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‘I don’t think I’ve ever had discussionsabout reading’: a case study of FEliteracy teachers’ conceptualisations ofliteracyAlex Kendalla & Karen McGratha
a Faculty of Education, Law and Social Sciences, Birmingham CityUniversity, Birmingham, UKPublished online: 05 Mar 2014.
To cite this article: Alex Kendall & Karen McGrath (2014) ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had discussionsabout reading’: a case study of FE literacy teachers’ conceptualisations of literacy, Research inPost-Compulsory Education, 19:1, 54-74, DOI: 10.1080/13596748.2014.872931
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‘I don’t think I’ve ever had discussions about reading’: a casestudy of FE literacy teachers’ conceptualisations of literacy
Alex Kendall* and Karen McGrath
Faculty of Education, Law and Social Sciences, Birmingham City University, Birmingham,UK
(Received 19 October 2012; accepted 18 April 2013)
Research on reading in the lifelong-learning sector has tended to focus on theattitudes, habits and practices of the recipients of further education (FE), or thepractices of literacy within the cultural and contextual environments of the sub-jects and spaces of further education. Although teachers’ conceptualisations ofliteracy are often acknowledged in this work to be central to the making andshaping of pedagogical practice, little research in the sector has attended specifi-cally to teachers’ meaning-making about literacy. This approach is well devel-oped in other phases where relationships between teachers’ classroom practicesand their attitudes and values in relation to textual experience are seen as signifi-cant. In this paper we start this work for the post-compulsory sector. The FE Lit-eracy Teachers as Readers Project aimed to explore teachers’ discursiveunderstandings of reading through a qualitative study of their own accounts oftheir reading habits and preferences, their definitions of reading and the role ofreading in their classrooms. Our discussion analyses our participants’ descrip-tions (figured worlds) of their own and their students’ reading identities todescribe the positions they take up in relation to (‘big D’) discourses about read-ers and reading, and to consider how this might begin to pattern and frame theirclassroom practice. Coming a decade after the introduction of subject-specialistqualifications for literacy teachers in the FE sector, this study offers a timelyinsight in to teachers’ conceptualisation of reading in the context of well-embed-ded professional training, and one that is particularly pertinent at a time whenthe statutory training model for FE is under review.
Keywords: literacy; teacher education; policy; FE policy; FE workforce devel-opment
Introduction
Research on reading in the lifelong-learning sector has tended to focus on theattitudes, habits and practices of the recipients of further education (FE), youngpeople and adults (Kendall 2005, 2008a, 2008b; Mannion et al. 2009), or thepractices of literacy within the cultural – particularly disciplinary and vocational– and contextual environments of FE (Mannion and Ivanic 2007; Carmichael et al.2007; Ivanič et al. 2009). Although teachers’ conceptualisations of literacy are oftenacknowledged in this work to be central to the making and shaping of pedagogicalpractice, little research in the post-compulsory sector has attended specifically toteachers’ meaning-making about literacy. This sort of work has developed
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
© 2014 Further Education Research Association
Research in Post-Compulsory Education, 2014Vol. 19, No. 1, 54–74, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13596748.2014.872931
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substantially in other phases of education where the relationship between teachers’classroom practices and their own attitudes and values in relation to textualexperience ‘has become an important part of the enterprise of understandingteaching’ (Zancanella 1991, 5). Zancanella draws our attention to key early studiesabout the way teacher thinking impacts on the curriculum, identifying tacitknowledge (Clark and Peterson 1986), teacher knowledge (Shulman 1987) and whathe calls the ‘personal in teaching’ (Clandinin and Connelly as cited in Shulman1987) as important examples of the intersection between teacher belief, values andtheorising (implicit or explicit) and the praxis of teaching. More recent projects inthe UK context, such as the United Kingdom Literacy Association-funded Teachersas Readers Project in primary education (Cremin et al. 2009), point to the enduringrelevance of exploring teachers’ life-world experience in relation to concept-making,particularly as the domains and practices of literacy evolve in the context of newmedia (Burnett 2009; Kerin 2009).
In this paper we start this work for the post-compulsory sector through anexploration of findings from the FE Literacy Teachers as Readers Project. This pilotstudy aimed to offer a sector-specific case study of teachers’ conceptualisation ofreading through qualitative analysis of teachers’ accounts of their reading habits andpreferences, their definitions of reading, and the role of reading in their classrooms.Through this work we hope to open conversations about the preparation andongoing development of literacy teachers in FE and to signpost the direction offuture research in this area. Our discussion here focuses on analysis of ourparticipants’ descriptions of their own and their students’ reading identities – whatGee (2011) might call their figured worlds – to describe the positions they take upin relation to Gee’s idea of ‘big D’ discourses (1990, 2011) about readers andreading, and to consider how this might begin to pattern and frame their classroompractice. This discussion is particularly timely coming as it does just 10 years afterthe introduction of statutory professional training for literacy teachers in the FEsector and at a time when the statutory regulations are under review (Lingfield2012) and very likely to be revoked.
Context: teaching literacy in further education in England
The topography of literacy teaching and learning in further education has changeddramatically in England over the last decade. New statutory regulations in 2002introduced for the first time a standardised initial teacher education curriculum forliteracy teachers in the sector to complement a newly implemented national literacycurriculum, and assessment framework, for adult literacy learners. These newregulations required literacy teachers to undertake a literacy teaching qualification inaddition to the generic qualification required to teach in the sector. Prior to 2002 thegeneric teaching qualification (now known as Qualified Teacher Status Learning andSkills or QTLS), combined with a Qualification and Curriculum Framework UKLevel 3 qualification had been sufficient to teach literacy and this remains the casefor all teachers in the sector except those working in adult basic education (literacy,English for speakers of other languages [ESOL] and numeracy). The process of reg-ulatory change was overseen by the sector skills agency Lifelong Learning UK(LLUK and formerly the Further Education National Training Organisation,FENTO) which designed and owned new standards for FE teachers in general, andliteracy teachers in particular, through a process of endorsement. At an early stage
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an additional layer of quality assurance, known as approval, was also required forliteracy teacher education programmes, but this was relaxed around 2008 as the twoprocesses were merged into a single endorsement process. Compliance was enforcedby a quality assurance agent and sister organisation to LLUK, Standards VerificationUK (SVUK). This dual system operated until spring 2011 when both organisationswere disbanded under the coalition government’s review of quangos, and, at thetime of writing, the sector is awaiting detailed guidance on the future of regulatoryarrangements. Importantly, the new regulations applied retrospectively to all literacyteachers working in the sector who from 2002 were required to become ‘qualified’through the new framework, either by undertaking an endorsed programme of studyor through formal accreditation of prior learning – there were a few exceptions forteachers with degree or higher degree-level qualifications in specified relevant sub-jects, but for the majority of teachers, and indeed for their employers, completion ofthe new teacher education programmes became an imperative.
