Whole language as signifier: Considering the semantic field of school literacy

Journal of Literacy Research, Mar 1998 by Dressman, Mark, McCarty, Laurie, Benson, Jonathan

To collect data on the written conversation about and related educational issues within El Campo, we searched the files of the local daily newspaper, the El Campo Post, for articles on topics ranging from community involvement in the schools to recent controversies in several elementary schools that have been identified as enclaves. We have also sampled the writings of Eric Buehrer (e.g., 1995), a writer whose main topic is the decline of public education in the United States, whose work is found in several Christian bookstores in the area, and who continues to be an important influence on the thinking of at least one local citizens' group.

Motives

Our motives for conducting our research and the grounds on which we argue these points come from a survey conducted within the College of Education at Algodon State of its recent elementary education graduates, who indicated that they wished they had heard less about programs in their preservice classes and more about "the basics" of teaching reading. We found this surprising, as none of the reading-language arts instructors at Algodon State claims to be an advocate of teaching exclusively, although each endorses practices like literature-based instruction and process writing that seem consonant with the practices of as professional journals describe them. Our interest in the ways the term was being rather loosely used by these new teachers in contrast to its careful, relative non-use by Algodon State faculty was further piqued when we learned there was a growing controversy over the practices of teachers in the El Campo area who openly named themselves teachers, that these teachers' use of the term seemed again to differ significantly from the use of the term by faculty at Algodon State, and that there was considerable coverage in the local newspaper of citizens' groups that were forming and who seemed to regard in still other ways, that is, as a code word for a number of things they did not approve of in the local schools that seemed, on the surface at least, to be completely unrelated to literacy issues. We became even more interested when, as members of the El Campo community and as frequent visitors to its schools, we began to see dramatic changes in the personnel and instructional practices in some of those schools, changes that were sometimes directly made in reference to and, other times, seemed to correlate less directly with a school's "reputation" as a place where flourished. Finally, rumblings in the national media (e.g., Atlantic Monthly, Levine, 1994) and teacher-practice journals (e.g., The Reading Teacher, Stanovich, 1993/1994) that referenced the controversy surrounding to yet another debate - The Great Debate (Chall, 1967) - convinced us that here was a phenomenon well worth investigating: the referencing of a single term to so many different discursive realities by so many different participants in the field of education.

The central project of this article, then, springs from our empirical and initially informal observation that the term invokes different meanings for different players in the field of school literacy, meanings that have heretofore largely been ignored or dismissed by discussants within educational and school literacy journals. The outcome of this investigation is an account of the ways that controversies surrounding in at least one community have become part and parcel of larger social, economic, and political is- sues and controversies within that community - an account which has led us to reconsider just what the alternative, as opposed to the stated, relationships among the discursive agendas of researchers and teacher educators in school literacy, educators in local schools, and their communities at-large might be, and what those relationships as they exist in the El Campo-Algodon State community may imply about the efficacy of school literacy research and teacher education within the United States today.