If learning to read is a “linguistic task”, what’s wrong with Whole Language?

Although it is some years since I have worked clinically, my initial qualification was in Speech Language Pathology and I have always had a particular interest in, and passion for language – both spoken and written. I love spending time with infants and toddlers and observing their amazing emergent grasp of the linguistic code – surely one of the greatest wonders of being human. My research activities in recent years have had a strong focus on “vulnerable” learners and I’ve had the enormous privilege of spending a lot of time in primary schools, interacting with teachers about (in particular) the teaching of reading in the early years.

A large focus of the presentations I give to teachers is explaining the linguistic basis of learning to read. This entails discussion of the fact that unlike learning to talk and understand, learning to read and write is biologically “unnatural” – i.e. humans are pre-programmed in an evolutionary sense for the former, but not the latter. This concept is often quite a revelation for teachers and I see many “ah hah!” moments in the course of these discussions.

I often use an analogy of a child having to “cross a bridge” in the early years of school – from talking and listening on one side, to reading and writing on the other. If I’m feeling particularly prosaic on a given day, I might mention the crocodile-infested waters underneath….

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While some fortunate children will metaphorically “skip” across the bridge and suddenly find themselves on the other side without having had much awareness that they were even on a bridge, many will find the experience one that requires conscious focus, guidance and support from adults, and carefully-paced milestones. Complex genetic and social factors no doubt account for such variability, but classrooms need to cater to all children, not just the very able.

Proponents of Whole Language-based approaches to the teaching of reading argue that reading is as natural as talking, and so simply requires immersion in text-rich experiences, in order for children to find themselves on the far side of the bridge.

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This argument fails a number of reality checks however, the first of which is that children’s acquisition of oral language, while strongly “pre-programmed” in an evolutionary sense, still requires enormous environmental input and interaction, in the form of exposure, simplification, repetition, imitation, expansions, recasts, and so on. There is something of a “dose-response” relationship between early language exposure and verbal skills in early childhood, such that this is a phenomenon that sits on a social gradient (see references below).  

Secondly, decades of cognitive psychology research tells us that the acquisition of skilled reading draws heavily on the child’s psycholinguistic knowledge about how their language works. Now of course we can’t sit down and interview a four-year old about her psycholinguistic knowledge, but we can extrapolate important information from spontaneous language samples and from the 1:1 administration of formal language measures.

By “psycholinguistic knowledge”, we are referring to the child’s grasp of grammatical rules (e.g. in English, the fact that in order to make a noun plural, we generally add an “s”), knowledge of narrative structure (the logical and sequential way in which experiences are organised and presented for the benefit of a listener), vocabulary use and comprehension, and knowledge of grammatical conventions to link words and express increasingly complex (e.g. embedded) ideas. Knowledge of the sound system (phonology / phonemic awareness) is critical, as it is the means by which a child can segment and blend sounds to manipulate and integrate word components. Finally, knowledge of pragmatics teaches the child the subtle and sometimes confusing social conventions around how language is used in a variety of communicative contexts.  We typically learn many of these rules through the process of breaking them, and then receiving some kind of corrective input from a nearby adult, such as a parent or teacher.

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Bear in mind too that all of these psycholinguistic milestones need to be mastered in both the receptive (comprehension) and expressive (spoken) modalities. Further, children need to master the understanding and use of literal language as well as figurative, or idiomatic language. Everyday communication would be quite boring if we only ever said exactly what we mean. Instead, we make our exchanges more interesting and entertaining (but often more confusing!) by using linguistic devices such as metaphor, sarcasm, and humour.

As children's grasp of oral language develops, they acquire the ability to think and talk about language and how it works, i.e., metalinguisitic abilities, and these can then be drawn on in the early years classroom and in everyday life, e.g. to explain why a joke is funny. 

Oral language, then, is one of those deceptively complex processes that by virtue of its pervasive presence in our lives can appear simple, or even inconsequential, as a developmental achievement.  

It is neither.

