Researching the reading lesson

1. A genealogy of teaching practices Researching the reading lesson Phil Cormack Centre for Research in Education University of South Australia

2. Teaching reading in Australia: An historical investigation of early reading pedagogy, the figure of the teacher and literacy education • What are the historical (dis)continuities in the ideals and practices associated with the teacher of beginning reading from the mid-19th century to the present? • How has the teacher-pupil-text relationship in beginning reading pedagogy been configured in different periods and places? • What can be learned from the history of debates about the teaching of reading that can inform teacher preparation and professional learning?

3. Associated papers • Annette Patterson, Phil Cormack, and Bill Green (2010, under review) Reading primers and reading instruction: An historical perspective. submitted to Paedagogica Historica. • Phil Cormack (2011, in press) Reading Pedagogy, ‘Evidence’ and Education Policy: Learning from History? Australian Education Researcher.

4. The reading lesson • a primal scene of schooling • shaped by the kinds of materials available for reading, and the pedagogical techniques deployed to shape young readers • the material and discursive forces at work that foreground approaches or technologies at different times

5. Effective history History becomes “effective” to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being—as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. “Effective” history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy towards a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. (Foucault 1977, p.154)

6. Indispensable restraint … Paul Ree was wrong to describe the history of morality in terms of a linear development… He assumed that words had kept their meaning, that desires still pointed in a single direction, and that ideas retained their logic; and he ignored the fact that the world of speech and desires has known invasions, struggles, plundering, disguises, ploys. From these elements, however, genealogy retrieves an indispensable restraint: it must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history… it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles (Foucault 1977, pp.139-40).

7. 1554 Inscription in German Al reyst den eseleterscholenomleeren, isteeneneselehy en salgheenpeertwederkeeren. 1557 Inscription in Latin Parisiosstolidumsiquistransmittatasellum. Si hic estasinus non eritillicequus. Although the ass goes to school to learn, If he is an ass, it will not return as a horse. You may send a stupid ass to Paris. If he is an ass here, he won’t be a horse there. Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1554) The Ass at School

8. Reading lesson descriptions 1816 Joseph Lancaster Manual of the System of Teaching 1654 Richard Lloyd The Schoole-Master’s Auxiliaries… 1897 F.J. Gladman School Method 1854 David Stow The Training System 1700 1800 1600 1900 1846 Horace Mann Report of an Educational Tour 1885 Lelia Patridge The Quincy Methods Illustrated 1665 Owen Price The Vocal Organ…

9. Reading lessons Reading lesson 1 – 1654 – Richard Lloyd from The Schoole-Master’s Auxiliaries… Reading lesson 2 – 1816 – Joseph Lancaster from Manual of the System of Teaching Reading lesson 3 – 1846 – Horace Mann from Report of an Educational Tour in Germany and Parts of Great Britain and Ireland Reading lesson 4 – 1885 – Lelia Patridge from The ‘Quincy Methods’ Illustrated: Pen Photographs from the Quincy school

10. Hamilton, D. (1989). Towards a Theory of Schooling. London: Falmer Press, p.37.

11. Reading lessons Reading lesson 1 – 1654 – Richard Lloyd from The Schoole-Master’s Auxiliaries… Reading lesson 2 – 1816 – Joseph Lancaster from Manual of the System of Teaching Reading lesson 3 – 1846 – Horace Mann from Report of an Educational Tour in Germany and Parts of Great Britain and Ireland Reading lesson 4 – 1885 – Lelia Patridge from The ‘Quincy Methods’ Illustrated: Pen Photographs from the Quincy school

14. Reading lessons Reading lesson 1 – 1654 – Richard Lloyd from The Schoole-Master’s Auxiliaries… Reading lesson 2 – 1816 – Joseph Lancaster from Manual of the System of Teaching Reading lesson 3 – 1846 – Horace Mann from Report of an Educational Tour in Germany and Parts of Great Britain and Ireland Reading lesson 4 – 1885 – Lelia Patridge from The ‘Quincy Methods’ Illustrated: Pen Photographs from the Quincy school

15. Reading the reading lesson… • what can we say about these as ‘lessons’—what makes them recognisably reading lessons? • where and how are they different, and what is the significance of these differences? • how is reading being understood here, and the pupil as reader? • what pedagogical relations are evident?

16. The reading lesson as a programmatic ‘triplet’ Student Pedagogy as relations Lusted (1986) Teacher Knowledge

17. Thinking genealogically about the reading lesson • understanding it as an historically contingent term • considering it as an assemblage – necessarily fragile and incomplete • analysing it as a form of human technology or the routinised orchestration of materials and/or practices designed to shape human conduct

18. Reading lesson analysis The routinised orchestration of materials and/or practices designed to shape human conduct • what materials? • what must the participants do? • what counts as reading here?

20. Questions raised • who is the teacher here? • what counts as ‘reading’? • why this emphasis on signalling and movement and position? • what ‘pedagogic relations’ are being demonstrated?

26. A complex orchestration of bodies and attention telegraph text pupil monitor master Visual attention Aural attention Supervision & signalling

28. A complex orchestration of bodies and attention text (inc blackboard) class schoolroom platform pupil Clarence teacher Visual attention Aural attention Visual &Aural attention Supervision & signalling

30. The reading lesson 1816-1885 Continuities Discontinuities pupils’ freedom to initiate the play of affect (eagerness, humour) deployment of pupils’ lives and experience the role of the teacher in managing all in the room the mono- or poly-attentive teacher teacher positioning as a reader ( e.g. insider to pupils’ aspirations or corrector) more and less open scripts for teaching the relation between learning meaning and learning sound-symbol knowledge genres used for learning (e.g. emergence of the ‘story’) • text as starting point • grouping of bodies into like ability with a levelled text • careful arrangement of bodies in space to facilitate supervision • the teacher’s body a key signalling device • technologies for supervising over distance • discipline to constitute the bodily performance of reading

31. The reading lesson as populational technology As a human technology, the reading lesson manages and coordinates groups of pupils and their teachers through the orchestration and disposition of: 1. time and space – schedules and architecture 2. texts, materials and furniture 3. the body – physical capacities 4. the mind – cognitive capacities 5. the soul – moral and affective capacities

32. Acting on ‘mental capacities and propensities’ While it would be too much to claim that our rulers now construe their tasks wholly or even largely in terms of the interior lives of citizens, subjectivity now enters into the calculations of political forces about the state of the nation, about the problems and possibilities facing the country, about priorities and policies. Governments … have set up machinery, established bureaucracies and promoted initiatives to regulate the conduct of citizens by acting upon their mental capacities and propensities (Rose 1999, pp.1-2)

33. Managing the soul—the case of discipline • Lancaster’s monitorial school • Patridge’s school of the New Education

34. Uncomfortable continuities The reading lesson is also coordinated across sites as an element of populational management. • Lancaster’s telegraph • Teaching Reading’s ‘Specialist Literacy Teacher’ Department of Education Science and Training. (2005). Teaching Reading: Report and Recommendations of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.

35. A complex orchestration of bodies and attention telegraph text pupil monitor master Visual attention Aural attention Supervision & signalling

36. Teaching Reading report (2005)