The effect of these changes was substantial, both for teacher educators and forqualifying teachers, and undoubtedly the business of adult literacy in England founditself, in Bernstein’s (2000) terms, in a new classificatory environment throughwhich the category ‘subject literacy’ emerged. The notion of subject literacy drawson Peim’s (1993) account of ‘subject English’ and describes the idea of the disci-pline as it is captured and defined by subject specifications and enacted throughassessment regimes. The ‘subject’ version of a discipline inhabits institutional set-tings, schools, colleges or universities and is associated with formal – often certifi-cated – learning. Crucially the subject-predicated discipline is described and reifiedthrough a range of textual practices and paraphernalia – specifications, examinations,textbooks and revision notes through which it becomes distinct to, and discretelyknowable from, the total possible forms of a discipline. Some commentators haveargued that emergence of subject literacy has effected what Marx has called the,‘bureaucratic baptism of knowledge and official recognition of the transubstantiationof profane knowledge into sacred knowledge’ (Marx, in Bourdieu and Passeron1990, 92). That is to say that the intervention of subject literacy has classified andinsulated, in Bernstein’s terms, ‘what counts’ as knowledge through the kind ofreview and audit that is undertaken by SVUK on behalf of LLUK before a pro-gramme of study is endorsed. Where LLUK looks at input, the Office for Standardsin Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted) looks at output, so the ‘appro-priacy’ of a programme of study is doubly scrutinised. The ‘consent’ of teachers isthus ‘won’, argue McDougall, Walker, and Kendall (2006), through the delegitimis-ing of non-specified knowledge, and ensured through the awarding or withholdingof qualifications or licences to practice, without which teachers are not permitted, bystatute, to teach. McDougall et al. go on to argue that this situates the teacher and inturn the teacher educator outside the diffusion or practice of power, so that the ques-tion of what might be taught is no longer one that might be posed to or by them.That is to say that the role of neither teachers nor teacher educators includes anylonger a responsibility to select from the total that is knowable or possible, but totake as a starting point that which has been sanctified through what Bourdieu (2002)might call consecration of a ‘legitimatised mode of expression’ (58). As such thework of teachers and teacher educators is potentially domesticated to participate inthe apparatus of classification by functioning as a technology of insulation(McDougall, Walker, and Kendall 2006, 170).
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Drawing on Foucault’s notion of discourse as systematically constructing theforms and objects of which it speaks, Urban (2009), whose interest lies in workforcereform in the early years sector, understands the processes of professionalisation thathave proliferated in the UK over the last decade as ways of asserting control overindividual behaviour towards making distinctions between forms of knowledge,those who speak and those who are spoken of, as well as where this talk happensand the forms it takes. Thus for Urban, knowledge construction belongs to thedomain of course designers, regulators and awarding bodies and is ‘transferred’ tothose who must put it into practice (a skilled workforce) through programmes ofvocational education. In the UK, he argues, a range of structural technologies serveto enforce and reinforce such understandings, such as Ofsted, mentioned above,quality gradings and workforce data returns at both local and national levels.Commenting on the professionalisation of the early years workforce, Urban contendsthat ‘new professionals’ – those who have qualified through the new frameworks– are bound to index their professional identity to these new knowledge relations,what he calls in his field the ‘prevailing habitus of Early Childhood Education’(Urban 2008, 135), and in so doing re-know, be re-known and re-value (and de-value?) their pre-existing understandings of their own practice and in turn their senseof their professional worth, status and identities. For literacy teachers in FE thesejudgements have, over the last 10 years, been made against the new benchmarks, or‘prevailing habitus’, of subject literacy. However at the time of writing, changelooks imminent as the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) isconsulting on Lord Lingfield’s (2012) recommendation to revoke the furthereducation workforce regulations which include the regulations around statutoryqualifications. We consider below the potential implications of this likely groundshift in the case of literacy teaching.
So how are ideas about reading constituted through subject literacy? In the nextsection we want to explore what Gee (2011) refers to as ‘big D’ discourses aboutreading, ‘that is to say the combination of language, actions, interactions, ways ofthinking, believing and valuing and using various symbols, tools and objects toenact a particular sort of socially recognizable identity’ (2011, 201), in this case twocompeting accounts of what it means to read and be a reader. The first accountoffers a reading of reading drawn from the texts of subject literacy, whilst the secondoffers alternative viewpoints gleaned from the research literature that has emergedconcurrently with the period of professionalisation outlined above.