So when educators argue the virtues of Whole Language as a reading instruction approach, they are conveniently lumping together a raft of linguistic microskills that the child is (a) still acquiring and refining and (b) needs to draw on in order to cross the bridge from talking and listening on this side, to reading and writing on the other. To the untrained eye, however these skills are not observable or accessible.

The fact that “Whole Language” has the word “language” in its name is both unfortunate and misleading, because learning to read IS a linguistic task, but Whole Language does not deliver, unpack, decipher and value-add the linguistic goods that all children need to acquire in order to learn to read. The fact that some (fortunate) children will learn to read in Whole Language classrooms simply attests to the enormous variability that teachers in early years settings need to address.

My driving motivation is to provide all children with access to the life-changing opportunities that await their arrival on the other side of the bridge. I'm sure this is the driving motivation of all who are invested in early years education, however examination of the research evidence shows uneven results.

That Whole Language is an approach that fosters passion about children's literature is laudable. However, direct instruction by teachers who understand the psycholinguistic properties of the language of instruction is key to shepherding more children to the other side of the reading bridge, safe from those crocodile-jaws of early academic failure.

References

Hart, B. & Risley, T. (1995). Meaningful Differences in Everyday Parenting and Intellectual Development in Young American Children. Baltimore: Brookes.

Hoff, E. (2003). The specificity of environmental influence: Socioeconomic status affects early vocabulary development via maternal speech. Child Development (74), 1368-1378.  

Locke, A., Ginsborg, J. & Peers, I. (2002). Development and disadvantage: Implications for the early years and beyond. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 37, 3-15.

Weisleder, A. & Fernald, A. (2013). Talking to children matters: Early language experience strengthens processing and builds vocabulary. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2143-2152.

(C) Pamela Snow 2014

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Reading Recovery and Cassandra's Curse

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Last week, I attended an excellent, though quite depressing seminar organised by Learning Disabilities Australia, entitled Reading Recovery and the Failure of the New Zealand National Literacy Strategy, presented by Professors Bill Tunmer and James Chapman (both of Massey University). A summary of the content of the presentation can be found in this paper.

The seminar was very well attended, with senior policy folk from the state and Catholic sectors present, as well as a number of education and speech pathology academics and practitioners, teachers, tutors, and other interested parties. The questions and comments from the floor were many and I think people would have stayed on for hours continuing the discussion if that had been possible. 

So why did I find it depressing? The first depressing aspect was the established evidence on Reading Recovery's failure to deliver (as per PIRLS data) on the stated aims of its developer, the late Dame Marie Clay (1993), to 

".....help children acquire efficient patterns of learning to enable them to work at the average level of their classmates and to continue to progress satisfactorily in their own school's instructional program. When recognized training accompanies the use of procedures contained in this book, success rates are consistently high and surprising."

The second depressing aspect was the fact that policy makers (and as a consequence many, though by no means all, teachers) have been slow to acknowledge and act on the irrefutable data that Reading Recovery is not delivering on its promises. That it is in particular, leaving behind children who come from low socio-economic status families and schools is especially disappointing and unforgivable. 

No-one would disagree with the importance of helping struggling learners to catch-up, and the earlier the better. That's where the consensus in this debate ends, however, and the so-called "reading wars" saga rears its ugly head. I don't intend to deconstruct this debate here (plenty of metaphorical ink has already been spilled on that one), but it is important to note that Reading Recovery is a "child" of the Whole Language movement. In essence, this approach to teaching reading, espoused in the late 1960s and 1970s by Kenneth Goodman stemmed from the attractive (though unsubstantiated) claim that children can acquire literacy skills in much the same way that they acquire oral language skills - through experiential immersion. While this idea may have had strong face validity and appeal to the educational zeitgeist, it lacked one critical ingredient - an empirically derived theoretical basis. In fact, we now know (and probably knew back then) that unlike learning to speak and understand, learning to read and write are biologically "unnatural" acts (Gough & Hillinger, 1980) requiring sustained specific instruction. As Melbourne Speech Pathologist Alison Clarke explains in this engaging YouTube clip phonics-based reading instruction was suddenly deemed "old fashioned" and was pretty much universally abandoned in Australian schools (and teacher-training courses) in the 1970s, in favour of Whole Language-based approaches. 

