellectual cousins—literature based reading, process writing, or whole literacy. In writing, we have emphasized the writing process and focused on celebrating the individual generation of ideas and the sense of personal empowerment that control over the process can bring rather than the formal features of the message and the convincing character of the arguments presented. In this new approach, conventional features such as grammatical appropriateness, spelling, and punctuation have assumed a background role, if any role at all, in the curriculum. In reading, the enabling features of reading instruction—phonics skills, word analysis strategies, vocabulary knowledge, and explicit comprehension strategies—have been relegated to a cameo role while reader response to literature has won the lead. This has led to a curricular approach in which we rely on highly idiosyncratic personal responses to the reading of high quality literary texts as the primary vehicle for developing reading skill (even if, as has been observed in some well-meaning literature-based programs, the teacher has to read TO students). The presumption seems to be that through meaningful encounters with the great ideas of good literature, most, if not all, of those skills that we used to regard as prerequisite to independence in reading will emerge and develop quite naturally, without arduous effort on the part of either teachers or students. For those who doubt my claim that whole language has captured the rhetoric of our profession, a simple test is available to evaluate it: Just examine the program for any IRA state, regional, or national conference for the last 5 years. Pick up any issue of the Reading Teacher or Language Arts over the past five years and peruse the titles of articles. In our rhetoric, if not in our classroom realities, it has won our hearts as a profession. And it is small wonder. It is hard to challenge a philosophy that puts kids first, teachers second, and outside meddlers—such as state officials, test publishers, materials developers, even consultants—last. Second, if the educational liberals, meaning those who favor child-centered curricular approaches have captured the professional rhetoric, the conservatives have captured the public discourse. Let me provide you with a short litany of conservative victories throughout the country:
So, what do I conclude from all of this? Would that the world were that simple! And, until I encountered a couple of other recent events, I thought they were. Here are the two events that complicate matters. These two events pose a problem for my political characterization of liberal and conservative agendas because they come with bipartisan political support. Politically, both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats support the California initiative. Even more complicated, people from both sides of the ideological fence separating child-centered and curriculum-centered philosophies were involved in each effort. What this suggests is that the support for early code-instruction is complicated. It can be supported from a conservative position, on the grounds that it is part of a traditional set of values and activities, activities that have stood the test of time in our educational system. But it can be supported from the classic liberal, egalitarian, or perhaps even radical, position that access to the code empowers students to read whatever they wish on their own so that they can decide for themselves what to think about particular issues. For better or worse (probably for worse), support of code-based instruction has, at least in my professional lifetime, been viewed as a litmus test for conservative, curriculum-centered philosophies of teaching and learning. But, if the emancipatory position is taken, it can also be construed as child-centered; after all, what could be more child-centered than providing tools to allow readers to position themselves as independent of state authority. I mention these complications (even though they compromise my rationale for this essay) to avoid pigeonholing individuals any more than necessary as I examine the dialectic tension that I am trying to reconcile in this essay. Looked at from a different perspective, this is a long-winded way of saying that regardless of the position we take on the matter of early code-emphasis, we all feel as though we have children's best interests at heart. We all come to the table with the very best of intentions—to help kids become literate and independent citizens. What each of must grapple with, I believe, is the question of whether we have fallen victim to our own conspiracy of good intentions! In this essay, I want to raise the flag for those of us who think that wisdom usually lies somewhere in the middle of most of life's contentious roads. I want to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of recent changes in curricular perspective. I want to ask whether the progress that we have made in embracing child-centered principles of literacy learning and teaching, and it has been genuine progress, has come at a price that is dear to pay. I want us to ask us to examine carefully the impact that these principles have had. I want us to ponder the question of whether we, as professional educators, have indulged ourselves as we have embraced what could be construed as a politically correct approach (one that permitted us to stand on the shoulders of figures of the stature of Comenius and Dewey) in siding for individuality, inquiry, authenticity, and empowerment. Furthermore, I want to know whether the cost of our actions may be that some children are being denied access to curricular opportunities they deserve. In asking these difficult, and in some circles unpopular, questions, I am not arguing wistfully for a retreat to the curricula of the past. Nor do I not want to be construed as taking sides against children, or motherhood, or the supreme deity, for that matter. I merely want us to take stock of where we have traveled in the last several years, to evaluate what we have gained and what we have lost, and to ask