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With Literacy and Justice for All: Rethinking the Social in Language and Education
Edelsky, Carole
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
2006
Pp. ix + 315
ISBN:0-8058-5508-4 (pbk): US22.50

Reviewed by: Steve Bialostok
University of Wyoming

The title and subtitle of Carole Edelsky’s new edition of With Literacy and Justice For All: Rethinking the Social in Language and Education are more relevant now than when the second edition appeared in 1996. Political and economic changes have profoundly redefined language and literacy for teachers and children. By not simply blending new material into her previous edition — Edelsky provides numerous additions, footnotes, elaborations, and lengthy postscripts — the author and With Literacy and Justice For All further documents the sociopolitical nature of schooling and in particular, language learning. Because she explicitly marks “old” and “new” material, we are privileged to read 1) the evolution of Edelsky’s thinking; 2) the effects of the political then and now. Edelsky addresses many issues that are frightening and the book's disturbances compel readers to action. This book’s release comes at just the right time.

The first four chapters examine the education of minority-language children, oral and written; the remainder of the book examines literacy learning, critical whole language, teacher empowerment, and standardized testing. The chapters can easily be read separately, but Edelsky has also woven them together by her insistence that larger social and political contexts underlie the everyday lives of children and classrooms.

Her powerful introduction examines the federal intrusion into (and the under-funding of) education, as well as into teacher education. She describes the intersection of neo-liberalism and repression, how corporate (and governmental) interests have co-opted classrooms and orchestrated narrowly focused literacy programs designed to shape future capitalist workers. She describes the “reappearance of McCarthyism” as realized by the power and intimidation of the religious right, the phonics-friendly Reid Lyon and National Institute of Health, the shrinking of independent media, and the blacklists in California “preventing state funds from being used for professional development that mentioned invented spelling, cueing systems or whole language” (14). Depressing as it all seems, Edelsky ends on a note of hope — challenges and critiques to what many might consider to be the inevitability of high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind.

A central theme throughout all editions of With Literacy and Justice For All, including this third, is that even in “naturalist” studies of second language acquisition, the political nature of learning is often ignored. The lengthy postscript Edelsky added in 2004 to the conclusion of Not Acquiring Spanish as a Second Language: The Politics of Second Language Acquisition (the original written with Sarah Hudelson) asks if inequities that originate outside the classroom haven't changed, what has? What allows some Anglo students in one particular school to learn Spanish in a dual language program when those first graders in her earlier studies didn't?

In the earlier studies, Edelsky concluded non-acquisition was a social activity and had nothing to do with the quantity of Spanish time allotted for English speakers. Inequities originated outside of classrooms. Spanish was “marked” as a nondominant language. English was normal, the expected language to know, and children as young as these first graders knew this. In other words, there were gross inequalities of power between Spanish and English. Bilingual programs cannot “compensate for a discriminatory political context” (31).

In the new postscript, Edelsky describes Valley View, a K-8 School with a dual language program that actually gets English speakers to learn Spanish. With an exceptional (White) principal “with a vision of an equitable, diverse bilingual world” (33), and valiant faculty who chose to work there because they share the principal’s vision, this is a school where the high status of Spanish is deliberate and expressly valued. Spanish language speakers take on teaching roles and English speakers take on learning roles; English-speaking students attend because their parents want them there; a sense of solidarity unites faculty and students. Edelsky describes a school where “adults are encouraged to think big…to envision making possible what seems impossible” (39-40).

Readers of the previous edition of this book will recall Edelsky’s strong challenge to well-known James Cummins’s widely adopted explanation of children’s second-language acquisition and their subsequent success in school. Originally, she contrasted people’s folk models (“theories”) with academic models (THEORIES). She wanted to explain how even researchers’ explicit THEORIES are influenced by their often unexamined “theories” that lead to what they identify as interesting problems, the methodologies they used and the models they construct.

In this edition, Edelsky argues that not only does Cummins (still) get it wrong, but also that he denies holding previous positions that are no longer politically and academically acceptable. His current positions retain the same old flaws rooted in a consistent failure to examine his own assumptions about learning, reading, and language. Most importantly, while the language he uses is all gussied up in hip educational jargon. Cummins fails to truly understand the fields that he uses to make his case — linguistics, sociolinguistics, and pedagogy.

Few academics actually publicly share their own theoretical struggles, but Edelsky does so in Literacy: Some Purposeful Distinctions. In a 2005 introduction, she asks after reviewing some of the literature from the New Literacy Studies, if, with such a broad view, there is a way to “pin down” literacy (106)? In an era of narrowly focused and powerful federal micromanagement of schools, how can schools expand their views of literacy “to include a wider range of practices with print but also to include images and three-dimensional objects” (107)? What counts in school (particularly test scores) can “seep into identities” (108). Edelsky’s distinction between literacy exercises and nonexercises remains a political act about what literacy should be for and what educational practices should be about. She explicitly wants to improve “children’s educational chances by improving literacy instruction, evaluation, and research” (110).

