​ "There’s a well know saying that "a picture is worth a thousand words”. Here’s a “picture" which summarises nearly five decades of naturalistic inquiry I’ve done in K-12 classrooms.  It’s  a visual summary of the theory of teaching and learning literacy which I believe best explains the data five decades of research has generated.  In 2017 , Debra Crouch, a USA based teacher and teacher educator sought my permission to synthesise and summarise the Conditions of Learning to support a professional development session she was planning. This visual summary is the result of our collaboration.  Over the next few months I intend to convert the meanings and relationships embedded in this “picture” to written language. (I predict it will take more than a thousand words.) Ultimately my hope is to produce a teacher-friendly book that would guide and support teachers in both understanding and applying the Conditions of Learning to create maintain classroom cultures that help all students become highly productive, critically literate citizens. 

A copy of the visual attached to this email ( See below) Plus this text.​
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I’d appreciate any comments, opinions, or questions which you might have.

  (STENHOUSE PUBLISHERS HAVE KINDLY LET ME POST THIS PIECE I WROTE FOR STEVEN LAYNE'S BOOK " IN DEFENSE OF READALOUD.)
 Is Teacher Read-Aloud The Swiss Army Knife(SAK) of Effective Reading and Writing Pedagogy?

Teachers have always read aloud to their students.  In fact it’s probably one of the most widely used classroom practices found in our schools.
 I know this because I recently posed this question to Mr Google: ‘Why should teachers read aloud to their students?’  In the space of 0.36 seconds he identified 104 ,000,000  ( that’s 104 MILLION!) references, articles, citations, reports, and other texts which addressed my question. While I didn’t read every one of these 104 million entries, my impression from sampling the first twenty or so pages was that the overwhelming majority of these references were very positive about the value and power of teachers reading aloud to their students.
 
Sprinkled among the 104 million references was a plethora of research claims about the efficacy of regular sessions of teachers reading aloud in class.   Among other things this research showed that Teacher Read Alouds could be used to, “demonstrate the power of stories”, “provide insights into how ‘reading works’”, “show how to search for meaning”, “demonstrate how make connections and inferences”, “develop new vocabulary and syntactic awareness”, “stimulate imagination”, “expose students to a range of literature”, “help distinguish different genres”, “encourage a lifelong enjoyment of reading”, “help learner-writers identify and transfer the literary devices authors use to their own writing”, and much, much more.
 
What’s this got to do with the Swiss Army Knife (SAK) ?
 
I think the SAK a useful metaphor for challenging our traditional perceptions of the Teacher-Read Aloud and opening it up to new possibilities. When I visualise the SAK I see a compact container of handy tools such as a screwdriver, nail file, corkscrew, toothpick, scissors, and tweezers.  Furthermore this picture invokes a range of associated meanings such as SAK’s are portable and convenient, they can be carried with you anywhere, you can reach for it anytime, open it up, and quickly select the tool you need for filing your nails, opening wine, tightening a loose screw, and so on. With some of the newer versions you can add new tools–some SAKs have over 80 attachments!
 
 
Think about it. Like the SAK, a Teacher Read Aloud session is an extremely ‘portable’ entity which all teachers can carry with them from class to class. Like the SAK a Teacher Read Aloud event is a ‘multi-purpose, versatile, one-stop pedagogical tool’ (or platform) for creating a multiplicity of mindful, contextualised opportunities for learners to engage with the multiplicity of skills and knowledge that effective readers and writers need to control.
 
 
Finally, like the SAK, the Teacher Read Aloud strategy has its own set of ‘basic’ tools which can be ‘opened’ and applied. These are the Conditions of Learning which I believe underpin effective human learning. Regular Teacher Read Alouds  are a form of immersion, which create opportunities for a multitude of demonstrations  about learning,  language and all the other accoutrements of effective reading, writing and spelling, grammar, text structure, and so on. Furthermore Teacher Read Alouds are inherently engaging , providing opportunities to communicate  expectations, to respond to learners’ approximations, leading to opportunities for learners to employ their burgeoning skills and knowledge about reading and writing, and take responsibility  for applying such skills and knowledge to the real world.

I’m convinced they can.
 
I believe whether it’s a highly academic domain like maths, science, medicine, biology, or highly technical areas like computer programming, electrical engineering, or more creative areas like writing, painting, acting, or sports like tennis, golf, swimming, or even more mundane real world skills like driving, ironing shirts, knitting, crocheting, the conditions of learning I’ve researched for the last fifty years can be used to inform and shape the teaching and learning which needs to occur.
 