ourselves whether we need to reconsider some of the curricular elements we have lost. I will begin with my account of our curricular travels in the last decade. After describing this journey in some detail, making sure to provide my reading of the underlying principles and impact of this movement, I will conclude with a set of design principles that I hope might serve as common ground for building the next generation of reading curricula. When we as a profession embraced whole language, we implicit accepted several underlying tenets—principles that undergird the infrastructure of the whole language movement. They come from three arenas of discourse—the curricular, the political, and the philosophical, The movement is much more than a way of teaching reading and writing, but it is surely that. Its intensely integrationist view of curriculum, if taken seriously, will influence everything taught in schools, not just reading and writing. It has a particular position on epistemology—how we come to know what we know; that position is important in understanding both its curricular and political stances. Compared to the conventional wisdom, the whole language movement makes very different assumptions about who is in charge of schools and learning and teaching; it privileges teachers and students above all others. There are two key curricular concepts in the movement—integration and authenticity. Integration. Integration is important in at least three senses:
Authenticity. Authenticity is the second key curricular attribute of the movement. It is very much related to the second sense of integration; in other words, when students pursue language activities out of genuine communicative intent, those activities will are more likely to be authentic. One source of inauthenticity, whole language proponents point out, is our curricular preoccupation with readiness We always seem to want to spend endless hours getting kids ready for the real thing: ("Just hang in there, guys, as soon as we get these sounds down, we'll be able to read real stories on our own."). This readiness notion often stems from the view that the best way to reduce complexity is to decompose reading and writing into simpler component subskills, each of which can be mastered in sequence, in order to get students ready for the real thing. Advocates of the movement, by contrast, support real reading and writing from the very outset of schooling. So important is reading and writing right from the start that a new vocabulary term, emergent literacy, was coined to distinguish these activities from the more conventional readiness stage in our conventional materials. And another term, invented spelling, was coined to capture the constructive intent of the work of even the very youngest and most emergent of writers as they construct texts. As near as I can tell, the criterion for authenticity is a "real world" criterion; that is, a school task is regarded as authentic to the degree that it represents the kind of task a literate individual would exercise of her own free will (unfettered by an authority figure in the process of doing school). The goal in the curricula seems to be to eliminate the gap between school literacy tasks and real world literacy tasks. From a philosophical perspective, advocates of the movement accept, at a minimum, a constructivist view of knowledge and comprehension. There is no meaning in a text; there is no meaning for a text until a reader constructs it for herself, and no two readers will construct identical meanings for a given text. Further, even the same reader is likely to construct different meanings from one reading to the next. Since meaning does not reside in the text, all comprehension is, by its very nature, a form of interpretation. Furthermore, since each reader must construct her own meaning, there can be no such thing as an authoritative interpretation. Each interpretation is, in this sense, every bit as valid as any other interpretation. What makes communication possible is shared, not identical, interpretations: We see things in common, but in our own idiosyncratic ways. This epistemological perspective carries important curricular and political implications. First, when it comes to comprehension, we are all—students, teachers, administrators, authors, critics—equals. A teacher's job is to understand, rather than correct, a student's interpretation because, as language users, understanding is our job in all communicative contexts. Second, an active interpretive community is necessary in order to support comprehension. Our personal meaning for a text can be whatever we want it to be, but when that meaning enters the arena of social discourse, a different set of rules apply; other community members demand rules of evidence and argument, and they want to know why and how we came to hold our personal meanings. Thus it is the interpretive communities with whom we interact and negotiate meanings that keeps us all from complete and unfettered idiosyncratic hallucination. For those in the whole language movement, the primary political question to ask about school curricula is, Who's in charge? For all too long, advocates of the movement tell us, we (where we means those of us who are teachers and students and live in classrooms) have given up our birthright; we have ceded the power to decide what will be learned and how it will be learned to them (where them means administrators, curriculum directors, curriculum committees, school boards, professors, publishers, basal authors, state officials, or national standards committees). It is a time, we are told, for empowerment; it is time for curriculum and standards to be returned to the communities of teachers and students who must live with and give life to them day in and day out. If and when this power is restored to teachers, then personal and professional reflection will replace regulation as the device for ensuring an accountable educational system. If curriculum is returned to teachers and students, so must assessment. Were this to occur, then only "situated" (i.e., arising from the