Literacy for a Diverse Society: Perspectives, Practices and Policies Edited by Elfrieda H. Hiebert Literacy for a Diverse Society: Perspectives, Practices, and Policies Elfrieda H. Hiebert University of Colorado, Boulder Reading Essentials Reprint Series January, 2014 TextProject, Inc. SANTA CRUZ, CALIFORNIA textproject.org © 1991, 2014 Elfrieda H. Hiebert. Some rights reserved. Originally published in 1991 by Teacher’s College, Columbia University, New York, NY This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. “TextProject” and the TextProject logo are trademarks of TextProject, Inc. Cover photo © istockphoto.com/CEFutcher. All rights reserved. Used under license. Contents Foreword by Frederick Erickson vii Preface xi Introduction Elfrieda H. Hiebert Part 1: Perspectives 7 2 Literacy and Schooling: A Sociocognitive Perspective 9 Judith A. Langer 3 Social and Cultural Constraints on Students' Access to School Knowledge 28 Margaret A. Eisenhart and Katharine Cutts-Dougherty 4 Diversity and Constancy in Human Thinking: Critical Literacy as Amplifier of Intellect and Experience 44 Robert Calfee and Sharon Nelson-Barber 5 Cultural Literacy Reconsidered 58 Ernest R. House, Carol Emmer, and Nancy Lawrence 6 Redefining Literacy and Literacy Contexts: Discovering a Community of Learners 75 Ofelia B. Miramontes and Nancy L. Commins Part II: Practices 91 7 Characteristics of Literacy Programs for Language-Minority Students 93 Robert Rueda 8 Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Classroom Discourse and Literacy 108 Pamela McCollum 9 Promoting Literacy Through Classroom Dialogue 122 Annemarie Sullivan Palincsar and Yvonne Marie David 10 Task and Talk Structures That Foster Literacy 141 Elfrieda H. Hiebert and Charles W. Fisher v vi CONTENTS 11 A Process Approach to Literacy Instruction for Spanish-Speaking Students: In Search of a Best Fit 157 Marfa de la Luz Reyes 12 Enhancing Literacy Through Cooperative Learning 172 MichaelS. Meloth 13 Two-Tiered Scaffolding: Congruent Processes of Teaching and Learning 184 Janet S. Gaffney and Richard C. Anderson 14 Fostering Early Literacy Through Parent Coaching 199 Patricia A. Edwards Part III: Policies 215 15 Policy and the Rationalization of Schooling 217 Rexford Brown 16 Literature: Whose Heritage? 228 Arthur N. Applebee 17 Children Who Find Learning to Read Difficult: School Responses to Diversity 237 Richard L. Allington 18 The Role of Assessment in a Diverse Society 253 Georgia Earnest Garcia and P David Pearson 19 Negative Policies for Dealing With Diversity: When Does Assessment and Diagnosis Turn Into Sorting and Segregation? 279 Lorrie A. Shepard About the Contributors 299 Index 307 Foreword When I read this book, I thought of Renee . She was an African-American second grader who was in trouble with her teacher for not finishing some of her worksheets. Both Renee and her teacher, who was white, seemed hurt and angry. Once, when the teacher was at the end of her patience for the day and we were walking together out to the playground for recess, she said to me, "Why do I bother trying to get her to finish? She'll be a hooker by the time she's 15 ." That made me furious. But what was going on didn 't seem to be blatant, overt racism. I knew the teacher was conscientious. As time went on I came to see some ways in which, from her point of view, her frustration with Renee made sense. I took account of what I was able to learn about her beliefs about teaching and about how children learn to read and write. Some aspects of those beliefs may have originated in- and were certainly sustained by­ her school district's policies and conceptions of what was reasonable and desirable in literacy instruction. Yet, after straining to understand and not to condemn the teacher out of hand, I was still angry. I didn't agree with the sense that was being made. It seemed to me that Renee and her teacher had been caught by each other in a tragic bind. Each seemed partly responsible for producing the situation with the other. It seemed that from the bind they were in they were unlikely to escape all by themselves. How did Renee and her teacher get into so tangled a knot? This collec­ tion of papers sheds light on that question by considering the social and cultural constitution of literacy and its acquisition. The book reviews a broad range of phenomena and issues. They include root conceptions and interests in literacy that are taken for granted as reasonable and just by persons and groups in society and that, in the press of doing daily business in schools , are rarely subjected to critical scrutiny. These are conceptions and interests that become institutionalized in school work, in intellectual discourse, and in the political and economic influences on how