This conviction is anchored to, and emerges from the data I collected from teachers who granted me the privilege of observing, documenting, and analysing their classroom practices for sustained periods of time as they responded to my request to explore how they might use the conditions of learning I’d identified to inform their classroom practices for teaching reading, writing and other accoutrements of literacy like spelling, grammar, vocabulary.
 
I spent several years asking these teachers how they applied these conditions to inform their classroom practices for teaching literacy. I also observed, recorded, and otherwise documented what I observed of both teachers and students in these settings.
 
My data show that, over time, these teachers were able to apply the conditions to
create a learning ‘ethos’ or ‘culture’ that supported and encouraged deep engagement with the literacy learning sessions they designed and implemented.
 
I asked these teachers to describe an ‘ideal literacy learning classroom’. While they used different words in their responses, the content of their responses were very similar. Basically they wanted to create learning settings in which students would:

1. engage as deeply as possible with all the demonstrations of effective literacy behavior their teachers provided;
2. respond to the learning opportunities they provided by,
3. approximating (or ‘having-a go’)
4. employing (‘using’, ‘practising’, ‘applying’) the literacy knowledge and skills underpinning the learning tasks they specifically designed for them to complete.

 
My data suggest that they created learning settings which supported these learning behaviours through the ‘discourse’ they used while interacting with their students. By ‘discourse’ I mean they way they talked about learning to be an effective user of literacy. Fundamentally they used a discourse which I described as  ‘pro-learning, pro-reading, pro-writing’
 
This discourse was delivered through the messages embedded in the expectations they continually communicated. My data show that six ‘Expectation Messages’ were continually and pervasively repeated and reinforced in the discourse these teachers used as they helped their students become effective users of literacy.
 
Message 1: Becoming an effective reader, writer, speller, talker, are extremely worthwhile enterprises that will greatly enhance the quality of your life.
 
Message 2: All members of this learning community are capable of becoming
effective readers, writers, spellers. No one in this group can fail to become an effective user of literacy.

Message 3: The best way to become an effective user of literacy is to share and
discuss the processes and understandings you are developing with other members of our learning community. This means taking risks and “having-a-go” both as a member of a group and individually. It also means approximating, and reflecting on the feedback you receive.
 
Message 4:When discussing the meanings you construct through
reading or writing, all statements, comments, and judgments related
to those meanings should be justified using plausible and sensible arguments and examples.This means rather than merely saying “ I liked/didn’t like this book” you have to add a because clasuse; “I liked/didn’t like this book BECAUSE. . . . .”
 
Message 5: It is safe to “have-a-go” in this setting.
 
Message 6: One can be said to “know” and “understand” when one has made that which is to be known and understood one’s own. (Sometimes this was expressed as “taking responsibility for one’s learning.”)
 
I believe these expectation messages can be adapted for any kind of teaching or learning setting, whether at the university level, the school level, or for sports coaching, or even mundane everyday learning.
 
Here’s something I’d like you to reflect on:

1. Think of an area of successful ‘out-of school’ teaching and learning you’ve completed. (For example I successfully learned to iron shirt when I was 54 years of age)
2. Think of an unsuccessful example of ‘out-of school’ learning you’ve failed at. (For example despite numerous courses and classes I’ve taken I’m hopeless at fixing things—being a ‘ handyman’)

 
Here are two questions I’d appreciate your responses to:

1. Which ‘Expectation Messages’ were present or absent from your successful and unsuccessful out-of-school learning experiences?
2. How might you embed these ‘expectation messages’ in the language you use to teach something to others?

 
Please share your responses to either or both of these questions.

This is the fourth and final blog on the question
 ‘Is it possible to apply the basic principle of “emulating Nature's best biological ideas to solve a human problem” to an area of the social sciences, (in this case learning to read)?”
 In it I address the fourth and final question I listed in the first of these four blogs, namely:

 ‘What does a “biological perspective for addressing the problem of learning to read” look like?
Describing ‘a biological perspective for addressing the human problem of learning to read’ is a bit like describing a complex tapestry, in that understanding the ‘big picture’ which the tapestry represents requires understanding how the individual threads of warp and weft intertwine to create the final product. In what follows I present a dot point summary of the threads of meaning and conceptual thinking I wove together to create the final tapestry of ‘‘a biological perspective for addressing the human problem of learning to read’.
•     First I had to re-frame the term 'learning' and its cognates (e.g. “knowledge”, “understanding”, “comprehension”, “knowledge-building”, etc. as “meaning”, and/or “meaning-making”. This meant that whenever I wanted to talk about, write about or think about ‘learning’ or any of its synonyms (i.e.‘cognate terms’) I forced myself to use the terms like ‘making (or ‘constructiing) meanings’, rather than discourse which suggested that ‘learning’, ‘knowledge’ etc. was some kind of tangible ‘stuff’ which existed independently of the human mind. Instead of saying, thinking, or writing ‘I’m going to learn topic x’ I would say, think or write ‘I’m going to make or construct meaning about topic x using symbols’.
•    Secondly I needed an ‘operational definition’ of  ‘meaning’. This is an ongoing task. Currently I operationally define ‘meaning’ thus:
“Meaning refers to the unpredictable mix of personally constructed internal, pictures, sounds, smells, feelings, thoughts, emotions constructed in the mind. They seem to be unleashed by, and closely related to the range of symbol systems humans are constantly using and manipulating to make sense of the world". This will certainly be fine-tuned as I learn more.
•    Thirdly I had to locate meaning –making firmly within valid scientific principles from biology, evolution, and cognitive science. Here is a dot point summary of these principles: 
o    'meaning' is an internal cognitive construction of the human mind which serves to make sense of the world. 
o    'making sense of the world' is essential for survival of the individual and the species.
o    the human mind is capable of constructing meaning using a range of symbol systems.
o    biological and cultural evolution has 'selected' the construction of meaning using a range of symbol systems as a species-survival trait for homo sapiens.
o    this ability has been so successful  as a species-survival mechanism that evolution has ensured that its acquisition by newly born members of the culture is as 'fail-safe' as possible.
o    as learning to control the oral form of language of the culture into which one is born is the primary and predominant symbol system which members of a culture need to learn, the principle Occam’s razor (or “evolutionary parsimony” (Dawkins 1976) states that the same conditions should also support learning  to control all the other symbol systems our cultures value and use , such as the written form of language. (i.e. reading and writing)
•    Fourthly, when I pulled all these threads together I concluded that the ecological, social, physical, emotional, conditions that support learning to talk provided a scientifically rigorous framework for a pedagogy that supports learning to read. 

So What Do The ‘Ecological, Social, Physical, Emotional, Conditions That Support Learning To Talk’ Actually ‘Look Like’?
 In order to find out I spent several years “bugging” and “spying' on urban and rural toddlers as they interacted with parents, siblings, peers, neighbours, relatives, teachers, and strangers over the course of a day. (Cambourne, 1972)  My data comprised hundreds of hours of audio transcripts of the verbal interactions in which these children participated, as well as all the language of others they overheard. These were transcribed into thousands of pages of “raw’ language used by the focal children and their interlocutors. This corpus of language was complemented by “specimen records” (i.e. rich field notes, see Barker 1968) which described both the behaviour and the contexts in which the linguistic behaviour took place.  Ecological psychologists describe these kinds of data as “rich archival lodes'” which can be “mined'” again and again for different purposes. (Barker, 1968, 1978)

I re-mined this “archival lode” from the perspective of the role which the ecological environment played in learning to use language. I used these data to identify examples of language-use which occurred in experimenter-free contexts, seeking insights into the role which ecological and social conditions played in supporting the complex learning which was taking place. I identified this set of ecological conditions that supported language learning. 
As such they also represent the conditions of learning which evolution has endorsed. They are yet another example of how “evolution has already solved many of the human problems with which science is currently grappling”. They ‘look like’ the figure I use to identify my ‘ Conditions of Learning’ Facebook page -  a web.

For the last 3.8 million years our neurological hardware has been shaped, refined, and extended by the environmental conditions that best supported homo sapiens' survival.  Furthermore this "shaping" has not been unidirectional.  Our evolving neurological hardware has simultaneously "shaped" the culturally appropriate social conditions which nurtured our species' meaning making behaviour. The end product of this process is a species (us), which despite its puny body, its lack of speed, teeth, and claws, is currently the most powerful species on the planet. 
We are capable of learning how to create and apply the symbol systems we find most useful to construct the complex meanings we need , if (and only if) the environmental conditions which make such complex learning possible are present in the learning setting.  This strongly suggests that Nature has already worked out what social, cultural and physical factors need to be the basis of scientifically derived learning-to-read pedagogy. 
Figure 2 above shows what they are.
Now all we have to do is sell this theory as "good science" to the Reading  Education community. I'm hopeful that Biomimicry will help me do this.