situation) assessment, the kind that teachers and students would develop to suit their own curriculum, would count. Standardized tests and basal reading tests would serve no purpose in the curriculum, for neither would provide any information about real reading. Furthermore, the goal of every teacher assessment, even when situated, would be to promote student self-assessment. This focus on sharing authority with students and promoting student independence underscores the child-centered character of the movement. So there it is—my characterization of the whole language movement—a grass roots curriculum reform movement based upon constructivist epistemological principles and committed to privileging in our schools all we know about how literacy functions in authentic situations. In fact, to eliminate the differences between literacy in schooling and literacy in life (at least, the good life) might be construed as a goal of the whole language movement. As I suggested at the outset, I do not want to leave the impression that the acceptance of this reform perspective is universal. To the contrary, there is considerable resistance to whole language and literature-based reading throughout the country (see, for example, Willis, 1995, for an account of the sources of support and resistance). In many places throughout the country, whole language has never really gained a foothold. Furthermore, the dissatisfaction of a variety of educationally conservative groups is likely to continue to grow, especially when they learn that more and more states have built standards, curricula, and assessments that value the principles of constructivism and whole language. More Littleton, Colorados and more actions such as those taken in opposition to radical assessments in California, Wisconsin, and Indiana can be expected. Nor do I want to imply that there is a single voice within the whole language movement. Whole language scholars and practitioners differ on a host of issues, such as the role of skills, conventions, and strategies within a language arts program. Some say, if we can just be patient, skills will emerge from meaningful communication activities (e.g., ); others spur things by taking advantage of spontaneous opportunities for mini-lessons (xxx); still others are willing to spur spontaneity a bit (see Willis, 1995, for a characterization of some of these internal differences, particularly on curricular issues). Nor do I want to imply that the debate as it develops in academic circles is identical to the tensions that arise as curriculum in enacted by teachers and students in classrooms. There is some reason to believe, for example, that the purist forms of either highly skills-driven or whole language programs exist more in the minds of scholars than in the classrooms of teachers, who, because their commitment to meeting the wide array of student needs they confront, are more inclined to build an eclectic program in which there is a blending of activities with highly divergent philosophical underpinnings. These qualifications notwithstanding, whole language has, in a very real sense, become the conventional wisdom and a kind of professional ideal to which we all respond. There is a great deal of evidence to support this assertion. Most dramatic, I think, have been the been changes in "archenemy" of whole language, basal readers. Vocabulary control is virtually gone in basals, even in the early readers that first graders receive. The practice of writing stories to fit into a developmental vocabulary sequence is virtually dead. Stories and chapters are no longer adapted to fit a particular level of difficulty, and they are excerpted much less frequently than in the 1980s. Workbooks have been replaced by journals (to be honest, some still look like workbooks), and there is precious little opportunity for students to practice skills in independent learning situations. Skills that a decade ago were proudly foregrounded are now often relegated to appendix-like status. In the thumb test of today's basals, it is hard to find them. Just as it has done with every major educational reform, the basal reading establishment has done its very best to co-opt the whole language movement. It is commonplace in the mid 1990s to see advertisements for whole language basals. As I suggested at the outset, the rhetoric of professional articles belies this change in the conventional wisdom. A decade ago, even five years ago, articles were written with the presumption of a different conventional wisdom—a world filled with skills, contrived readers, and workbooks. Now, they are written with the presumption that whole language reforms, while not fully ensconced in America's schools, are well on their way to implementation. The arguments in today's articles are less about first principles of whole language and more about fine tuning teaching repertoires. The meetings of the Whole Language Umbrella are larger than most large state conventions and regional conferences of the International Reading Association. Whole language is no longer a collection of guerrilla sorties into the land of skills and basals. It has, I believe, become the conventional wisdom, in rhetoric if not in reality. In the process of ascendancy, the movement has celebrated and privileged several important principles of literacy learning: authenticity of text and task, curricular integration, student and teacher empowerment, the primacy of constructing meaning, and a recontextualization of learning within a community context. In my view, these have all been positive developments—ones that all members of the profession, quite irrespective of their philosophical dispositions, can celebrate. Still, the controversy between whole language and the conventional wisdom has been likened to a war—a holy war. And, as in all wars, holy and otherwise, there have been some casualties. I have already mentioned two—the loss of vocabulary control and the hiding of skills. The replacement of carefully controlled basal stories authentic texts written by regular authors even at the earliest levels has meant that some