Many aspects of Reading Recovery have long perplexed me, most notably the question of what is being "recovered" for children who had not acquired the requisite skills in the first place? Secondly, I don't understand why any education system would adopt a reading instruction approach (Whole Language) that assumes a 15-20% failure rate (and need for expensive and intensive intervention) by the end of the first year of school ("failure" here referring to the lowest performing students in the class - those whom Clay argued could be brought up to the norm via Reading Recovery). Why not simply employ effective, evidence-based teaching approaches for all, and move the whole curve to the right?

Imagine a hospital administrator deciding that operating theatre infection control guidelines were "old-fashioned" and unwieldy, and so proclaiming that henceforth, we'll dispense with strict hand-washing protocols, letting practitioners use their own judgement on this, and rely instead on people's natural immunity. As a fall-back, anyway, we have postoperative antibiotics for the tail of the surgical curve who (inevitably) happen to develop a serious infection. Of course those in that tail will already be disadvantaged in other ways, e.g., being older, or having multiple comorbidities, making their immune systems compromised and their benefit from antibiotics equivocal at best, and non-existent at worst. Let's not even try to calculate the cost to the system (and society) of increased length of stay and lost social and economic productivity. 

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Of course such a situation would not occur and most would read that scenario and consider it laughable. But why are health and education so different with respect to the way in which evidence is derived, critiqued, and applied?

One key factor might be that when hospitals adopt systems that don't work, patients die, and people can see that patients die. When schools adopt systems that don't work, no-one dies and practitioners are largely shielded from the detrimental effects of their practices, however pernicious these effects may be over the longer term.

However just as we can't hold individual doctors accountable for policies enacted in hospitals, we can't hold individual teachers to account for policies enacted by their schools or education sectors. We must, however, hold policy makers and those who are responsible for teacher training to account to apply evidence ethically. The Whole Language-Reading Recovery grip on teacher education and early years practice is doing a huge disservice to the most vulnerable and socially disadvantaged learners. These are the very learners who need school to accelerate their progress relative to more advantaged peers. The evidence presented by Tunmer and Chapman shows unequivocally that such acceleration is not occurring in NZ, and there is no evidence (of which I am aware) to indicate that it occurs here either. 

I teach medical students enrolled in an undergraduate MBBS. Putting aside for a moment differences in university entrance requirements for medicine Vs teaching, a major difference I see between these students and those in education (whom I have also taught) is their capacity and willingness to question and challenge evidence that is presented to them. In medicine, we know we would be producing graduates who are frankly dangerous to the community if they do not exit university as astute life-long consumers of new research and of edicts from "on high" (e.g. hospital administrators) that they should adopt or abandon a particular practice. Student doctors are taught to "argue their corner" and to do so using the language of evidence, not anecdote. Treating a medical condition is a matter of science (blended with positive personal qualities such as warmth and respect), not a matter of personal ideology (with a few notable exceptions, such as termination of pregnancy, where guidelines exist for how doctors should deal with their personal biases so as not to disadvantage their patient).

In the case of reading instruction however, we seem to have a terrain that has elements of religious boundary-setting around what teachers (and their educators) can and cannot be challenged over. This is ethically indefensible and if allowed to continue will simply perpetuate the widening gap between the "haves" and "have nots" in the early years classroom and beyond. There is nothing progressive, socially or educationally, about standing by and being complicit in maintaining such an unfair status quo.

Academics who have interrogated the evidence on Reading Recovery and found it to be wanting seem to have been afflicted by Cassandra's Curse - the ability to predict the future alongside the sure knowledge that they will be ignored.

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References and further reading

Buckingham, J., Wheldall, K. & Beaman-Wheldall, R. (2013).Why Jaydon can't read: The triumph of ideology over evidence in teaching reading. Policy, 29(3), 21-32. 