In my last post I shared the tentative hypothesis that process of ‘meaning-making using abstract symbol systems was so successful in empowering our species, that evolution selected it as form of species-survival behaviour’. Exploring the feasibility of this tentative hypothesis is the first step in addressing Question 3, namely’

3.What’s Involved In Interpreting The Human Problem Of Learning To Read From A Biological Rather Than A Psychological Perspective?

Arguing that a certain form of behaviour has been ‘selected by evolution’ is a contentious claim. Justifying such a claim involves reading deeply in the literature of biological and cultural evolution, for evidence that the behaviour which has been ‘selected’ developed (i.e.‘evolved’) from non-human and proto-human species. While there is a plethora of such research and documentation , the constraints of space allow only this general summary.

Summary of Research and Documentation Supporting Evolutionary Selection Of Meaning-Making Using Symbols in Homo Sapiens.

Homo sapiens ability to construct and communicate complex meanings using a wide range of symbol-systems (oral and written language, art, dance, sign, music, etc.,) is grounded in the fundamental necessity for cooperative, shared intentions. (Tomasello 1999, Deacon 1997, Donald 1991, 2002, Grice 1957, Fauconnier & Turner 2002)
Modern humans’ ability and willingness to engage in cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality manifested through joint attention in shared contexts. It evolved originally for the explicit purpose of enhancing collaboration and developing shared cultural norms. (Grice 1957, 1975, Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, 2005)

The basic motives of this infrastructure are helping and sharing. Humans communicate to request help, inform others of things in order to help and support them, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. (Vygotsky 1978, Richerson & Boyd 2005,Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993, Tomasello 1999, Tomasello et al 2005)

With respect to the predominant and most powerful medium of communication manifested by the 6000 or so fully developed oral languages ever spoken on earth, the motives to cooperate listed above created different functional pressures for conventionalising grammatical constructions. Tomasello comments that “Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and now, for example, required very little grammar, but informing and sharing required increasingly complex grammatical devices”. ( Tomasello, 2008)

Research into gestural and vocal communication of both great apes and human infants indicates that humans’ cooperative communication must have emerged first from gestures of pointing and pantomiming. (Call & Tomasello, 2008) Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure.  These must have been supported by skills of cultural learning which enabled creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. (Tomasello1999, Deacon 1997, Donald 1991, 2002, Grice 1957, Fauconnier & Turner 2002,)

This biological research and theory building seriously challenges the dominant psychological perspective based on the Chomsky-an view that linguistic knowledge is innate. (Chomsky 1993, Pinker2000)

Instead the major thrust of this approach is that the most fundamental aspects of  the uniquely human ability to construct and communicate complex meaning using vocal and written symbols are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general.  However the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups. ( Deacon 1997, Tomasello, 2003)

Evidence from archeology and paleontology further supports this summary. It supports the hypothesis that survival as a species for our relatively physically weak ancestors depended on their ability to meet a complex set of needs, including, organising hunts, sharing food, communicating about distributed food resources , planning warfare and defence, passing on tool making skills, sharing important past experiences , establishing social bonds between individuals,  communicating with and establishing mutually supportive relationships with potential sexual partners and/or mates and other members of the tribe or group, caring for and training young, and so on. (Deacon 1997, Feldman 2008, Donald 1991, 2002, Fauconnier & Turner 2001, Ramachandran V.S (2003) , Tomasello 1999, 2003)

Symbol use it seems offered them a range of new, previously unknown cognitive behaviours which not only ensured their survival but which were responsible for our species subsequent ability to out-compete all other species on the planet. The survival of the first hominid groups who adopted an habitual hunter/gatherer mode of existence depended on them developing ways conceptualising and communicating a set of abstract social "contracts" which would stabilise the inter-group relationships necessary for the needs of procreation, food, security, and child care to be satisfied in mutually supportive and socially cohesive ways.

A symbolic system, albeit, an extremely crude one in the beginning, seemed to provide an effective option for meeting these needs, especially as there was also an already existing suitable “raw material” which could become a medium for symbolic behaviour-- namely the vocal noises our ancestors could make.  

In the beginning it may not have been very much like speech. Only a few types of symbols and only a few classes of combinatorial relationships between them would have been necessary. These groups also would have required considerable complexity of social organisation to bring their unprepared brains to fully comprehend the abstract meanings they were struggling to construct and communicate.