beginning readers are forced to stumble over word after word they don't know. The relegation of skills to the appendix has meant that we have all but accepted the premise that skills are better caught in the act of reading and writing genuine texts for authentic purposes than taught directly and explicitly by teachers. The argument is the same for phonics, grammar, text conventions, and structural elements. These entities may be worthy of learning, but they are unworthy of teaching. We are presented with a serious conundrum as a profession. Our earlier skill instruction, with decontextualized lessons and practice on "textoids" in workbook pages, surely deserved the disdain accorded to it. But I am not convinced that a complete retreat from any and all skill instruction is the answer. The data presented by several researchers who study early reading (see Hiebert & Taylor, 1994) suggests that many kids do not catch the alphabetic principle by sheer immersion in print or by listening to others read aloud. To the contrary, it seems to require careful planning and hard work by dedicated teachers who are willing to balance systematic skill instruction with authentic texts and activities. A third casualty has been strategy instruction. This loss has been particularly difficult for those of us who spent the better part of the early 1980s convincing those who control the tools of instruction that the thoughtful teaching of flexible strategies for making and monitoring meaning ought to replace the direct teaching of skills that were taught as though they were only every to be applied to workbook pages and end of unit test items (Dole, Duffy, Roehler, & Pearson, 1991; Pressley et all, 1992). But the strategy lessons that filled our basals in the middle to late 1980s—direct advice from teachers about how to summarize what one has read, how to use text structure to infer relations among ideas, how find distinguish fact from opinion, how to determine the central thread of a story, how to use context to infer word meanings, and how to make and evaluate the accuracy of predictions—were virtually non-existent in the basals of the early 1990s. Again, there is no bias in whole language or literature-based reading against the learning and use of a whole range of cognitive strategies. There is, as with phonics and grammar, a serious question about whether direct, explicit instruction in how to use them will really help. Again, the advice is to let them emerge from attempts to solve real reading problems and puzzles, the kind students meet in genuine encounters with authentic text. There is reason for disdain, even caricature, of what we did in the 80s. But as I suggested earlier, the answer may be revision rather than rejection of these strategies, which I, for one, think are too important to be left to the vagaries of sheer exposure. A fourth casualty of these holy wars is the emphasis on structure that we have only just gained by the mid 1980s. In fact, it stemmed from roughly the same time frame and from roughly the same source (cognitive psychology) from which we found strategy instruction. And this has not just been a rejection of the tradition of formal grammars identified with traditional English classes. The rejection of structure extends to just about any systematic analysis of the infrastructure of just about any structural account of just about any linguistic phenomenon. So story grammars, rhetorical structures, and intersentential relations are as suspect as formal grammar or rules for usage. As with skills and strategies, reformers do not claim that students should not learn these structural tools; they simply claim that, like skills, they are best inferred from reading and writing authentic texts in the process of making meaning. So, the advocates are comfortable in adopting Frank Smith's (1983) admonition to encourage kids to read like a writer (meaning to read the text with a kind of critical eye toward understanding the tools and tricks of the trade that the author uses to make her points and achieve her effects on readers), but they would likely reject a systematic set of lessons designed to teach and assess children's control of story grammar elements (such as plot, characterization, style, mood, or theme) or some system for dealing with basic patterns of expository text. As with skills and strategies, many of us see an compromise alternative to both the formulaic approach of the early 1980s and the "discovery" approach of the new reforms— dealing with these structural elements as they emanate from stories that a group is currently reading can provide some guidance and useful tools for students and teachers. A fifth casualty is reading in the content areas. Content area texts—expository texts in general, but especially textbook-like entries—are not privileged in our new world of literature-based reading. This is not an implicit criticism of the literature-based reading movement, rather it is a comment the reallocation of curricular time and energy that occurs when a movement gains momentum. There is a certain irony in this development. When I ask teachers about their most serious concerns in literacy instruction, they invariably say—and this is especially true if they teach fourth grade or higher—"Well if you think my kids have trouble with stories, you should come and see what we do with our social studies and science class. That’s where the real fun begins." Our colleagues in the middle school and high school level have worked diligently over the last three decades to convince their colleagues that content area reading instruction, study skills, and attention to text structure is important. It appears to have been destroyed with one stroke of the literary pen. The cost here has been very dear. To enter middle school and high school classrooms in order to examine the role of expository text, is to conclude that it has none. Occasionally teachers assign expository texts for homework, but when students come to class the next day, clearly having avoided the assignment, teachers provide them with an oral version of what they