Conceptualising reading – ‘big D’ discourses
Big D 1: subject (adult) literacy
Peim’s (1993) proposed starting point for ‘opening a discourse’ about reading is use-ful for exploring both ‘values’ and ‘ethics’ about reading, readers and texts withinthe post-compulsory context. Peim suggests asking how reading is defined, what itis for, how proficiency is understood and the kind of reading practices that are pre-ferred or valorised (1993, 71). Posing the question, ‘What is reading in subject liter-acy?’ seems therefore a legitimate place to start:
The ability to read is as important today as it ever was. Some people believe that theneed for good basic skills has lessened as technology has improved, that television,with all its power and indeed its role in providing information, has reduced the need
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for reading. Certainly there are many people who don’t buy books for pleasure andenjoyment, and some who rarely read a newspaper or visit a library. In some ways thismay not really matter. Being able to read fluently is very different from wanting to readat all. (Basic Skills Agency 2001, 54)
Here the reading in the adult literacy curriculum (ALC) is linked to the practicesand necessities of the ‘outside’ or ‘external’ spaces of the institution. In the back-ground there is also a hint at the perceived commodity value of literacy which somewriters (Sanguinetti 2000; Gee 2000) argue to have been at the heart of policy initia-tives around adult literacy over the last decade. The authorial voice understands thatlearners may choose or prefer not to read but simultaneously insinuates a valuejudgement about such a choice which the reader (teacher) is invited to share:unspoken in ‘in some ways this may not really matter’ are the ways in which itmight. Equally this kind of choice is one that the authorial voice (and the teacher?)distinguishes his/herself from. Reading is carefully distinguished from otheractivities such as the catch-all ‘technology’ or watching television and the mentionsof book buying, newspaper reading and visiting the library serve to establish a senseof significance for, and value to, these activities. This outlines the key strands whichform the foci of the reading curriculum – acquisition of the ability to read in atechnical sense which includes acquisition of a model of language and a frameworkfor making and taking meaning; knowledge about ‘appropriate’ reader/ing identitiesand what to use reading for in the sense of the values and meanings associated withdifferent types of reading.
The curriculum conceives – particularly at the ‘lower levels’ – a highly perfor-mative, technicist model of reading that Crowther, Hamilton, and Tett (2001) havedescribed as a ‘literacy ladder’ notion of competence and acquisition. In this config-uration, literacy is presented as a de-contextualised ‘toolkit’, an autonomous (Street1995) set of skills, in reading, writing, speaking and listening, that once acquiredenable the holder to effectively function across a range of contexts and settings. Lit-eracy is achieved through a linear process of becoming literate as the learner movesup the ladder, mono-directionally, from a deficit, illiterate identity towards acquisi-tion. Central to this idea is that literacy is a universal skillset, or toolkit, that isstraightforwardly represented and easily captured within a curriculum specification.In English, policy progression up the ladder has often been characterised as a cathar-tic transition, with learners at lower rungs typified as ‘stumped’, ‘anxious’, ‘panicky’(Black Country Observatory 2004) and continually on the cusp of exposure. TheBlack Country LSC ‘Move On’ campaign (Black Country Observatory 2004),directed at a 16-plus audience, asked:
Do you start to panic when someone asks you to fill in a form?
Do you always try to make out you’re busy when the kids come home from school, soyou don’t have to help them with their homework?
Do you pretend you’ve forgotten your glasses when someone asks you to read some-thing?
These questions construct a number of insecurities for the ‘yes’ respondent abouttheir capacity to participate in and contribute to the everyday demands of both pri-vate and public life, thus establishing a potential motivator for learning and skills
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acquisition. The would-be learner is invited into a contract that promises educa-tional, economic and personal transformation, ‘open[ing] up a whole new world ofopportunity … not only will learning new skills and picking up new qualificationshelp you to get a job, it can help you to feel more confident’ (Black Country Obser-vatory 2004). It is a common sense of the literacy ladder ideologue that the ‘illiterateidentity’ is deficit and as such the subject will seek to manage this ‘lack’ throughstrategies that seek to conceal and mask. This position has been best capturedthrough the metaphor of the gremlin, a central character of the 2005 Department forEducation and Skills (DFES) campaign which haunts and taunts the less literate intoadult education so that becoming literate is represented as a process of exorcism, ofshedding insecurities. By implication, the learner and the degree of their commit-ment and motivation is the central impetus for the successful acquisition of literacy.
This account of literacy positions teachers as well as students in very specificways. The teacher, who must have already demonstrated their expert position at the‘top of the ladder’, guides the inexpert student towards the goal of ‘literacy’ – ashared position towards the top of the ladder. Within this narrative, the learner isconstrued as an ‘anonymous’, ‘decontextualised’, ‘degendered’ being whose princi-pal distinguishing characteristics are ‘personality’ and ‘learning style’ (Malcolm andZukas 1999a, 1999b). The learner’s ‘responsibility’ is to acquire ‘skills’ which areatomised and ordered by hierarchical and linear arrangement, whilst the teacher’sjob, as enshrined in the national standards for teachers in the post-compulsory sector(FENTO 2001; LLUK 2002), is to assess learners’ needs, plan and prepare anappropriate teaching and learning programme with identified learning outcomes,determine a range of suitable teaching and learning techniques, manage the learningprocess, provide support to ensure students meet the desired outcomes, and assessthe outcomes of learning.
‘Teacher’ and ‘learner’ identities here are defined by their difference. Street hascalled this the ‘great divide theory’:
Illiterates are fundamentally different from literates. For individuals this is taken tomean that ways of thinking, cognitive abilities, facility in logic, abstraction and highermental operations are all related to the achievement of literacy: the corollary is that lit-erates are presumed to lack all these qualities, to be able to think less abstractly, to bemore embedded, less critical, less able to reflect upon the nature of the language theyuse or the sources of their political oppression. (Street 1995, 21)
Learners are seen as in deficit, as needing ‘help’ (Pember 2001) and in short areidentified as having problems that professionals have a responsibility to solve; thuseffecting a professional ‘contract’ of ‘care’ (Avis, Bathmaker, and Parsons 2002).
As suggested above, many exponents of subject literacy link its successfulacquisition to enhanced productivity and envisage benefits both for the economyand for individual workers. ‘Businesses in the new hyper-competitive global capital-ism’, argues Gee (2000, 46) in his critique of the new capitalism, ‘march to thedrumbeat of distributed systems … there is no centre. There are no individuals. Onlyensembles of skills stored in a person, assembled for a specific project, to bereassembled for other projects, and shared’ (46). Thus improving the literacy levelof the worker comes to be seen as a key tenet of economic enhancement, andliteracy as ‘commodity’ becomes central to a political agenda that links literacy withproductivity (Sanguinetti 2000; Gee 2000) and policymakers in the UK have oftenbeen keen to make a correlation between an individual’s literacy level and the kinds
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of income they might expect to command (Pember 2001). This easy coupling of lit-eracy (and numeracy) and prosperity casts the learner as the central protagonist intheir own drama of social and economic success by backgrounding and obscuringthe kinds of social and economic complexities that researchers often notice in thelives of adults and young people who have not been successful in subject literacy(Castleton 2001).
