On literacy, multiliteracies and reading

One of these things is not like the others

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

It’s interesting that one of the words in the title of this post alerted spellcheck. You see, ‘multiliteracies’ is a made-up term. I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Pamela Snow at the Science of Learning Leadership Accelerator this week in Melbourne. She pointed out that ‘reading’ is a verb, denoting a skill that teachers can teach and learners can learn. ‘Literacy,’ with all of its infinitely divisible friends like ‘multimodal,’ ‘visual’ and ‘critical’ is a noun. The term represents a turf grab by education academics that justifies their ostensibly innovative roles, and neglects the actual teaching of reading. Case in point is this research project that promises to revolutionise literacy using memes. It’s hard to imagine a teacher bringing more to this than their students, not to mention being a whole lot easier than teaching reading.

From what I can tell, the new NESA syllabus seems to have no text requirements, unlike the old one which placed an equal emphasis on ‘quality literature’ and film. The definition of quality literature is highly subjective when applied in practice, and there was no requirement to study full novels. I have complained loudly and publicly about this and I’m now now concerned that either a) NESA forgot to include them in the draft release and they’re yet to follow; or b) direction and discussion about the role of literature in a knowledge rich, liberal education is off the table as far as the syllabus is concerned.

Two things can happen here. In one sense, I got my wish. Teachers like me will no longer be bound by the cultural politics that hobbled choices of curriculum and actually limited the volume of quality texts that we could study. But on the flip side, teachers will be able to freely prescribe a diet of YA identity fiction, memes, and graphic novels of Macbeth.

If this sounds like teacher bashing, it’s not. There are many reasons that teachers choose low-challenge texts. Teachers are given no instruction in text selection as part of their ITE. Our lecturer for text programming was a children’s bookstore owner who promoted trends like ‘sick lit’ (yes, YA identity-texts about sickness, disability and teen angst). And the issues of peer effects in clusters of disadvantage is becoming better known: schools in disadvantaged areas struggle to retain and attract experienced teachers; most teachers have had little training in reading instruction; and in absence of teacher skill in reading comprehension instruction, engagement becomes a behaviour management tool. All of this I completely understand. This doesn’t make it ok.

So my challenge to schools is to set a whole school literacy intention that privileges reading over literacy. Seek out professional development on reading instruction for your teams¹. Demand better PL from your professional orgs, delivered by the best experts they can find. Go have a coffee with your school’s local speech and language therapist. I’m opinionated but I’m not often didactic – except in this case. Hand on heart, I can tell you that the current lack of expertise in the teaching of reading is not our fault. But now we know better, we need to be better².

1. Like the SOLAR Lab short courses at La Trobe here.

2. If you don’t yet count yourself as someone who ‘knows better,’ I found this document to be a great starting point.