would have gotten out of the text if they had bothered to read it. Most high school teachers have quite literally given up on the textbook for the communication of any important content. While understandable, this approach is, of course, ultimately counterproductive. There comes a time in the lives of students—either when they go to college or it enter the world of work—when others expect them to read and understand informational texts, on their own and in printed form rather than through oral or video transformation. Finally there is the question of what sort of curriculum—skills-based versus whole language—will best suit the needs of linguistic and ethnic minorities. On the one hand, there is substantial evidence in our schools that low income and minority students are far more likely to be exposed to a skills-based curriculum than are wealthier and majority students, who are more likely to receive process oriented curricula (García & Pearson, 1994; Herman & Nolte, n.d.). On the other hand, scholars who have examined curricular issues from a minority perspective (e.g., Delpit, 1988; Delpit, 1991; Reyes, 1992) have noted that majority educators sometimes assume that child-centered, process oriented curricular practices are just what minority students need, when, in fact, they may, in their quest for equity, inadvertently and unintentionally deny minority students access to the power code used in our schools and society. The question that educators must answer is how we can best meet the needs of particular groups of students, as well as their parents. And the very act of asking that question presupposes that we have some idea of what their needs are. That, in turn, assumes the existence of an open system of communication, and that is an assumption that many educators, especially minority educators, would question (e.g., Delpit, 1988). My own suspicion is that when we answer this question, we will end up saying that ethnic and linguistic minorities benefit from a curriculum in which students gain access both to the power code, which may require attention to structure and conventions, and to the "good stuff," which will surely require attention to the more elusive questions of literature, literary experience, and language use in our society. So let me end with my candidate core—my list of the characteristics of effective instruction and thoughtful teachers. The sources of my proposed common core are myriad. I readily and happily admit that many of the elements in my core are completely consistent with the whole language movement, and one could draw the inference that they come directly from whole language. But they are also consistent with much of the work that was rejected, or at least pushed to the margins, in the wake of whole language's ascendancy. Hopefully, however, these principles reveal enough tension with both conservative and liberal agendas that they require more of a transformation than a blending of current ideologies. Thoughtful teachers build code-based instruction on deep knowledge of language and learning. First, teachers take advantage of the natural relationship between oral and written language. They help students, even their youngest students, understand that oral and written language, while surely not identical, emanate from the common wellspring of language that resides deep in our being. As many scholars, both whole language and phonics first advocates, have suggested, once they discover this principle, then they can bring to the task of reading and writing all that they have spent the better part of their lives learning—their oral language. Nothing could be more unfair than to provide texts and instruction that deny them access to this wellspring of inner oral language. Second, teachers help students embrace the alphabetic principle. Students must discover the cipher, as Phil Gough (Gough & Hillinger, 1980) calls it. For once they have learned that great secret—that English writing represents sounds—two entire whole worlds are opened to them. First, that wellspring of inner oral language. Second, through that language, a seemingly unending world of books. Recognition of the importance of deep knowledge of language and literacy will lead us to regard learning to read as an intellectual achievement rather than the acquisition of a process or set of skills. It also has several implications for teaching phonics in our schools. If we accept the relevance of this knowledge, we will . . .
Thoughtful teachers look for authenticity in all aspects of instruction. In the past decade, we have provided students with more authentic texts than were found in many basals (and, by the way, in many earlier trade books); and to a greater extent than previously possible, we are asking students to read and write for real reasons (the kind real people in the real world have) rather than for the fake reasons we give them in school. To put it succinctly, school is often all too school-like. These lessons of authenticity from the whole language movement should be embraced and embraceable to all teachers of reading. One only wonders why we had to have someone come along and point out that our materials and methods were so inauthentic; then again, in education we seem to need to be reminded often that "the emperor has no clothes!" Authenticity is about contexts as well as about texts and tasks. Recent work on situated learning provides us with some hints about what was wrong with our 1980s instruction for comprehension strategies and structural elements of text. We made the same miscalculation for them we did for phonics—viewing them as ends unto themselves. By making them legitimate goals in their own right, we abstracted them from real texts, real problems, and real situations. What goes under the name of skill, strategy, or structure instruction is much more accessible, interesting, and sensible when it is embedded within a real problem, a real text, or a real body of content. There is a paradox here—and this has been the real discovery for me and for others who pushed the earlier, more abstract approach to such