&lt;Whole Language&gt; as Signifier: Considering the Semantic Field of School Literacy

Dressman, Mark; McCarty, Laurie L.; Benson, Jonathan

doi:10.1080/10862969809547980

Cited by 6 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…I did not experience the vocational complexities of apostasy until I began my doctoral studies in language and literacy a decade later. That academic world, in the 1990s, was one filled with convictions of passionate intensity, a world of sectarian and fanatically defended belief (Dressman, 1995(Dressman, , 1998. From my childhood and adolescence I recognized immediately and uncomfortably what was expected in seminars and the excommunication that could result if one challenged too directly the place of English educator Louise Rosenblatt in the pantheon of literary critics, the orthodoxy of Reader Response criticism, or the natural grace of a method of teaching early reading called the Whole Language Approach.…”

Section: Rejecting Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond disbelief: A confession of religion, technology and academic conceit

Dressman

2012

Ethnography

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My professional life has been built on taking a position of apostasy, or the rejection of belief, toward many if not all of the major articles of faith within the fields of literacy studies, teacher education, and instructional technology. I justified my stance and my research practices through my reading of Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the relation between belief and practice, and was successful for many years in getting published in top academic journals. My disbelief was shaken, however, after a trip to a university in Morocco and subsequent efforts to bring students in the US and myself into direct exchange with Arab/Islamic culture. These experiences provide the basis for re-examining the efficacy of apostasy as an epistemological stance, and through the critique of Jacques Rancière speak to the power of intimacy, empathy, and redefined forms of believing and belonging as paths of insight into one’s own and others’ cultures.

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Section: Rejecting Beliefmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond disbelief: A confession of religion, technology and academic conceit

Dressman

2012

Ethnography

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“…What would it cost to change their own behavior based on such an analysis -and how would such changes, which would surely be monitored, be read by the powers that be and by their peers, within communities where difference is immediately suspect of deviance? In response, we need only consider the backlash within the US against the teacher-(and not administrator-) driven Whole Language movement, whose rhetoric about the teaching of early literacy is based not on deficiency but on tropes of development and emergence (Dressman, 1995;Dressman et al, 1998), and ask if something as comparatively innocent as literacy acquisition can draw such fire, what might be the result of teaching which is openly cognizant of race, class, and gender? In answering these questions it becomes apparent why teachers who operate within discursive regimes of truth as potentially wrathful as those dominating education today in the US would want to take cover while they were still making sense of their experience, by finding ways to mean what they say without necessarily saying what they mean.…”

Section: The 'Good Sense' Of Teachers' Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

Teacher, teach thyself

Dressman

2006

Ethnography

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This ethnography examines the potential of having teachers study their own practice in order to ‘liberate’ them as an oppressed and ‘voiceless’ group and to raise issues within their discourse communities about social, cultural, and political aspects of education. The study was conducted as part of a graduate program in education in which two courses were organized in a teacher research format. Although the teachers in these courses reported feeling supported and found their experience to have a marked effect on their awareness of their own and their students’ discourse patterns, they showed less apparent willingness to move from the examination of specific instances of teaching to an openly critical examination of their and their communities’ beliefs about students’ home lives or about schools as institutions and their roles in them. These findings in turn raise issues about what these teachers’ resistance to my critical perspective as an applied ethnographer may indicate about assumed relationships in the teacher research literature between the construction of ‘voice’ in teachers’ ethnographic writing and the culture and politics of schooling.

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“…Les parents éprouvent souvent des difficultés à accepter que leur enfant apprenne à lire d'une autre façon que la leur. Des entrevues récentes réalisées auprès de parents (Dressman, McCarty et Benson, 1998) montrent que certains d'entre eux croient important que les enfants apprennent d'abord les règles et les conventions du langage écrit, qu'ils se conforment à celles-ci avant de devenir un lecteur autonome. La méthode traditionnelle axée sur le décodage est, selon eux, la seule méthode valable pour enseigner la lecture à l'enfant.…”

Section: La Lecture Chez Les Débutantsunclassified