Culture change as literacy praxis at an inner city school in the UK

Mr Roy Bentley Washwood Heath Technology College Birmingham, United Kingdom

I was once asked to provide learning support to a group of thirty three year 9 pupils studying the ‘communication’ module from a popular key stage 3 science scheme. One of the sections was about ‘ultrasound’, and featured two species of bat: one with long ears and one with short ears. The pupils had to cut out a series of ‘statement boxes’ and stick the statements which pertained to the long eared bat next to a large picture of a long eared bat, and so on. The cognitive skills involved in reading the information section and then matching it to the boxed statements were of a relatively high level, a level incommensurable with the skill level of the ‘cutting and pasting’ task. I kept asking myself, ‘If these pupils can select complex information on the auditory acuity possessed by the two species of bat, and then relate this to a description of the bat’s habitat, then why do they need to cut out little boxes and stick them next to a line drawing of a bat?’ It is likely that this activity was designed to support  pupils in transition from concrete operational to formal modes of thought, although I am not sure what the publishers would have made of the way brighter groups were cascading solutions down to more passive members of the class.

At the end of the lesson the exercise books looked reasonably sophisticated - rather like a roughly typeset, glue-smeared facsimile of their text book, containing a pastiche of complex information. In this lesson, there were clear learning inputs and outputs, but the process assumed to be linking them was problematic, because most students were not so much processing information, as assembling jigsaw pieces to make the same picture as everyone else.

Although the forgoing cameo relates to a practice I observed in the late 1990s it provides a useful analogy for a current tendency among some groups of sixth form students to construct essays by ‘cutting and pasting’ elements from the Internet and using word or phrasal substitution to rework their downloads. I have found this to be particularly evident both with indigenous white restricted code users and ethnic groups who speak English as their second language. Unsurprisingly, the result of this process is at variance with the expectations of those who adopt it, holding grades down and adding to the malaise of linguistic disempowerment which drives the process on. Students adopting this practice merely select appropriate connecting devices to amalgamate and consolidate what they have torn from its original context; a process not of writing/authoring, but of linguistic bricolage.

As these products pass through the assessment cycle, these students become aware that their writing is of a heterogeneous quality, consisting of ‘islands’ of coherent (copied) writing interspersed with faulty logic, grammatical errors and vacuous connecting devices. At the same time, teachers marking the work feel obliged to provide constructive guidance and therefore produce positive comments, incisive criticisms and helpful suggestions. In response, students incorporate the exact prescription indicated, including supplied exemplars, into the evolving text and without further thought, feed it back into the loop! Although disempowered in one sense, students adopting this strategy are tacitly exploiting a powerful psychological lever: for their teachers are unconsciously motivated to synthesise the problematic link between learning inputs and outputs in return for the knowledge that when they do, examination grades will not fall below a certain threshold level. Over time, mythologies emerge which obfuscate and reinforce this economy, which both binds and blinds its subscribers - causing teachers stressed under extreme leverage, to misrecognise inarticulable feelings of personal resistance as symptoms of commitment failure.

Theorisation

I will now show how the sixth form staff I was working with, which included a post graduate researcher based at a university in the North of England, collaborated to produce a model of the antecedents and processes driving this malaise, and how we have already begun to produce a promising and practicable alternative. The model is based upon a combination of New Literacy Studies (NLS) and the post structuralist philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin – although in this article, I will only have space for the former. My discussion will begin with a brief examination of assumptions which underpin prevailing ideas on literacy, ideas which we eventually scrapped, and then I will describe how we began to construct an entirely new foundation for praxis.

Like many educators we had unknowingly subscribed to certain assumptions about the nature of consciousness which have their long roots in seventeenth century Cartesian rationalism, and which have become known in modern times as ‘the metaphysics of presence’ (Derrida, 1967). This consists in the idea that cognitive abilities derive from the isolated thrust of a private, detached interior consciousness or ‘cogito’ - popularly depicted as an isolated homunculus ensconced somewhere behind the eyes - which has ‘privileged access’ to a source of ‘natural light’ or a-priori reason, which does not depend for its operation upon social interaction and functions as the locus of interpretation for experience. In this view, language functions as nothing more than a transparent vehicle to be stripped by a transcendent interior presence (Descartes’ ‘cogito’), of its information content like cooked flesh from a chicken bone. Once the bone has been sucked clean it is discarded and forgotten, for just as the eye is assumed neutral in the act of seeing, so language is assumed to be neutral during the communication of ideas, adding nothing of its own, either to the cognizing subject or to the cognitions it is being used to convey.

In disengaging consciousness from the social mêlée, Descartes claimed to have found the ‘Archimedean point’, the fixed foundation for knowledge which would be our escape from ‘forces of darkness which envelop us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos’ (Bernstein, 1989). Over the years this philosophy of detachment has become sedimented into classroom praxis as a tendency to address something insular within the student, so that s/he is no longer subject to the flux of experience (social pressure), but able to live in an objectified impersonal mode.