instruction—that the best way to help students develop highly transferable, context-free literacy tools is to teach them as if they were entirely context bound. In other words, if you want me to become better at determining the central story thread or evaluating the efficacy of an argument, then don't give me an abstract routine, give me real stories to talk about and real disputes to settle. Thoughtful teachers base their curriculum on positive and optimistic views of student potential. Another attribute of thoughtful teachers for which we can thank the whole language movement is a different, more generous, and, I would argue, more accurate set of assumptions about what students know and can do when they show up at school. We can assume that students are in classes to succeed not fail, to learn how to be independent rather than to rely on us for every bit of knowledge they will gain. We can assume that there is a level at which every student comes to us already literate. That is the point of the emergent literacy perspective. Even the three year old who recognizes that if an arch is in sight, a hamburger is not far away has learned the basic principle of signs—that our world is filled with things that "stand for" other things. If we assume that young children are already literate, we are more likely to engage them in tasks in which they can demonstrate their literacy and use those successes as bridges to even more challenging literacy activities. This, by the way, is exactly the point that I tried to make 18 years ago in Teaching Reading Comprehension (Pearson & Johnson, 1978)—that a teacher's job is always to bridge from the known to the new. Because there really is no other choice. Kids are who they are. They know what they know. They bring what they bring. Our job is not to wish that students knew more or knew differently. Our job is to turn each students' knowledge, along with the diversity of knowledge we will encounter in a classroom of learners, into a curricular strength rather than an instructional inconvenience. We can do that only if we hold high expectations for all students, convey great respect for the knowledge and culture they bring to the classroom, and offer lots of support in helping them achieve those expectations. Thoughtful teachers demonstrate and model literate behavior at every opportunity. Teachers can and should share the agonies and ecstasies of their own literacy development, letting kids in on their own trade secrets about how to approach the range of literacy tasks we provide in our curricula. As long as we remember that the purpose of demonstration is to help students do it on their own rather than to do it for them, I think we can be genuinely helpful. I would also suggest that if we are serious about this modeling, sometimes, when we watch a teacher demonstrating how to solve a particular literacy puzzle, it will look a whole lot like what we used to call direct or explicit instruction. And that does not bother me because it is not skill instruction that I object to but rather the rigid, formulaic, and decontextualized kind of instruction that has stripped skill learning from real contexts of reading and writing. Thoughtful teachers scaffold the learning environment to help students cope with complexity. Scaffolding is our only hope to help students cope with the complexity of learning to read, especially if we reject, as I think we must, the principle of decomposition. It is better to provide extensive scaffolding to help students complete authentic, and perhaps quite difficult, tasks than it is to decompose tasks into components and thereby decontextualize them to a point where students can no longer see any purpose to it. Scaffolding is a tool that allows us, as teachers, to intervene in an environment and provide the cueing, questioning, coaching, corroboration, and plain old information needed to allow students to engage meaningfully in a task, before they are able to complete it independently, while they gradually gain control of it. Thoughtful teachers place a premium on student engagement and control. Any program that, or any teacher who, reserves all rights of curriculum planning and all rights of assessment and evaluation fails to comprehend the importance of real engagement and true empowerment. While teachers must be the curriculum leaders in classrooms, students need opportunities to assume responsibility for their own literacy development by participating in curriculum decision-making and self-assessment. Otherwise, how will they ever decide whether they have understood or communicated well when they are on their own? Thoughtful teachers strive for integration from a base of integrity. I chose these words carefully in order to emphasize the ironic juxtaposition of two words with the same root. Integrity implies a wholeness and validity to a phenomenon; we talk about preserving or destroying the integrity of something. And the irony fits here: It would be a high price to pay if the cost of an integrated language arts curriculum were that its components (reading, writing, and oral language) were given short shrift in teaching and learning. On the other hand, curricular integration may be a necessary step in ensuring the integrity of any of these components; that is, reading or writing may achieve full integrity only when they are taught in a way that demonstrates their essential connection to other language arts and to other curricular areas, such as math, science, and social studies. All too often I think that our attempts to integrate curriculum do not go very far, do not help students develop the insights and the infrastructure they need to read, write, or for that matter, to do mathematics, science, or history well. Integration, either of the language arts or between language and other curricular areas, works well as long as we pay attention to the integrity of each of the elements earmarked for integration. This is not to say that we should not look for, promote, and encourage continuities between reading and writing. We should. This is not to say that we should not encourage