Americans try to understand, plan, conduct, and regulate educational processes and outcomes with the hope of improving them. The book takes an approach that is distinctive in that while its papers focus on a single area of subject matter, they manage to consider a wide range of connected phenomena and issues . The contributors examine not only the arguments Americans have about how and what to teach as literacy Vll viii FOREWORD in school but in how to do schooling itself. This book connects conceptual work on the nature of literacy and its acquisition, not only with empirical research on how literacy is taught in classrooms but also with the workings of school organization, governance, and policy within which local school practices are embedded. Those connections are rarely so comprehensively and so pointedly made. Yet it is just such a combination of scope and speci­ ficity that has been absent from current discourse on educational reform. The reform debates have failed, for the most part, to take account of the concrete struggles of classroom life and the particular unexamined beliefs and insti­ tutional arrangements that may be exacerbating those struggles. Without being at all doctrinaire, this book's analysis shows that the tugs of war over literacy in the classroom and in American society are fundamentally interest­ and value-laden, which is to say, that they are political in nature. A "constructivist" perspective on thinking, learning, and literacy is the conceptual thread that links the major sections of the book. In recent years, we have seen emerging a set of family resemblances in orientation by which current efforts in psychology and linguistics, sociology and anthropology, and literary theory and philosophy can be seen as joined in spirit. By col­ lecting review articles that share in this family connection of perspectives, this volume shows literacy in American schooling as a set of constructing practices that are organized within and across the activities of individual learners, of classrooms as immediate scenes of pedagogical interaction and curricular engagement, of schools as formal organizations, and of society as a whole. If you are familiar with the full range of issues presented, you may want to read this book from front to back. It begins with discussions of construc­ tivist perspectives on literacy instruction, continues with papers that review classroom practices, and concludes with essays on policy and accountability processes that frame and influence the work of local teachers, students, and administrators. If you are more familiar with some topics than others, I sug­ gest that you read the first few chapters in Part I, skip to the first and final chapters of the last section, and then work your way back through the rest of the book. This is because, for most of us, the connections between policy and the basic assumptions underlying literacy and its teaching are not at all well-known. On the issues we face in literacy instruction, there has been a very unfortunate separation between policy decisions and processes and the substantive choices practitioners must make about what and how to teach in the classroom. Reading all the sections of the book gives us a more compre­ hensive sense than we would otherwise have of what is necessary if real change is going to happen. What we see is daunting-a multidimensional web of mutually rein- FOREWORD ix forcing assumptions and practices in teaching, assessment, school organiza­ tion, finance, and governmental decision, which result in the provision of the most marginal kinds of literacy for the poorest of our nation's children. Only by making the web visible can we begin to see how its structuring of coun­ tervailing tensions operates and where the crucial points in the system are located, toward which change efforts should be directed. A final note on diversity. Some of the chapters in the middle section of this book point to a root assumption that research shows to be false but that normal policy and practice take for granted. This is the assumption that the children of marginally literate parents-and in America today that means persons from ethnic, racial, and linguistic minority groups who in another generation will be majority groups-come to school virtually lacking any knowledge of or desire for literacy. The school's job, in that view, is to mo­ tivate those children by placing them on the bottom rung of a ladder of skills and having them practice simple skills. Here is where literacy learning be­ comes a moral tale. Because in our society literacy is culturally defined as good-and inherently so-if a learner doesn't try hard and persist at practice on the rung where he or she has been placed, that can be seen as a sinful act.