In Current issues in comparative education, Professor Brian Street (2003) sees the forgoing philosophy embodied in what he calls the ‘autonomous’ model of literacy, in which writing practices are seen as a technical, neutral skill to be taught through the propagation of universal abstractions such as the rules of grammar, and absorbed passively and individualistically by the isolated student. Implicit in this practice is the expectation that, ‘literacy in itself (autonomously) will have beneficial effects on other social practices…. enhancing cognitive skills, improving economic prospects, making better citizens’ (ibid). Street then describes a ‘social turn’ away from this Cartesian approach to language and towards what he calls the ‘ideological’ model, which lies at the heart of what has become known as New Literacy Studies (NLS). In a nutshell, the ideological model supports the view that, ‘literacy is a social practice, not simply a technical and neutral skill; and that it is always embedded in socially constructed epistemological principles’ (ibid). 

Epistemology focuses upon grounds for the validity of knowledge, so the idea that literacy is implicated in a “socially constructed epistemology” instantly associates communication practices in any social context, with the articulation of power in that setting. For me, Black American author Toni Morrison, provides a perfect illustration of this connection in her novel, Beloved, which focuses on the experiences of a group of African-American ex-slaves. At one point they are recalling ‘Sweet Home’ (the slave plantation) and in particular, a character named ‘Schoolteacher’ - the white man who weaves the discourse of power.

‘At night he sat down to write in his book. It was a book about us, but we didn't know that right away (p.37) …  I heard him say, “No, No. That's not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don't forget to line them up”.’ (p. 193).

Morrison concludes, ‘definition belongs to the definers and not to the defined’ (p.193).

Although NLS is broad in scope, focusing upon ‘the articulation of different discourses as centrally and dynamically interwoven in people's everyday literacy activities’ (Gee, 2000), our interest in Street’s ideological model of language was limited to processes of interaction within the classroom. We wanted to establish and exploit a possible link between the articulation of power in the learning environment, and the quality of literary production. If this could be established we would be able to improve literacy amongst sixth form students through a radical change of the teaching-learning model.

Towards a solution

Fortunately, the postgraduate member of our team had done some preliminary research which gave impetus and direction to the modelling process. She had been correlating the educational achievement of a small group of female Asian FE students against various ethnological factors such as race, culture and languages. During a group interview she had noticed that when talking amongst themselves these students used what appeared to be a ‘hybrid’ code comprising vernacular forms of English, Punjabi and Urdu, and after further research, posited a correlation between this language behaviour and the morphology of the texts these girls produced. The texts were ‘hybrid’ in the sense that they consisted of expanses, which undoubtedly conformed to Bernstein’s depiction of a ‘restricted code’ (Bernstein, 1971), interspersed with more complex, semantically elaborate constructions which gave the writing a characteristic ‘lumpiness’ (that is, heterogeneous, in terms of conceptual rank). This lead her to ask - was this heterogeneity a result of code hybridisation or some other feature of social and linguistic interaction? If so, would it be possible to identify, examine and enhance the sociolinguistic antecedents of these semantically richer veins of text, and thereby increase the frequency of their occurrence. 

During one discussion with her supervising professor, it emerged that the way the girls took active control of the discourse may correlate with the anomalous structure of the writing. It was at this point that she was able to posit a possible link, for this group, between epistemological construction (new language forms generated) and the ‘lumpy’ texts. This discovery was exciting for us, for it meant that experiences of social and personal empowerment within the learning environment may enable students to transcend the code in which they normally communicate. We decided to put this hypothesis to the test, creating experiences of empowerment among carefully selected teaching groups, and then trawling their work for ‘lumps’ of higher conceptualisation, using coloured highlighters to indicate differing conceptual rank. Our results indicated lumpiness in texts written by the most responsive members of the group.

In order to systematise the process into a viable pedagogical design, our researcher came up with an approach which has now become known as the MERR cycle, a process in four stages.

1. Mining: Texts produced by the students are analysed and each concept given a certain rank. In this way conceptually elaborated “lumps” may be properly identified.
2. Extraction: The segments of higher conceptualisation are removed from the body text.
3. Refining: These segments are now embedded within an artificial (ie teacher constructed) matrix of higher rank than the text from which they were extracted. This is seen as a zone of proximal development
4. Recycling: The refined and augmented textual product is integrated back into the chain of discourse. This process required an emphasis upon discussion, in which students were encouraged to engage in linguistic experimentation and in particular, to communicate bilingually.

This was a radical new approach to literacy, for instead of focusing upon the identification of individual errors, we were ‘cutting’ fragments of higher conceptual rank from the body text produced by each student, and ‘pasting’ these back into a collective workspace. Each person’s contribution to this ‘hybrid’ text was identified as such, which in fact helped the students to understand why plagiaristic practices disempower the writer. This process ran in parallel with portfolio building during which, of course, students had to write their own texts or properly cite information gained from elsewhere. We found that skills gained through deployment of the MERR Cycle were transferable, and the examination result for portfolio work amongst the most responsive students was significantly better.

I have just successfully trialled a modification of the foregoing process; adapted to writing in Advanced level sociology, in which the hybrid text produced by the group is spoken aloud by a virtual ‘avatar’ assisted by a text to speech engine (the program is called Crazy Talk). By this means, the dynamic interaction of a group of students is personified in the image and polyphonic utterance of a single avatar.  When hearing such a bright, confident and articulate voice, students who, at this stage in their development, could not (individually) produce such a high level of speech, begin to feel empowered and quite naturally to assimilate the elaborate speech forms they hear.