Big D 2: re-thinking reading
An alternative account of literacy generally and reading in particular has beenoffered by research informed by the New Literacy Studies (see for example Bartonand Hamilton 1998; Barton 1994; Gee 2000; Street 1995). Researchers workingwithin this paradigm treat language and literacy as social practices rather than tech-nical skills learned exclusively in formal education. This kind of research orienta-tion, argues Street, ‘requires language and literacy to be studied as they occurnaturally in social life, taking account of the context and their different meanings fordifferent cultural groups’ (2001, 17). Barton and Hamilton’s (1998, 7) five tenetsoffer a useful summary of the principles that underpin these alternative positions:
(1) Literacy is best understood as a set of social practices; these can be inferredfrom events which are mediated by written texts.
(2) There are different literacies associated with different domains of life.(3) Literacy practices are patterned by social institutions and power relationships,
and some literacies become more dominant, visible, influential than others.(4) Literacy is historically situated.(5) Literacy practices change, and new ones are frequently acquired through
processes of informal learning and sense-making.
What is central to these ideas is that literacy is not understood as a context-free,technical skill set but as practice embedded in social and cultural relations. Literacyis about how we produce and make texts, or what Lankshear and Knobel (2006) call‘literacy bits’, but these:
do not exist apart from the social practices in which they are embedded and withinwhich they are acquired. If, in some trivial sense they can be said to exist (e.g. ascode), they do not mean anything. Hence they cannot be meaningfully taught andlearned as separate from the rest of the practice. (Lankshear and Knobel 2006, 13,emphasis in original)
This enables movement away from the singular ‘literacy’ to the plural ‘literacies’(Cope and Kalantzis 2002; Barton 2005) and an acknowledgement that it might bepossible to take up multiple ‘literate’ positions within the wider possible field of lit-eracy. That is to say that it opens up the possibility of varied and divergent ‘literacyportfolios’ that develop and emerge through participation in different domains, com-munities and practices over time. Taking this paradigm to the educational contexthas significant implications for our understandings of ‘teacher’, ‘learner’, ‘curricu-lum/knowledge’ and our ideas about in/expertise.
Bernstein’s notion of the elaborated code is helpful here. A central contention ofliteracies is the dispersal of expertise across different domains of practice. This
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suggests a horizontal discourse (Bernstein 2000) about literacy that is weakly framedand classified. As such the locality of ‘expertise’ and the exercising of power areless predictable, and both teachers and learners may take up positions that are legiti-mately powerful or less powerful, expert or inexpert in relation to different domainsand practices.
Learners may bring their own definitions about literacy to the classroom spacethat reflect their participation in ‘non-schooled’ (I borrow Street’s use of schooledhere to mean educational institutions more broadly) contexts and are likely ‘literate’in specialist domains outside the classroom. Learners are recognised andacknowledged as experiencing functioning adult lives that involve participation in avariety of communities of practice that in turn mediate literacies and texts.
Teachers similarly are sometimes expert and sometimes not. Teachers will not,cannot and neither is it desirable that they should seek to, ‘know’ all that it is possi-ble to know about the broader field of multiple literacies and thus they must becomeresearchers and learners within this field, acknowledging and exploring the literacyprofiles of learners and the ways in which they may be expert in their life-world lit-eracy domains. As such teachers are challenged to read themselves ‘against thegrain’ (Street 1999), to take open account of their own expertise and inexpertise andto co-explore with students the disciplinary spaces of literacy and the diaspora ofideas about what literacy knowledge might be. Meaning/s become ‘cultural andlearned, but … also unfixed, sliding and plural … in consequence a matter for politi-cal debate … [whereby] culture itself is the limit of our knowledge: there is noavailable truth outside culture’ (Belsey and Moore 1989, 10) and in which ‘the lit-eral description of events is not possible, any more than description can exist in aone-to-one referential relationship to that which it purports to describe. Rather adescription is a “gloss”, a typification of the presumed meaning of such events’(Stanley 1997, 214). Reading in this pedagogical turn becomes a very different kindof practice to that identified by subject literacy with notions of text, reader, andlanguage being deconstructed:
Texts don’t stand on their own as bearers of their own self-defining meanings. Any textis always read from a particular point of view, by a subject (or subjects) positioned at aparticular point … the ‘true’ text – is never more than an abstraction, an idea distinctfrom particularly positioned readings of aspects of the textual object. (Peim 1993, 73)
As such reading and writing practices are conceived as context bound, the ‘listener/reader, speaker/writer, seen not as an isolated individual, but as a social agent,located in a network of social relations, in specific places in a social structure’(Kress 1990, 5).
These sorts of perspective posit new possibilities to understand literacy ecologi-cally and to understand that new times provide new contexts, spaces and places forliteracy work:
Young people’s technology use is now perhaps best seen as a media ‘ecology’ wheremore traditional media, such as books, television, and radio, are ‘converging’ with dig-ital media, specifically interactive media and media for social communication. (Itoet al. 2008, cited in Selwyn 2009, 366)
Notions of ‘multimodality’ (Kress 2010) and ‘multiliteracies’ (New London Group1996; Cope and Kalantzis 2002) are deeply embedded in the recent research
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literature and much important work has been done to establish rich connectionsbetween life-world literacies particularly in the digital context (Millard 1997; Marsh2004; Davies 2009) and formal learning (Barton and Hamilton 1998) and to extendthinking about literacy as a category for study (Lankshear and Knobel 2006).
