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

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

Professional Journals and the National Media: as Simulation?

The Course of Journal Discourse We will begin our discussion with a recounting and analysis of the course of nationally before moving to the analysis of the interviews we conducted. Although many avowed practitioners and supporters of pedagogy trace the lineage of the term and their philosophy from its use by John Amos Comenius (in translation) in the 16th century through the writings of John Dewey (Y. Goodman, 1989), widespread current use of and its organized movements has its origins in the "miscue" research and analysis of Kenneth Goodman (1976) in the United States, in the "psycholinguistic" research of Frank Smith (1982) in Canada, and in the reading curriculums of New Zealand (Clay, 1976) and Australia (Holdaway, 1979). Beginning in the mid-198os, a "spontaneous" grassroots movement of humanistically oriented teacher support groups and teacher-practice literacy advocates in universities throughout the United States (including the TAWL group in El Campo) came together, culminating in 1988 in a loose confederation known as the Whole Language Umbrella (Greenfield, 1993). At the same time, use of the term became so prevalent in schools and teacher-education programs that at least three major journals - Elementary School Journal (Hoffman, 1989), Educational Researcher (Berliner, 199o), and Language Arts (Teale, 1992) - focused on the meaning of the term and its implications for research and teaching in special "themed" issues. In the texts of these early exchanges, the tone of quantitatively based literacy researchers and teacher educators was alternately circumspect (Hoffman, 1989), defensive (McKenna et al., 199oa, 199ob), quizzical (Pearson, 1989), and always a little edgy about what this movement, acknowledged to be unlike anything seen in the previous 25 years (Pearson, 1989), might mean for the literacy establishment. Much of this early discussion focused on issues of definition and ownership of the term. McKenna et al. (199oa), for example, declared "a research agenda for the gos." Citing Shakespeare ("The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose"), they argued that "effectiveness studies" comparing and "traditional" approaches to literacy instruction were what was needed to bring the false claims of both sides to task. In response, Carole Edelsky (199o) asked rhetorically, "Who's agenda is this, anyway?" She accused McKenna et al. of presumptuously defining on their own "skills-based" terms and reserved to those researchers who had "examined their conceptions of language and literacy" and understood "the participants' perspectives" (pp. 9-io) the right to research in the name of . Her response, laced with Yiddish exclamations, was confident and thoroughly aggressive in its tone.

In another, less feisty article, "Defining and Describing Whole Language," Dorothy Watson (1989) provided some insight into the issue of definition by carefully describing her own struggle to define the term while also being careful to acknowledge regularly in the text that her definition was, in the final analysis, only her definition - a rhetorical strategy implying that could not be defined in "objective" or even consensual terms, and that its meaning belonged to those who claimed it as theirs, that is, teachers. This perspective was echoed in an article in the practitioner journal Language Arts by Ken Goodman (1992b), who explained "Why Whole Language Is Today's Agenda in Education," and who also cited Shakespeare as his guide: