There is - or rather was - a valuable mailing list of literacy-education-related articles regularly compiled and distributed by Associate Professor Brian Cambourne.
Every few days he would distribute a summary of what media articles related to literacy education was apearing in the Australian and international media.
recipients of the summaries used this to inform their, research, to spark discussion with students, to improve their own teaching practice - in short, this information was used far and wide and this service was highly valued.
Now its compiler has been attacked by Miranda Devine in an ill-informed and emotive piece in the Sydney Morning Herald.
The discussion is far more complex than the baddies-in-black-hats scenario that Ms Devine paints in this article.
I also do not believe that Brian Cambourne deserves to be insulted - being portrayed here as some sort of monster.
But I believe that the words of the Bullock Report into reading education in the United Kingdom in 1975 best sum up the true situation (as distinct from that which was written up in the Herald):
There is no one method, medium, approach, device, or philosophy that holds the key to the process of learning to read. Too much attention has been given to polarised opinions about approaches to the teaching of reading. What is needed is a comprehensive study of all the factors at work and the influence that can be exerted upon them.
This point was also made by Ron Sinclair who came to Brian Cambourne's defence in a letter to the editor on 23rd March:
Cambourne has produced a wealth of impressive evidence to substantiate his advocacy of holistic approaches to literacy. He is one of many dedicated literacy leaders who rightly emphasise the centrality of meaning in learning to read and that excessive emphasis on fragmented decoding achieves only limited results. Such reductionism can produce "readers" who are able to decode print, but who seldom go near a book.
Whole language advocates are not averse to teaching phonics; they teach embedded phonics as one strategy among many necessary to help children with reading problems. How many times must it be said that almost all schools teach phonics thoroughly? [...]
{...] To characterise whole language advocates as those who think "children learn to read naturally just by being exposed to books" is insulting. It fails to recognise the wide acceptance of whole language emphases on skills being taught in context, literacy across the curriculum and quality literature at all levels of the reading experience.
From my limited teaching experience I can see that it would be wrong for me to place all my teaching-reading strategies in one basket. The students I meet have differing needs, and there is no one-size-fits-all to these students.
As for Brian Cambourne's work distributing the newspaper articles - not surprisingly, he does not want to do it any more.
- Bullock A (1975). A language for life: Report of the Committee of Enquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the Chairmanship of Sir Alan Bullock FBA. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.