Big D discourses, text, taste and identity
As well as positioning teachers, learners and ideas about knowledge, the differentways of thinking about literacy outlined above may often (implicitly and explicitly)constitute different ways of knowing and thinking about text which are pertinent tothe data we discuss below. Kendall’s (2008b) discussion of young people’s readingchoice offers a helpful starting point for considering the idea of textual value in rela-tion to curriculum and classroom practices. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (2002) idea of‘distinction’, Kendall makes use of Colebrook’s idea of the ‘Shakespeare industry’(1997, 98) to illustrate how the consumption and association of oneself with whatBourdieu might call ‘consecrated’ (and what Marx, see above, might call ‘sacred’)texts yields a profit of distinction: ‘the more legitimate a given area, the more neces-sary and “profitable” it is to be competent in it, and the more damaging and “costly”to be incompetent’ (Bourdieu 1992, 86). In the context of education, Kendall arguesthat:
success or competence (achievement) as a reader might be understood in terms of ageneral acceptance and internalisation of institutional positions, which texts have valuewhich don’t, which reading practices have value and which don’t. Texts falling outsidethe authority of curricula, Heat, Closer, More and Total Film, become other to dis-courses of legitimacy. (Kendall 2008b, 125, emphasis in original)
The habitus of teachers and students, she contends, are through virtue of theirqualifications, experience and differing relationships with the classroom practice (asproducers and consumers) differently situated within the ‘field’ of institutionalmeanings about reading, and thus are differently positioned in their potential to drawdown real and prospective profits. Crucially within institutions, she continues, youngadult readers are rarely positioned as brokers of ‘legitimate’ capital in the sense thattheir preferred reading choices (which may indeed be ‘profitable’ and legitimatewithin the social and extra-curricular fields within which they participate) are rarelyembraced by, or positively represented through, the values of the curriculum.Through the imposition of curricula, and its resultant processes of curriculum selec-tion and de-selection, the school or college can be seen to be active and influentialin the process of consecration; ‘the educational system defines non-curricular culture(la culture “libre”), negatively at least, by delimiting, within dominant culture, thearea of what it puts into its syllabuses and controls by its examinations’ (Bourdieu2002, 23 cited in Kendall 2008b). Thus consumption and association of oneself with‘consecrated’ texts yields a profit of distinction: ‘the more legitimate a given area,the more necessary and “profitable” it is to be competent in it, and the more damag-ing and “costly” to be incompetent’ (Bourdieu 1992, 86, cited in Kendall 2008b).
Bennett, Kendall, and McDougall (2011) recognise these processes of consecra-tion as being characteristic of the sorts of ideas about text that we notice in subjectliteracy, which, they argue, ‘fetishises the idea of the text’ (2011, 225). Proposinginstead a ‘text free’ curriculum they develop the idea of a pedagogy of the inexpertto reconfigure literacy learning so that:
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the focus of study would not be ‘the text’ but the tracing and analysis of textual fields,the choices individuals make as they negotiate … texts and the common patterns in theirselections. The work of the teacher in this version of textual practice is not to teach abouttext but to facilitate ethnographic enquiry that enables young people to read thetextualised stories of their lives (Kehler and Greig 2005, 367). (Bennett et al. 2011, 212)
Having sketched dominant ‘big D’ ways of understanding literacy and literacy learn-ing and considered how these might translate into pedagogical practice, we moveinto a discussion of our participants’ talk to explore how the teachers in our studyposition themselves within these competing ideas about literacy to build narrativesabout their own literacy identities and those of their students, and how these mightbegin to construct classroom relations and practices.
Method
The case study outlined here was undertaken in the West Midlands of England andinvolved semi-structured interviews with eight teachers of ESOL and literacy. Theteachers in the sample were all dually qualified, as described above, to teach in FEgenerally and to teach literacy or language specifically. One had taught for threeyears, one for four and the remaining six for in excess of nine years with one report-ing having taught for 22 years.
The data was collected by a group of teacher researchers who had recently com-pleted a Postgraduate Certificate in Education for Teachers of Adult Literacy andwho returned to their placement colleges to interview colleagues with whom theyhad worked or been mentored. As such, the sample emerged organically and waspartially self-selecting in that participation tended to be dependent upon the coinci-dence of researcher availability and participants’ teaching timetables. The criteria forinclusion in the project were that participants were employed by a West MidlandsFE college to teach literacy or language within the context of the adult curriculumfor some proportion of their timetable. The limitation of working with an opportu-nistic sample such as this is acknowledged, however the study aims to open upquestions about teachers as readers rather than to be generalisable and as such thecontingent nature of the sample offers an interesting window on teachers’ conceptu-alisations and conceptualising. Interviews followed a semi-structured format andinvited participants to explore 30 prompts and questions grouped in three specificareas: their teaching experience and pathways into literacy teaching; their ideasabout reading and their own literacy histories; and their work with reading in theclassroom. A critical discourse analysis of the data (Fairclough 1992; Gee 2011)was then undertaken to explore the ‘little d’ (Gee 2011) figured worlds of our partic-ipants – that is to say their ‘socially and culturally constructed ways of recognisingparticular characters and actors and actions and assigning them significance andvalue’ (2011, 205), and the ways these accounts play in and out of the big D dis-courses explored above.
Findings
The interviews yielded a vast amount of data in response to the 30 questionsexplored. Our discussion here focuses on routes in to literacy teaching, the ideasteachers constructed about what it means to read and be a reader, what counts asreading and their roles as teachers of reading.
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Routes in to literacy teaching
Semi-structured interviews started by inviting participants to describe their teachingbackgrounds and how they came to teach literacy and language. In common withteachers across the sector (Avis and Bathmaker 2005), our participants had a diverserange of skills and experience and had come into teaching fairly contingently via‘contacts’, ‘literally by accident’ or via ‘a friend’, from roles in administration orvocational areas, such as the health service, catering, dressmaking and first aid, asthese comments illustrate:
I started off being quite general and I did a general PGCE and I thought I would endup teaching IT and started doing a little bit of Spanish and I did some work in theESOL Department so that gave me a little bit of knowledge of basic skills and basi-cally saw a job once I finish by PGCE for a community tutor which seemed to besomebody who could become quite flexible and deliver things like IT and basic skillsso I ended up doing more of the basic skills; mainly ESOL and literacy and from thereI really enjoyed doing the literary side of it and decided to specialise in literacy.
I wanted to teach but I came to it by accident really because I was going to a drop in cen-tre where you can do free IT courses and that was my first step to improve IT and I met awoman in her 20s who had also dropped in to this IT centre which I didn’t realise at thetime offered reading and writing … from there I started to investigate basic skills.
