CONVERSATION WITH PAUL THOMAS

 

P. L. Thomas, professor of education at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is an author, essayist, editor and Award winner. In this conversation he was interviewed by Sherry Sanden, Co-editor, Talking Points. Her contribution is not recorded here.

Go to:

https://library.ncte.org/journals/tp/issues/v32-2/31300 for full interview (sent to me by Brian Cambourne, June 2021).

I have summarized Paul Thomas’s contribution.

The article begins… at a time when some media figures and others insist on a one-size-fits-all, phonics-centric approach to reading—and attempt to delegitimize holistic, meaning-based reading instruction—Dr. Paul Thomas published a book to help provide clarity. How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (2020). [This book] arrived in a world where literacy educators observe with dismay the replacement of their expertise with a zeal for the captivating rhetoric of the so-called “science of reading".

I [Paul] was kind of pulled into the science of reading (SoR) debate through my public work e.g. I keep a blog …a good bit of critical public work about how the media covers education broadly. I have two strong commitments: One is to a[n] historical grounding of our understanding of education, and the other, obviously, is literacy and how that’s viewed in the media. So, it just seemed like something I needed to do. I was very strongly encouraged by the literacy community that I’m a part of, and that meant a lot to me.

Paul continues, Emily Hanford’s “missionary zeal” for the science of reading, juxtaposed with her disregard for actual scientific evidence and lacking any historical context and the SoR advocates especially the dyslexia band … pretty nasty and very aggressive, and they are not really concerned about any sort of dialogue. [Hanford] discovered a field that’s more than a century old in the United States…the gap between research and practice. So, this is an old and somewhat tired pose on a topic. I would say the narrow and possibly extremely important difference, now, is the role of social media. I think the parental and the dyslexia advocacy element and the advent of social media has really given sort of a bold-ness to the movement that it didn’t have before; social media has allowed things to be amplified and probably distorted. And I think there’s a good bit of naivete among the parents of children with dyslexia. Honestly, I am 100 percent on their side. No child with any need, whether we call it special or not, should be ignored by our school systems. That’s one thing I have zero tolerance for. Every single child should be served. But what’s happened is the needs of a few have become the driving force of mandates for all children.

I think we just don’t want to admit that the reasons students aren’t developing as readers, the way we would like … One, they never have, which may be some evidence that that’s just a reality. Two, it’s clearly strongly linked to their home and their communities and their socioeconomic status.

[Especially in USA], teachers increasingly have been told exactly what to do, whether they agree with it or not, and then are blamed when it doesn’t work because the solution doesn’t fit the problem. Those who believe in nonstop phonics instruction or universal dyslexia screening certainly seem to have the ear of the media and legislators, while the voices of those of us who have actually spent time sitting beside children and teaching them to read are frequently disregarded.

1. Maybe we [especially balanced literacy educators] are not doing enough to get our voices out there? We are terrible at explaining what they know to the public. The SoR movement pushes the simple view of reading, which is very compelling to the public. The problem for us is that reading and teaching reading are never simple. That is really hard to communicate to the public because the public likes simple messages.

And, furthermore, balanced literacy, is a philosophy … there are not instructional templates.

2. Classroom literacy teachers aren’t allowed to be public advocates. If they are, they’re risking their careers. Holistic literacy, the complex literacy folk who I’m among, is a hard message. It’s really complicated and difficult.

3. SoR movement is a very privileged movement. And I think that most of us who are very privileged—it just seems like reading happened. So, it sounds simple. That seems obvious, and it never was that simple.

Teachers who daily are working with individual students and individual needs, need to find [education] communities so they feel confidence and they also feel professionally and personally safe in their practices because they do know more than people who haven’t been in a classroom.

“Teaching and teachers must be, instead, guided by evidence, both the evidence of a wide range of research types and evidence drawn from the individual students in any classroom. To teach is to quilt together what a teacher knows about the field, reading for example, and then what instructional approaches will address where any student is and where any student wishes to go” [p. 105]. This is perhaps the failure about which I am most incensed, regarding a philosophy that prescribes a systematic and intensive approach that is identical for all students. With all of the work that has been done ascribing pedagogical importance to students’ strengths and needs and backgrounds, how can we still be questioning the importance of evidence drawn from the children sitting in front of us?

To a fault, I am a student-centered teacher - what I want to do is to teach every student one-on-one. Kids who sat in my [class]room, worked individually, I gave them feedback, and they revised.

[What is happening is] we just want to fill up a room with 30 kids, make the teacher the center of the room, and fix all the kids. So, there’s a pathology to that, there’s a whole ideology around that, that I completely 100 percent reject. I think there’s nothing to fix about a child; I think a child is a child. Eight-year-olds act like eight-year-olds, and it’s perfectly healthy and normal. I do think every student deserves whatever that student needs. And then you have to also keep in mind that for some of us, our goals are different than what I call the technocrats—that’s what they’re looking for. I want human autonomy. I like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I idealize that.

I think literacy is the key to that. And again, that’s not something that is popular. Politicians don’t like that. Parents don’t like that.

I want to put all the focus on what is the accountability movement: that has been in-school reform only. My problem with that is, it’s very much a “blame the victim” mentality. We want children to set aside their lives when they walk through the school door. We want teachers to be superhuman. And all of these things are unrealistic. I think probably the perfect example of that is, No Child Left Behind wanted 100 percent of students to be proficient by 2014 (U.S.A. initiative).

You can’t get 100 percent success in anything; it’s nearly impossible with humans.

Instead, I demand, that policy is equity based. I think all of us need to learn how to talk that way. not say equal, not to say equality, but to say equity. Equity means that a student identified with dyslexia gets what that student needs, even though it’s different than the student who is having trouble at school because [of] different reasons, different needs.

So those are two different worlds. They don’t need the same reading program. They may not even need the same teacher. They may not even need the same school. So, I’m a huge advocate for all of us better understanding what the concept of equity means and being able to talk about it in terms of policy and practice. So, what would be an equitable policy, what would be an equitable classroom practice—and to be able to talk that way and to give people evidence of what that looks like.

Every child deserves whatever that child needs to be an eager and critical literate human; however, there simply is not a single prescription for what that need may be for any child.

Phonics misses the critical part. It focuses too much on just decoding and not enough on understanding or challenging the text you read, and certainly sitting and doing any kind of worksheets or program does not have, the joy that a picture book does.

Stephen Krashen constantly says: access to books, access to text, in the home, in the school—that’s where our commitment should be. And we would have kids eager if they were surrounded with books and they were around people that have found joy in books.

Can I add, being a classroom and Reading Recovery teacher: a Literacy/pedagogy consultant: a Lectutor (Sessional) in teacher education at Flinders University: an author of many literacy books and a South Australian Award winner. I concur with everything that Paul Thomas believes in and writes about.

Liz Simon