Carter, M. & Wheldall, K. (2008). Why can't a teacher be more like a scientist? Science, pseudoscience and the art of teaching. Australasian Journal of Special Education, 32:1, 5-21.

Clay, M. M. (1993). Reading Recovery: A Guidebook for Teachers in Training.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Gough, P. B., & Hillinger, M. L. (1980). Learning to read: An unnatural act. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 30, 179-196.

Learning Disabilities Australia https://www.ldaustralia.org/literacy-reading.html 

Reynolds, M. & Wheldall, K. (2007). Reading Recovery 20 years down the track: Looking forward, looking back. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, 54, 199-223.

Tunmer, W.E., Chapman, J.W., Greaney, K.T., Prochnow, J.E., & Arrow, A.W. (2013). Why the New Zealand national literacy strategy has failed and what can be done about it: Evidence from the progress in international reading literacy study (PIRLS) and Reading Recovery monitoring reports. Australian Journal of Learning Disabilities, 18(2), 139-180.

(C) Pamela Snow 2014 Tweet

The language of language impairment. Roses by other names can still be thorny.

The recent issue of the International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders focussing on nomenclature for children with impaired language skills is both timely and thought-provoking. The open access papers are written by pre-eminent experts in child language research and provide an important melting pot of current ideas, tensions, conundrums and importantly, some suggestions as to sensible ways forward. I have only managed a “first pass” read of the papers so far and need to sit and re-read them to absorb them properly, but offer here some initial ideas and responses – which may change of course, as my re-reading helps the ideas percolate further.

Firstly, let me say I have been as guilty as the next person of being inconsistent in how I use terminology in relation to language difficulties / disorders / impairments / problems / deficits. Ironically though, the one term I have been able to comfortably avoid in recent years is Specific Language Impairment (SLI), because my research with young people in the youth justice and child protection systems tells me that their language difficulties, while both marked and common, are not at all “specific” in the sense in which this word has been used in the SLI literature over the past two decades.  In our 2011 paper describing the expressive  and receptive language skills of 100 young offenders completing custodial orders, in whom (using what was probably an overly conservative cut-off) we identified 48% as “language impaired”, and observed that:

“While it is possible that some may meet diagnostic criteria for Specific Language Impairment (SLI), it is more likely that the patterns of decrement evident in this group are of a generalized and non-specific nature - reflecting perhaps early disruptions in attachment, low parent–child attunement, and other socio-environmental factors that militate against the development of robust oral language skills” 

(Snow & Powell, 2011, pp. 486-87).

I agree with Reilly et al. when they state (p.423) that

 “…making a conceptual distinction between ‘real’ language impairment and children for whom the environment has caused their language impairment may be simplistic”. 

It follows, then, that I support the view that the descriptor “specific” is unhelpful, both nosologically and with respect to allocation of intervention services. Many children and adolescents have clinical profiles that reflect clear need with respect to their language skills, yet these are anything other than “specific” in the sense in which this term was intended to be applied. I am comfortable describing young offenders as having “language impairments” because their expressive and receptive language skills are not adequate to enable them to meet everyday social, academic, vocational communication demands. In reality of course, many of these young people are coming from a literal “deficit” position with respect to language exposure and experience, but the term deficit has unhelpful connotations and will be even less likely to gain traction than its more widely known and used counterpart “impairment”.  

When I think about the young people in our youth justice / child protection studies and their language profiles, this is the way I think about the complex developmental pathways that in many cases result in impaired language skills:

In reality, the diagram should be a lot busier, showing arrows from each point of intersection between different risk factors, but that would make it visually unworkable.

It is of course not possible in this line of research to partial out contributory mechanisms (or their interactions). The important take-home message for policy makers and schools in particular, is that language skills in already vulnerable young people are fragile. I fully support the arguments presented by both Dorothy Bishop and by Reilly et al. that discrepancy-based diagnostic criteria (i.e. excluding children with nonverbal IQs below certain arbitrary cut-offs) are not helpful in deciding who does or does not have a language impairment. A language impairment exists when you do not have sufficient expressive and /or receptive skills to verbally navigate your way through the business of everyday life at the expected developmental level. Low IQ may sometimes explain some of this difficulty, but is not an “opt-out” clause with respect to explaining poor language functioning, or determining who might benefit from intervention services.  