By accident, I came here as a temporary admin person and one of my spare time activ-ities was being part of St Johns Ambulance and I was a first aid trainer so when I camehere my boss at the time said, ‘Oh, great you can do some first aid training here then’and because I came in as a temp to the basic skills department, as it was then, it wasjust a natural progression that I went from teaching first aid to basic skills ... and liter-ally I have fallen in to the role of teaching English, the first aid started to fall off andthe basic skills teaching took over.
Such trajectories are typical of a sector that has traditionally recruited teachers basedon their vocational experience and enabled opportunities to train ‘on the job’. As suchfor many the experience of teaching literacy, which participants often came to circui-tously and contingently, preceded any professional development or subject knowledgework, as policy has ‘focused on professionalising the existing teaching workforce andensuring an adequate and continuing supply of competent literacy, numeracy andESOL teachers’ (Morton, McGuire, and Baynham 2006, 176). Some began their nar-ratives by foregrounding success in subject English, often literature specifically:
I’ve always been good at English and I absolutely love literature and I did an EnglishLiterature degree.
Well I did an English degree at university and always wanted to go on to teach Englishand then I got a job with the library teaching learning programmes in the communityand that’s how I kind of got contacts here and then eventually when a job came up Igot a job here.
I think [I came into literacy teaching] because, this sounds conceited, but I’ve alwaysbeen good at English really and it was my favourite subject at school and I love read-ing and communication and language and I came to basic skills.
I had already got A-level English so I felt fairly comfortable with the English anyway.
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This readiness by some participants to frame their journey into literacy teaching withtheir experience of subject English suggests both an investment in the values andidentities of subject English and a readiness to make links about content relevancy.This implies that for these teachers at least, concept-making about the work of liter-acy teaching may be significantly more entangled with their own learning historiesthan their professional learning about literacy.
On being a reader
The majority of our participants very quickly took up expert (big D 1, top of ladder)positions identifying themselves as avid, enthusiastic and committed readers, some-times to the point of hyperbole:
I read a lot, I read all day every day for work, I am an avid reader.
I’m an avid reader; I read substantially and always have done.
I read every night! I’m always reading.
I’m a regular reader, I read every day and I’ve also got a book on the go. I’m a mem-ber of a local library and I used to be in book clubs but I have got so many books inmy life now I’ve had to stop my membership for the book club so I just read in thelibrary and buy books that perhaps I’m going to read again, specialism types of books.
Whilst those who felt less confident nevertheless used the same reference point –‘English teacher as expert reader’ – to index what they saw as their own weaknessesas readers who lacked pace or tenacity:
I’m a slow reader, I have friend who can read very fast which I’m a little bit jealousof! They can read a novel in a couple of hours where it would take me several days toread it and split it up, but I can see myself as reasonably well read, in that I try to havea good, I think I’ve got quite a good background in reading and I have read some clas-sics but not all of them and I try to widen it.
I do still read a couple of books but hardly as I should as an English teacher.
Interestingly, however, other aspects of the teacher’s role, workload and time, weresometimes used to explain or qualify an inability to adhere to the ideal of the readingteacher:
As a teacher I don’t read much because I have a lot of paperwork to do.
This suggests a concern to reassert a generic teacher identity at the point where a special-ist one breaks down. As such this participant is able to territorise some sort of expert orprofessional ground in defence of a deficit she feels in relation to her identity as a reader.
What counts as reading?
I only really read on holiday really. I’m constantly reading but not what you would callreading, reading.
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In tune with the adult national curriculum document discussed above, all participantsmade a rapid association between reading and print-based texts, suggesting a fig-ured-world common sense about what might be counted (and dis-counted) as read-ing. This response made a typical distinction between print-based text and digitaltext, privileging the former as ‘what counts’:
I used to be an avid reader and then technology took over … suddenly technologycomes in to your life and it’s more interesting and addictive than a book, so I do stillread a couple of books but not hardly as I should do really as an English teacher;
I’m not going to say to them ‘I don’t do any reading because I’m playing PlayStationall the time’, as that’s not really a role model is it?
This echoes the findings of studies of reading habits that pre-date the ubiquity anduniversality of the digital reading (Kendall 2005) environment and suggests thatteachers’ definitions of reading might be more likely to index – as Bourdieu hasargued (discussed above) – to the values and reference points of their own literacyeducation rather than to evolve dynamically in response to transformation inlife-world practices. This might mean that teachers’ pedagogical meaning-makingmay not yet be integrating ideas about ‘digital literacies’ as they ‘displace’ (Gillianand Barton 2010, 7) traditional forms of reading and writing. So whilst teachersmay be making use of the repository affordances of digital technology – forexample, ‘I will try and get newspaper articles or download them’ – they are notnecessarily grappling with the meanings of literacy in the context of new spaces andplaces for writing, reading and meaning-making and taking meaning. Indeed onlyone participant mentioned digital technology positively in relation to her own andher students’ learning:
We do reading on the Internet and I try to do as much e-learning as I can, so thatinvolves reading on a computer screen…. I’m not on Facebook but a lot of them areso we do have to acknowledge that people do that type of reading so I like to givethem the opportunity to use the computer and research the Internet.
Although this respondent’s conceptualisation of how ‘new reading’ might impact onclassroom practices did not move beyond conventional approaches to information-seeking and retrieval.
Talking about their own reading preferences, most participants referred to recentfiction by particular authors such as Larsson and McCall or high-status (consecrated)texts and genres more broadly – Moby Dick, poetry, the classics and historical fic-tion – seeming to align themselves through these broad descriptions to texts thatmight yield a profit of distinction. For some this was not necessarily unconscious:
Because we tend to measure people and their worth in our culture by their achieve-ments academically and reading and writing, but in the bush they judge people by howwell they ran and caught their food or looked after their family so I think people are ata great disadvantage if they can’t read.
Here the functionality of ‘being able to read’ is overlaid with an acknowledgementof the entangled nature of reading, identity and social status.
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They went on to describe reading as a solitary, private and individualised activitythat demanded time and space away from the distractions of work or family, as thisset of statements suggest:
No I don’t think I would [call it a social activity] not in my circle but I suppose itwould be for certain people.
It takes me away from my day-to-day, but part of it is shared as well, and I do havefriends where we share literacy interests so we talk about music but books as well.