reading and writing across the curriculum. We should. This is not to say that we should not take advantage of the phonics learning that goes on in invented (or as I understand we now call it, temporary) spelling to boost growth in learning the phonics students need for reading. We should. But we should not rely solely on reading good literature to teach the writing process. We should not rely solely on writing to ensure reading comprehension. We should not rely solely on invented spelling to ensure the development of phonics knowledge. Examining things from the other side of the curricular fence, when it comes to learning in science and history, we should not rely on a few books about science or history to supplant a well-developed, well-articulated curriculum. Integration, Yes. But from a base of integrity. Thoughtful teachers build and respect community. We must, I believe, help students learn to be active members of literacy communities—communities that provide scaffolding when the going gets tough, communities filled with real live peers with whom to exchange oral and written communications that render our activities authentic, and communities that celebrate and honor our individual and collective accomplishments. Such communities provide students with endless opportunities to read, write, speak, and listen to, with, and for one another. The principle of community must come into play in another sense, also. The literacy that is spawned in our schools, if it is to survive and receive full nurture, must be extended into the communities and the homes in which children live. Conversely, those communities and homes, and the language and traditions that define them, must extend into the schools; otherwise our rhetoric about respect for cultural traditions will be empty and our children will be marginalized by insensitive curricula (see Moll et al, 199x). Thoughtful teachers are always looking for connections. These other principles really devolve into a single principle—the notion of connectedness. Everything we do with our students in our classrooms must be connected to the rest of their lives in every conceivable way. To other curricula. To everyday life. To oral and written texts. To their families and their cultures. To their work. To their leisure. To the core of their existence. Disconnectedness is at the heart of many of our social and most of our educational problems. Indeed, I would say all of them. Helping kids reconnect and building curricula worth connecting to—those are the most important professional challenges we face. There you have it. My search for a common core on which to build thoughtful curricula, on which to base thoughtful instruction, on which to build consensus and civility, from which to transcend ideology so that we can focus our energy on the literacy of our students rather than political correctness of our curricular claims. Coda In closing I want to make a couple of highly specific pleas to those who read this essay. The first is that I hope teachers, either at the state level or the district level, will do everything possible to regain some of the ground that appears to have been lost on assessment. I, for one, still have great faith in performance and portfolio assessment as the tools we need to support curricula of the type that would be consistent with the principles I have explicated. And if it is financially or politically impossible to resurrect them as wide-scale efforts, I hope that all the good work done in several states will find its way into local assessments. The second plea is to regard the midcourse correction in curriculum that appears to be playing itself out in our schools with a kind of cautious optimism. Based upon the principles I have espoused and what I have said about phonics, it is clear that I too see the need for some recalibration. But we should not confuse recalibration with retreat. The principles that guided the evolution and ascendancy of literature based reading and whole language should not be swept aside in the recalibration. I am not alone in this plea. Even the so-called champions of a return to a world of phonics and skills (e.g., Adams, 1991; Hiebert and Taylor, 1994; Stahl, 199X) are not advocating a retreat from the progress we made in the last decade. To the contrary, their curricular recommendations include strong positions on authenticity of text and task, just as mine have. What I hope for is that what we can achieve is not so much a REcalibration (with the emphasis on REturning to some former view of curriculum) as a transformation to some higher common ground. My final plea to all of you is to consider becoming a member of my new political party—The Radical Middle. But I do not invite you into that company lightly or in jest, but in all seriousness. At the outset, I shared my concern that the voices of those who are as sympathetic as they are resistant to both extremes are not being heard. My greatest fear is that if the only voices heard in this debate are those from the far sides of the room, one of them will win. And given what I know about what happens when professional groups go up against well-organized political groups, I would not bet on the profession in such a battle. I think that the radical right is winning control of our statehouses and is doing everything possible to win control of local school boards. I believe we stand a chance of preserving, extending, and refining the good work we have accomplished only by taking a stance that invites more folks under a new and wider umbrella than any we have erected before—so that even more students stand a chance of gaining access to the intellectual freedom that comes with the independence they achieve when they can read for themselves. The motto for the Radical Middle is simple: Better to be helpful than politically correct. Better to be involved that theoretically pure. Better to be searching for common ground than for ideological distinction. Better to be in the middle of a road headed somewhere than stuck in a ditch on either side.
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