It is pleasing to see a focus in Dorothy Bishop’s paper on fostering children’s skills and interests that are not reliant on language/literacy achievement, and of course I fully agree with such a strengths-based approach. Improved self-esteem and a sense of achievement are important in their own right, and also for school attachment and retention. Sadly though, we need to recognise that in industrialised, first world countries, the job market is going to rely more, rather than less, on language and literacy skills. We only need to look to our local supermarkets for evidence that low-skill jobs (working as a cashier) are disappearing and are being replaced by high-skill jobs (designing, installing and maintaining self-checkout points). 

Children with language impairments grow into adolescents with language impairments, who of course emerge as adults with language impairments. Such impairments are sometimes superficially masked by behavioural and mental health issues, but they are not lost on employers. In 2011, the Industry Skills Council of Australia published a report stating (p. 1) that 

Literally millions of Australians have insufficient language, literacy and  numeracy skills to benefit fully from training or to participate effectively at work

Non-specific language impairment is likely to be what turns up in classrooms and on SLP caseloads – so I’d like to see the term “specific” dropped and would be happy to run with “language impairment” OR “language-learning impairment”. Both are closer to the reality of complex underlying causal pathways, and the latter has an important link to academic achievement. However both would need to be “sold” to policy makers and funding bodies with respect to the prevalence and life-span importance of the problems to which they refer.

A further reason to drop the descriptor "specific" is that this would remove the (false) two-tiered hierarchy between those children whose language impairment is "pure" and those in whom other developmental threats to language competence (as per my diagram above) are identifiable. We only need to look to the world of "dyslexia" Vs "reading difficulties" to see how unhelpful such hierarchies are in practice.  Researchers will of course continue to investigate children whose language impairments are ideopathic, and will need to convince funding bodies of the empirical and applied importance of doing so.  

Oral language competence is a complex output that requires complex inputs. The bottom line for me is that language experts, whether from psychology, speech language pathology, education, paediatrics, or public health need to make a lot of noise about oral language competence – what it is, why it matters, and how to strengthen its chances, right from birth. Deciding what we will call its inverse will be an important part of the way forward.

I’m looking forward to thinking and reading further and will be interested to see how others react to these important papers.

References

Bishop, D.V.M. (2014). Ten questions about terminology for children with unexplained language problems. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 49(4), 381–415.

Reilly, S., Tomblin, B., Law, J., McKean, C., Mensah, F.K., Morgan, A., Goldfeld, S., Nicholson, J.M. & Wake, M. (2014). Specific language impairment: A convenient label for whom? International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 49(4), 416-451.

Tweet Snow, P.C. & Powell, M.B. (2011). Oral language competence in incarcerated young offenders: Links with offending severity. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 13(6), 480-489.

© Pamela Snow 2014

#WeSpeechies Chat August 5 2014 6pm AEST

I am delighted to have been asked by Drs Caroline Bowen and Bronwyn Hemsely, creators of the WeSpeechies twitter handle, to curate WeSpeechies this week.

Topic: Oral language competence in children and young people: Early beginnings, transition to school, literacy, and the young people's interface with the law in the ICP2014 year.

I look forward to lively interaction and discussion across the week! 

The chat session will take place on Tuesday August 5, as follows:

Date: Tuesday 05 August 2014
Time: 6:00pm AEST for one hour
Time Zone: Australian Eastern Standard Time (Bendigo, Melbourne, Sydney)
8pm NZST AUK
10am SAST DBN
9am BST LON IST DUB

Curator: Pam Snow @PamelaSnow2 (August 03 - 09)

Early oral language competence (skills with everyday talking and listening) is critical to social and academic success in the early school years, but is often simply "assumed" when children enter school. Unfortunately, many children enter school with inadequately developed expressive and receptive skills in one or more linguistic domains (e.g. vocabulary, narrative skill, phonemic awareness) and are not ready to meet the rapidly evolving and increasing demands of school life. Furthermore, some have difficulties with pragmatics, or the social use of language.