I don’t really see it as a social activity for me I think it’s more of a solitary activity.
Yeah I think it switches you off completely from everyone around you and where youare and I think it’s almost immature.
As such reading is constructed as an activity that takes one away from the everydayactivities of adult life and responsibilities to the point of, for one respondent, ‘imma-turity’ – reading as a distraction from some kind of constant, self-consciousnessmindfulness. It is at this point that we notice the tensions and contradictions of dis-coursal adherence as some of our participants struggle to invest in both their desireto define themselves in a relation to orthodox ideas about the good reader and theways of being and doing that that demands. This sort of struggle to maintain acoherent, resolved narrative is evident elsewhere; for example where participantswrestled to reconcile the good-reader tenet of reading as pleasure, with what wasexperienced for them as something more laborious.
Reading for pleasure
Participants were keen to describe their engagement with the high-status texts theyexpressed preferences for as ‘pleasurable’. Clear divisions were drawn between howparticipants defined reading for pleasure or leisure, as opposed to reading for work.Clark and Rumbold (2006, 6), acknowledge that it is hard to define reading for plea-sure, but suggest that it ‘refers to reading that we do of our own free will anticipat-ing the satisfaction that we will get from the act of reading’. Greaney (1980, cited inClark and Rumbold 2006, 5) uses the definition of ‘reading for leisure’. Caillois(1961) and Huizinga ([1938] 1950) (cited in Nell 1988, 7) propose that ‘pleasurereading is a form of play. It is a free activity standing outside ordinary life; itabsorbs the player completely, is unproductive, and takes place within circumscribedlimits of place and time’. In describing themselves as readers, our participants usedthe terms pleasure, leisure and enjoyment interchangeably:
I read a lot. I read all day every day for work, at home I read for work and I am a lei-sure reader mainly in the holidays.
I wouldn’t pick up a book until holiday time because once I start reading a book thenit’s all consuming.
I only really read on holiday really. I’m constantly reading but not what you would callreading, reading.
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This correlates with the notion that ‘leisure reading’ is undertaken on texts of theirown choice, as opposed to reading for work, which may be seen as a less enjoyableactivity. In addition, the idea of ‘really read[ing]’ or ‘reading, reading’ (see quotesfrom participants discussed above) suggests a more ‘active’ (Pullman 2004), deeperengagement with the text where the reader can escape the constraints of the curricu-lum or to experience ‘other worlds’ (Nell 1988, 22). However sometimes the act offulfilling the aspirant position of reading canonical texts for pleasure is experiencedas labour/ed:
I mean sometimes some books you read you do put yourself through it if you likebecause you know it’s supposed to be a classic.
INTERVIEWER. So do you feel like when you start a book you have to finish it?
PARTICIPANT. Not entirely no, I will work at it.
This uneasy fracturing of subject identity, not enjoying a book but at the same timekeeping going a big D 1 affiliation with high-value texts, illuminates a conceptualuneasiness as teachers work to resolve two competing positions and consider per-haps the capital risk associated with relinquishing a big D 1 identity. This identityrisk is illuminated through participants’ discussions of their students as readerswhere a clear distinction is made between the preferred identities of the teacher andthe ‘othered’ identities of students.
Students as readers
Participants’ discussion of their own reading preferences contrasted substantiallywith the accounts they gave of their students’ reading habits which they character-ised by association with texts and practices of low cultural value:
I don’t think I ever had the learner come up to me and say, ‘Oh I’ve just read thisbook’, so I’ve just always assumed that they only read what they have to read or whatI give them for homework.
One learner [was] reading their first book; what they class as a book.
... the Metro sometimes and the pink top ... nobody has bought the Telegraph or Timesin!
I don’t think many of my learners read purely for pleasure ... they go home and putBollywood or Polish movies on so I know they’re not spending time reading.
This inclination to ‘other’ the experience and preferences of students chimes withfindings from previous work we have undertaken in the sector. In a study of thereading habits of young adults, a similar tendency by educators to ‘depict anunskilled reader who rarely reads for pleasure and who prefers magazines and televi-sion to books’ (Kendall 2008b, 123) was noted. Whilst acknowledging the limita-tions of the simple binary in Prensky’s (2001) idea of teachers as ‘digitalimmigrants’ and students as ‘digital natives’, such analysis might be a useful wayinto making sense of the way teachers ‘other’ the behaviours of students:
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‘My students just don’t _____ like they used to’, Digital Immigrant educators grouse.‘I can’t get them to ____ or to ____. They have no appreciation for _____ or _____ ‘.(Prensky 2001, 2)
Prensky’s invitation to ‘fill in the blanks’ here certainly resonates with the commentsof teachers below who contrast the merits of letter writing and newspaper readingwith what they see as the more value-less activities of texting and social network-ing:
They ... go on Facebook and social network sites, they wouldn’t pick up a newspaper Idon’t think.
The mobile phone generation texting messages and poor spelling has got a lot toanswer for…. I say, ‘Let’s write a letter’ and it’s ‘I don’t want to write a letter I cantext.’
Teachers here demonstrate a very fixed interpretation of what constitutes literacy thatdraws heavily on the kinds of discourses of distinction noted by Bennett et al. andemphasises the singularity of literacy emphasised by a big D 1 subject literacy.These ideas are heavily bound up with, or in Bernstein’s terms insulated by, whatgoes on in classrooms and serve to ‘separate’ (Ivanič et al. 2009, 190) classroompractices and home practices and devalue the latter. Indeed the subject of literacywas to be entirely circumscribed by curriculum specifications suggesting a domi-nance of, and subjugation to, big D 1 discourse:
I am fulfilling what Cambridge expects from our students.
I teach what I have to teach and that’s it really.
[I teach] Functional reading.
Really the course is so prescriptive ... the courses we do are too short to do anythingmore exploratory.
Reading pedagogies
Surprisingly most participants did not see teaching themselves as teachers of readingand neither did they have close-to-hand working definitions of reading; some had norecollection of ever having given thought to defining or working with reading: ‘Idon’t think I’ve ever had discussions about reading’. Indeed in common with teach-ers in previous studies (Kendall 2008a), many grappled with an answer to the ques-tion of what we do when we read:
Ooh that’s a very strange question.