Edelsky’s 1980's attempt to separate reading from reading exercises by describing literacy as a subordinate category postulated that "any use of print as print" (115) that involves the construction of meaning guided by an interdependent system of language cues that are interacting as guided by the reader's purpose. Like all language learning, learning literacy is purpose-driven, embedded in context, and guided by use. Her 1990's revision recognizes the difference between reading and reading exercises but admits "having second thoughts about the character of that difference" (116) which - based upon particular criteria - "did not permit me to sort exercises from nonexercises" (117). She goes on to problematize the distinctions. Her 1990’s solution for teaching, researching, and evaluating literacy — which she describes in copious detail — involves reading/NOT reading, exercises/nonexercises, literates-as-Subjects/literates-as-Objects. This raises the critical question of value: What does a researcher, a student, an educator, a community want? Edelsky concludes the chapter by describing how she questions certain aspects of her proposal, providing several thoughtful examples that challenge it. Edelsky even briefly describes an earlier draft of this final postscript, recognizing aspects of it as an “error.” How many of us in the academe open ourselves up in such a way? This chapter is not only insightful and scholarly. It is brave.

On Second Thought is the only thorough recent examination that I have read which closely tries to get at the question: Is written language language? Since Ken Goodman first argued that written language is not simply a way to represent oral language but is language, and is learned in the same way as oral language, scholars whose work I admire (and don’t admire) have dismissed this assertion. Their throw-away lines add up to ‘language is hard-wired; writing is not.’ Most of it centers on a varying acceptance of Chomsky.

But suppose (gads!) that Chomsky was wrong.

In one of three possible directions for arguing against the refusal to acknowledge the possibility that written language is language, Edelsky examines the work of Harvard’s Terrance Deacon, a neurologist and evolutionary and biological anthropologist who has blended anthropology, neurobiology, and linguistics into an argument that it is an evolved symbolic reference — not innate Universal Grammar — that we humans are wired for.

A second possible argument for seeing reading/writing as language accepts the brain hard-wired for language theory, but postulates that the brain is hard-wired only for a first language. This argument leaves room for suggesting that learning written language is like a special case of second-language learning. This reasoning makes certain arguments vanish. Second languages are not found in every community; second languages are not learned with universal success; second languages are generally recognized as being learned with variable success; communities take on additional languages (including writing systems) as needed.

A final argument involves Western bias. Edelsky draws upon the work of Roy Harris, Francis Coulmas, and Michael Halliday, each of whom in their respective way argue that ‘language is a semiotic ecology with various modalities of expression (oral, written, gestural) in various relationships to each other depending on the particular community of users” (139). The remainder of the chapter explicates the case for looking at literacy learning as a case of second-language learning. Edelsky has not provided forgone conclusions in this chapter. She has opened up possibilities for discussion, debate, and thoughtful response.

Other chapters defend, critique, and update “whole language,” a term that Edelsky — unlike publishers, politicians, and numerous educators — does not shy away from. A new introduction to Whole Language: What’s New? describes the systematic and McCarthy-like political attacks on whole language — enabled by an uncritical and propaganda-disseminating media— attacks having almost nothing to do with pedagogy and almost everything to do with controlling education, favoring educational/political cronyism (e.g., approved Reading First programs with close ties to the Bush administration), and reclaiming the hegemonic supremacy of experimental reading research. I only wish Edelsky had described how well respected reading researchers — testifying before legislatures for the supremacy of systematic, explicit, directed phonics instruction — have remained shamelessly silent about how so much of the ensuing pedagogy has so disastrously been played out in classrooms (e.g., preschool and kindergarten children sitting through lengthy, daily phonics and phonemic drills).

And, in keeping with the ends justify the means mentality, I particularly liked how Edelsky, in the chapter on Risky Literacy, turns her gaze on many progressives who emphasize “reading and writing for expanding personal horizons, for understanding how texts have the effects they have…for examining conditions in one’s life.” Such expansions may have “unanticipated consequences” (200), specifically the paradoxical possibilities of “estrangement from their roots” (201). I am not, however, as convinced as Edelsky that “whole language” teachers necessarily sidestep these issues. But in the end, this is where Edelsky effectively laminates whole language and critical practice.

In a book about literacy and justice, there are the requisite chapters on the awfulness of standardized tests and high stakes testing. But Edelsky’s chapter Sorely Tested frames the issue uniquely: Different critiques of standardized testing are called for in different eras. She claims that in the current era — when testing is all about politics — then the response must also be political too. We must quit thinking that if only we had the right argument, stated it correctly, or made the perfect point we'd convince people to change the tests or eliminate them altogether. Edelsky calls for resistance and an organized “movement for education rights.” Maybe it’s my utterly demoralized mood of late about the state of American education at the moment, but I am not as optimistic as Edelsky leaves her readers. But that’s a mild quibble, and she has left me wondering if – perhaps – I am wrong.

There is no doubt that With Literacy and Justice for All is an intellectually challenging book, probably best for graduate classes and seminars. Even with her excellent summaries, it would also be useful to have some background on particular topics, such as having first read Cummins or Goodman before reading Edelsky’s chapters. But after reading this book, I could only think of the oft-quoted saying by Winston Churchill: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.” Edelsky’s book contradicts Churchill. Her book has both heart and brains.

References:

Deacon, T. (1997). The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and brains. New York: Norton.