Some such children come from relatively linguistically impoverished home environments and a significant proportion will display a combination of learning and behaviour problems by mid primary years. Some will enter the youth justice system, after early school exclusion because of behaviour problems in and out of class.

Speech Language Pathologists / Speech and Language Therapists have a significant role to play at policy and practice levels in both promoting early oral language skills and the transition to literacy through the application of evidence-based literacy instruction, and by providing services to those whose risk trajectories see them marginalised from the economic mainstream by the time they reach early adolescence.

Questions

Welcome

Q1 What needs to happen for children with early language delays/difficulties to be better identified before or at school entry? #WeSpeechies

Q2 Are children who come from verbally impoverished environments ‘language impaired’ - why or why not? #WeSpeechies

Q3 Behaviour can be a form of communication - but how can we convince policy makers of this, and ways that #WeSpeechies can help with this?

Q4 Why are SLPs/SLTs mostly absent from Youth Justice Settings, and how can we increase our influence in this important area?#WeSpeechies

Chat concludes

Here’s an idea – how about we give Indigenous children the best education that evidence can provide?

Some assertions just make me plain cross. Like those contained in this piece published on The Conversation on July 2 BiggestLoser’ policy on literacy will not deliver long-term gains,  in which Dr Stewart Riddle, of the University of Southern Queensland argues against the application of evidence-based literacy instruction methods for Indigenous children. 

First of all there’s the title of the piece, referring to a “Biggest Loser Policy”. Apart from what seems like a cheap throw-away reference to an equally base TV program, I am not actually sure who the purported “losers” might be of a policy that promotes the application of evidence-based instruction methods to Indigenous children - children whose achievement levels have historically lagged shamefully behind those of their non-Indigenous peers, in spite of obvious capacity to learn, given the appropriate instructional environments and experiences. 

While references to “skilling and drilling students to the point of exhaustion” are just tired and inaccurate clichés about how direct instruction works in qualified hands, I really take issue with Dr Riddle’s questioning of  “….the assumption that raising Indigenous literacy levels across Australia is inherently a good thing, in and of itself". 

How on earth are we going to make school a place in which Indigenous children make real gains, learning real skills and feeling a real sense of mastery and hope for the future, if we don’t have a fundamental, fire-in-our-bellies commitment to the notion that raising Indigenous literacy levels across Australia is inherently a good thing, in and of itself?! 

At a population level, level of education is the single biggest predictor of health status across the lifespan. Education is not just about literacy, it is about keys to life – to aspiration, self-esteem, accomplishment, participation in the mainstream economy, and a sense of optimism about a future that entails real choices. 

Dr Riddle, where will our Indigenous doctors, lawyers, social workers, teachers, psychologists, physicists, architects, philosophers, pharmacologists, surveyors, journalists and political commentators come from, if not from the ranks of those who have been given fair and equal access to the life-changing opportunities afforded by quality mainstream education? Of course Indigenous children need to learn about, value, and ultimately pass on their own culture, but let’s not commit the ultimate act of colonial imperialism of condemning them to a life on the margins of mainstream Australian society, by deciding that direct instruction just isn’t cool enough for these kids.

For what it’s worth: 

My “underlying assumptions … about what it actually means to be literate” include being able to access the world of imagination and knowledge via the written word and being able to share one’s own ideas and experiences via oral and written texts, at increasingly complex levels to support the progression through primary, secondary, and tertiary education. Oh sure, it’s nice when people have enough functional literacy skills to read the dosage instructions on a medication bottle, to fill-in an online form, and to send and receive text messages. But how about we give our Indigenous children not just access to the crumbs of educational attainment, allowing them instead to play the game of life with a full deck of opportunity cards? 

Knowing that Indigenous children were reaching basic literacy benchmarks would be a very good start in addressing the tragic inequities (education, health, housing, income) that exist between our first people and the rest of us. When you teach children the basics of decoding text, you confer life-changing skills that cannot be taken away.  