I’d say reading words I guess, but understanding and comprehending reading ... I thinka lot of us when we read don’t read word for word, we read and scan ahead and mighteven flick back ... sorry can you repeat [the question]? ... Interpreting, I think, I couldread something that you might interpret as something else.
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Acquisition of knowledge through text, an acquisition of information and pleasurethrough text and passing on as well when you write something for someone to read,you are an author and gives you the ability to express your views and pass on informa-tion.
I don’t know if there has ever been a defining definition but when we read I think welearn the skill of how to manage the page with our eyes first of all so that’s tracking.
Pace and looking at the letters and recognising the symbols and the sounds that gowith the symbols for reading out loud, accessing a scheme in our brain.
Most participants sought out technical or performative explanations in the firstinstance – what the reader does with their eyes, scanning strategies for managing text,relationships between graphemes and phonemes and whilst some did move towardsmore social, ‘accessing schemes in our brain’ accounts, big D 2 discourses were nota-bly absent from their meaning-making. In common with FE teachers in previousstudies (Kendall 2008a), participants seemed to conform to Gee’s notion of how read-ing is learned in schools perhaps. Gee argues that the teaching of reading fixates on‘reading as silently saying the sounds of letters and words and being able to answergeneral, factual and dictionary like questions about written texts’ (Gee 2003, 16).This, he contends, engenders readers who can de-code but not really read:
You do have to silently say the sounds of letters and words when you read (or, at least,this greatly speeds up reading). You do have to be able to answer general, factual, anddictionary like questions about what you read: This means you know the ‘literal’meaning of the text. But what so many people – unfortunately so many educators andpolicymakers – fail to see is that if this is all you can do, then you can’t really read.You will fail to be able to read well and appropriately in contexts associated with spe-cific types of texts and specific types of social practice. (Gee 2003, 16)
Whilst readers may feel comfortable with literal meanings, they may be less sureabout the other ways in which texts mediate the meaning of social situations; that isto say the practices of reading as manifest in the language or literacy classroom.Inevitably these ideas played out through participants’ accounts of their approachesto the teaching of reading:
[What do you know about your students as readers?] That’s a good question actually,probably not much: I don’t question my students on their reading habits as it’s some-thing I pick up as we go along ... the [initial assessment] interview doesn’t ask themabout their reading habits; we test them on their writing, but we don’t say, ‘Well doyou read or do much reading?’ And, ‘What’s your attitude towards reading?’ It tendsmore towards writing.
People I have tried to teach to read for years and still haven’t grasped it and that forme is really frustrating because you’re trying and trying and you can’t see what thekey is to unlock this for the person.
Reading took second place to writing in initial assessment strategies and processesand as such did not seem to feature in the everyday narrative-building about stu-dents. For many participants, teaching reading represented a sort of ‘holy grail’;always sought, never found, and none of the participants expressed confidence aboutstrategies or approaches they might use to support and develop adults as readers.
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Conclusion
The discussion above suggests to us that teachers’ conceptualisations of literacy areoften aligned with dominant policy discourse. Whilst this might be seen as a predict-able outcome, what does seem to be significant is that teachers build their concep-tual frameworks for literacy only partially around the curriculum documents thatthey negotiate and interpret. As, if not more, significant, are the personal values, atti-tudes and beliefs about literacy that they bring to bear on their thinking. These arefrequently formed contingently through personal experience of school, college anduniversity and often indexed to socially dominant tenets of common sense.
Despite the prominence of reflective practice as a key mode of professional learn-ing for teachers, both within the sector particularly (see for example Burke 2012), andacross the teacher education sector more generally, participants seemed not to havehad the opportunity to engage reflexively with their learning about literacy or to theo-rise their positioning within the field of literacy studies in any systematic way, indeedtraces of big D discourse 2 were almost entirely absent from the transcripts. This isnot to say however that our group of teachers participated in discourse 1 in entirelyresolved or unproblematic ways and we have signalled above the points at whichbreakdowns and tensions in attempts to keep narratives going seemed palpable.
Particularly surprising were the consistencies of response with teachers in a pre-vious study (Kendall 2008b). We had anticipated that rapid change in everyday useof reading and writing in digital environments might have pre-empted a shift, insome small degree, towards more expansive definitions of ‘what counts’ as literacy.However, sustained reassertions of more reductive positions, redolent of D1 dis-course, were, as with the much earlier study (Kendall 2008b), pervasive across thetranscripts. This suggests that the space between classroom practice and life-worldliteracies continues, as Burnett (2009) has found, to be heavily insulated, and moreimportantly, that existing modes of professional learning facilitate little systematicchallenge or problematisation of the dominant dynamic. What this study suggests isthat participants have limited exposure to the rich research literature in literacy stud-ies and that as a consequence the tacit curriculum and pedagogic knowledge thatteachers evolve over time is likely to evolve at a distance from and tangentially tocontemporary challenge, discussion and debate, perhaps to the detriment of studentsengaged in literacy learning.
These conclusions seem especially pertinent at a time when the statutory regula-tions governing the qualifications of literacy teachers specifically, and teachers in thepost-compulsory sector generally, are under review and likely to be revoked infavour of employer-led non-standard alternatives. If existing arrangements facilitatelittle opportunity for teachers to unpack and examine the meanings they make forliteracy then a move to voluntary engagement with professional development mayleave literacy learners entirely at the behest of the contingent learning trajectories ofindividual teachers. Such possibilities raise important questions for teacher educatorsand employer-based Continuing Professional Development (CPD) co-ordinators, andmore work will need to be undertaken to understand issues within local contexts andto build frameworks for workforce development at micro and macro levels.
Notes on contributorsAlex Kendall is Professor of Education and Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Edu-cation, Law and Social Sciences at Birmingham City University. Alex’s writing and research
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explore literacies and teacher development across the broad domains of further and highereducation.
Karen McGrath is Director of Post Compulsory Education at Birmingham City University.Karen’s role includes leadership of specialist teacher education programmes in Language andLiteracy. Karen’s research interests are in mentoring and teacher development for the furthereducation sector.
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