INTERPRETING ACROSS THE ABYSS: A HERMENEUTIC EXPLORATION OF INITIAL LITERACY DEVELOMENT BY HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS WITH LIMITED FORMAL SCHOOLING A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Jill A. Watson IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Martha Bigelow, Advisor July, 2010 © Jill A. Watson, 2010 i Acknowledgements I am first of all deeply indebted to all the refugee and immigrant students and their families whom I have had the honor to know, in school and beyond, and who are in such a significant sense experiential co-creators of this project. It is the path we have walked together that brings the basis of any understanding of this topic and its urgency. I remember all the moments, and pray always that the world treats you well. I want to thank my teaching colleagues, as well as administrators and staff, who over the last twenty-five years have inspired and supported me with your good work and good will. We have had some amazing times together that I will not forget, and that sometimes made a real difference. To the monks of Blue Cloud Abbey and the American Indian Cultural Research Center in Marvin, South Dakota, goes a special acknowledgement of your kind hospitality. I am grateful for the time I have spent with you and the spiritual and intellectual life you have shared with me. And especially for the radical unconditionality. Sincere thanks to my committee, David O’Brien, Jane Plihal, and Connie Walker, for your valuable comments and encouragement. Each of you has inspired me with your passion and erudition. Yes, let’s pursue the commune idea. I would like to thank Jessie Eastman, Graduate Studies Assistant in Curriculum and Instruction, for your patience and helpfulness—it has meant so much. To Dee Tedick, thank you for your friendship and support, in particular your support for my readmission. Kristen McMaster, thank you for every minute of our professional collaborations—I have ii learned so much from you about research and about being a true colleague. I am grateful to Chet Bowers, who took the trouble to review my manuscript and provide helpful comments and encouragement. Sincere thanks to my former advisor and constant friend Dale Lange, who challenged me with his passion and intellectual curiosity to go the way of the rubber dinghy. Your support over the years and presence at my defense has meant more than I can say. To my dear friend Ann Mabbott, a superlative person, deepest thanks for many years of friendship and confidence in me which often surpassed my own—you have made such an enormous difference in my life. To Martha Bigelow, my amazing advisor and great scholar of older preliterate L2 learners, go my sincerest acknowledgement and thanks. You have been an incredibly perceptive, sensitive, smart mentor and role model to me over the past three years; it is astounding how you always know the right thing to say to get things flowing again. I am so grateful for your scholarly mentorship, wise counsel, patient guidance, and faith in my work. Deepest regard and gratitude to David Smith, true companion in the way. The journey is unimaginable without you. Finally I want to thank my dear husband, Marty, and my children, Simone and Dominik, who have tolerated me, comforted me, and believed in me over the years. You are my other great teachers of unconditionality and I love you. Ecce venio, Domine, ut faciam voluntatem tuam. iii Dedication For my parents, Bob and Loretta, who taught me. iv Abstract The presence of older learners with limited formal literacy and schooling in U.S. high schools constitutes an intense and unique instance of the encounter of contextually oriented oral indigenous culture and the distanciated culture of high literacy and digitacy. Drawing on the work of Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and others, I describe the distance between the noetic lifeworlds of orality and literacy as a semiotic abyss across which interpretation is difficult but necessary. The scholarly stance required is one of humility—to fail to engage the alterity of orality with sensitive attunement is an act of continued imperialism, which is morally unacceptable, epistemologically naïve, and ecologically suicidal in cognitive and natural terms. Following Marie Battiste, Enrique Dussel, David G. Smith, and others, this philosophical study locates the phenomenon of initial literacy development by high school English language learners within the history of Western epistemology, colonialism, and globalization, in particular the legacies of Kant’s logic of emancipative reason, transformed in school contexts into a logic of sacrificial reason wherein the primitive ways of orality are sacrificed to hyperliteracy in the environment of reified, standardized education in the United States. Illustrative anecdotes, poetry, and assertorial argument are used to evoke instances of the encounter or orality and literacy in school settings. Refuting the primacy of both idealism and positivism in society and education, the study is inspired both topically and methodologically by hermeneutics, the ancient art of interpretation, as a way of articulating the fusion of horizons between severed hyperliteracy and oral ways of knowing in context, so that a conversation v regarding the role and instruction of literacy remains unforeclosed and capable of sustaining a common future in which oral and literate noeses are respected. A pedagogy of reciprocity between orality and literacy is proposed as a path to the practical survival of older oral newcomers who must acquire the artificially-toned manners of representational culture, and to the ontic survival of the hypostacized Western self trapped in triumphal determinacy. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………...……………………………………….i Dedication……………………………………….……………………………………...iii Abstract….……………………………………….……………………………………..iv Table of Contents………………………………….…………………………………....vi List of Abbreviations…………………………..………………………………………..ix Etymological References……………………..….……….……………………………...x Chapter 1: Interpreting Across the Abyss…………………………...…………………..1 Introduction…………………………………………………...…………………1 Scholarly Humility……………………………………...……………….3 Elucidating the Title……………………………………………...……………...5 Interpreting………………………………………………...…………….5 The Abyss………………………………………………………………..6 Situating the Study……………………………………………………...……….9 Educational and Philosophical Traditions………………………..…….10 Topical Focus of the Study…………………………………………..…12 Discussion of Designators……………………………………………………...13 Methodological Orientation…………………………………………………....16 Interpretive Thematic Focus of the Study……………………………...17 Chapter 2: Review of Literature………….…………………………………………….19 Second Language Acquisition Studies………………………………………....19 Curricular and Instructional Research……………………………………….…22 On the Need to Customize Programs and Instruction………………….29 Consequences of Literacy Approach……………………………………..…….32 Effects of Phonetic Alphabetic Literacy…………………………….….34 Cognition in the Absence of Alphabetic Literacy…………………...…37 A Wider Lens: Epistemological and Political Approaches…………………….41 Postmodern Perspectives……………………………………………….41 Critical Perspectives……………………………………………………43 Indigenous Perspectives………………………………………………..47 Critique of Neocolonialism…………………………………….47 Critique of Neocolonialism in Education………………………52 Holism and Spirituality of Indigenous Knowledge…………….55 Western Scholarship in Support of Indigenous Perspectives…………..58 Review Summary………………………………………………………………61 Contribution of the Study………………………………………………………64 Questions Guiding the Study…………………………………………………...66 Chapter 3: Hermeneutic Orientation of the Study……………………………………...67 Mythological Origins……………………………………………………….…..67 Historical Antecedents of Modern Hermeneutics……………………………...69 Epistemological / Semiotic Background of Hermeneutics……………..70 vii Hermeneutics from the Classical Period to 1800………………………71 19th Century Hermeneutics……………………………………………..73 20th Century Hermeneutics……………………………………………..79 Gadamer and Hermeneutics……………………………………………84 Contemporary Hermeneutics…………………………………………...92 Hermeneutics and Education…………………………………………...94 Synthesis of Hermeneutic Understandings……………………………………..94 Hermeneutic Design of the Present Study……………………………………...98 Situatedness of the Interpreter………………………………………...102 Constructed Anecdote and Interpretation……………………………..103 Summary of Hermeneutic Orientation………………………………………..106 Chapter 4: The Power of Medium………..…………………………………………...108 On the Danger and Importance of Interpreting the Impact of Media…………110 On the Under-inclusion of Orality as a Factor………..………………112 The Challenge of Engaging with Orality in Schools: An Anecdote….116 Grasping Orality: Challenges to the Literate Imagination……………122 An Anecdotal Example of the Power of Medium…………………….126 On the Limitations of Language for Expressing Truth and Meaning...129 Some Effects of Alphabetic and Academic Literacy…………………………132 Benefits and Pitfalls of Phonetic Alphabetic Literacy: An Anecdote...135 The Ambivalent Legacy of Alphabetic Literacy……………………...136 The Odd Phenomenon of Learned Latin……………………………...138 Literacy and Digitacy…………………………………………………………140 Orality and Digitacy in Conflict: An Anecdote……………………….144 Summary of the Power of Medium…………………………………………...146 Chapter 5: The Noesis of Orality……….…………………………………………….148 Background to Oral Noesis…………………………………………………...148 Stages of Orality………………………………………………………149 Metacharacteristics of Sound and Memory…………………………...151 Characteristics of Oral and Indigenous