Literacy skills are very difficult to back-fill when they are not gained in the appropriate developmental window – most notably the first three years of school. Under-achievement spawns behavioural and adjustment difficulties that in turn create mutual antipathy between learners and schools, and predictably result in early school departures. Perhaps Dr Riddle would prefer to wait until Indigenous children are detained in the Youth Justice system, which they are at highly disproportionate rates compared to non-Indigenous young people, and address their literacy needs there?

 

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The danger of a little knowledge (and a little dogma)

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There’s been a great deal written and debated in recent times about the importance of teacher quality and the role this plays in improving learner outcomes.  Few would disagree, I think that teacher quality plays an important part in the overall mix with respect to student engagement and learning, though how much, of course is difficult to define and measure.

I had pause for thought this week, though, about the importance of “teacher quality” when so-called experts, be they academics (like me) or practitioners, are invited to take the podium at a conference and address an audience of teachers about current scientific understandings and so-called “best-practice”.

As an academic who is a former practitioner, I always value opportunities to talk to people who are at the coalface, whether in education, justice, health, welfare, or policy. When your work requires you to deal with the messy business of people’s everyday real concerns and distress, you gain knowledge, insight, and humility that no amount of data trawling and analysis could ever confer.  When presenting to such audiences, I always try to be conscious, therefore, of using language that is somewhat conditional and qualified. As an academic, part of my role is to “channel evidence” to people who don’t have the same access to primary research sources as I do, and are in many cases not equipped to critique its quality. As other academics will know, “knowledge” is fluid, testable, debatable, and modifiable. It needs to be handled with great care.

When my father told me (when I was about 10) that “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing” I remember being perplexed about the notion that there could be any danger in knowledge. Older and wiser, I now understand the truth of these words and am reminded of them when I listen to (some) education “experts” present as facts, their particular dogma, ideology, or anecdotal experience. 

I witnessed this earlier this week, when listening to a fellow invited speaker at an education conference attended by about 150 teachers and other practitioners who work with young people who are either disengaged from education or are at risk of such disengagement. These teachers all appeared to be highly motivated and eager to improve their knowledge and skills. They listened with what seemed like great focus and engagement to a speaker who told them that

• MRI studies show that “dyslexics[1]” use the right side of their brain when attempting to read, not the left
• It’s important to understand the “learning style” of a “dyslexic”
• Many dyslexics have so-called “Irlen Syndrome” and benefit from the use of coloured overlays.

I seemed to be the only academic in the room, which meant I felt like the proverbial wet-blanket at question time when I pointed out (politely!) that there is no scientific basis for the notion of learning styles, and nor for the use of coloured overlays.  I mentioned that teachers in the audience might find the MUSEC Briefings a useful resource for evaluating the claims made by proponents of such approaches but was met with only a very lukewarm response. I didn’t know where to start on the MRI issue so left that one right alone. I also have an intense dislike of disability-based descriptors for people – I doubt that anyone who has a reading problem would be happy to be defined in such a mono-dimensional way as “a dyslexic”- as if the term conveys all we would ever need to know about them. It’s about as unifying a term as calling someone “an asthmatic”.

I am sure you can see the problem – an engaging speaker has over-simplified a complex construct and offered charmingly straight-forward and accessible responses that seem to have good face validity, so of course well-intentioned teachers are keen to “buy”. 

However, just as we expect teachers in classrooms to be accountable for what and how they teach, we need to hold “experts” at conferences accountable for what they present as facts to those who operate at the coalface. I often say to audiences of teachers that I think what they do is no less significant for society than what medical practitioners do (in fact, in some respects……..yes, you know what I’m thinking….). As a community, though, we expect medical practitioners to think and behave according to scientific principles, not according to their particular belief-system, regardless of how well they seem to be able to package and present it to an audience. 

My dad was right – a little knowledge is most certainly a dangerous thing. 

 

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[1] I have blogged on the problems with this term previously - http://pamelasnow.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/dyselxia-we-need-to-talk-its-not-me-its.html

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