Fauconnier and Turner paint this word picture of the process of developing a first primitive, sound-based symbol system which was capable of achieving these outcomes:

Two million years ago, australopithecines, equipped with non-linguistic ape-like mental abilities, struggled to assemble by fits and starts, an extremely crude symbolic system—fragile, difficult to learn, inefficient, slow, inflexible, and tied to ritual representation of social contracts like marriage. We would not have recognised it as language. But language then improved by two means. First invented linguistic forms were subjected to a long process of selection. Generation after generation, the newborn brain deflected linguistic inventions it found uncongenial. The guessing abilities and intricate nonlinguistic biases of the newborn brain acted as filters on the products of linguistic invention. Today's languages are systems of linguistic forms that have survived. The child's mind does not embody innate language structures. Rather the language has come to embody the predispositions of the child's mind. (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002, p. 173)

These crude and difficult language forms imposed evolutionary selection pressures on neural architecture. This evolving neurological hardware both 'shaped', and was shaped by the culturally appropriate social conditions which nurtured our species' meaning-making behaviour. The end product of this process is a species (us), which despite its puny body, its lack of speed, teeth, and claws, had constructed a system of  symbolic communication called language, and this in turn made us the most powerful species on the planet.
In the next (and final) blog in this four part topic I will address the question

‘What does a “biological perspective for addressing the problem of learning to read” look like?
I shall also list all the references referred to in the four parts of this topic

 

In my last Blog post I promised that future posts would address these four questions:

1.      Is it possible to apply the basic principle of “emulating Nature's best biological ideas to solve a human problem” to an area of the social sciences, (in this case learning to read)?

2.      What does it mean to adopt an “interpretive perspective” in scientific endeavours?

3.      What’s involved in interpreting the human problem of learning to read from a biological rather than a psychological perspective?

4.      What does a “biological perspective for addressing the problem of learning to read” look like?

In this post I’ll address Questions 1 & 2. In future posts I will address Questions 3 and 4.

 Q1.     Is it possible to apply the basic principle of “emulating Nature's best biological ideas to solve a human problem” to an area of the social sciences, (in this case learning to read)?

The short answer is a very definite ‘YES’!  My reasons for this are two fold:

(i)                 It is essential for the maintenance of participatory democracy as we know it. Most educational scientists from modern Western democracies agree that high levels of reading ability are an essential prerequisite for supporting and strengthening the forms of participatory democracy we value. As Giroux recently argued, “we need a vision of schooling dedicated to the cultivation of an informed, critical citizenry capable of actively participating and governing in a democratic society”. (Giroux 2010) Without a citizenry of effective, critical readers, realising this vision becomes extremely difficult. 

 Given this relationship between literacy and democracy it is imperative for our schools to produce graduates who are highly effective, productive, critical readers.

How else will they be able to sift truth from spin when evaluating the messages political parties are continually disseminating?

(ii)               The exponential rate at which information is increasing, and the need for readers who can quickly understand and critically evaluate the truth-value of the multiple textual messages with which they’re being continually bombarded, is fundamental if democracy is to survive.

These two reasons should trump those who argue that the aim of education is to produce graduates who can work in ways that maximize profits and thus ‘keep us economically competitive’.

Q 2.     What does it mean to adopt an “interpretive perspective” in scientific endeavours?

What does “interpreting the human problem of learning to read from a biological rather than a psychological perspective” actually entail? At the risk of oversimplifying a complex multifaceted process it simply means an educator like myself has to stop talking and thinking about the broad concept of “learning” using psychological discourse most educators have been trained to use, and instead try to talk and think about learning using the discourse of biology.  

 In order to do this I had to immerse myself in the discourse of those who wrote and researched in the fields of biological and cultural evolution especially as it pertained to the development of the special cognitive abilities that distinguish homo sapiens from other primate species.

After months of false starts and dead ends I slowly identified a subtle but significant difference between the psychological perspective with which I’d been imbued as a consequence of my academic training and years of professional involvement in education, and the biological perspective of those who wrote and researched in the fields of biological and cultural evolution.

 It was this: Whereas psychological discourse tended to define (and thus frame) learning as a change in an animate organism’s behaviour “caused” by contiguously occurring external factors and events, the biological-cum-evolution discourse I immersed myself in framed human learning as a ‘special kind of learning and knowing which is ONLY available to our species’.

(Deacon 1997, Feldman 2008, Donald 1991, 2002, Fuster 2000, Iacoboni et al. 1999, Ramachandran V.S (2003), Tomasello 1999, 2003)

 Framing human learning this way triggered this question in my mind: “Why is this kind of learning and knowing so special for our species”? The result of addressing this question had far reaching implications for the resolving the original human problem I set out to address.

 OK. What’s So Special About This Kind of ‘Learning’ and ‘Knowing’?

Biologists argue it’s “special” because it’s what distinguishes homo sapiens sapiens from all other forms of life on our planet. Not only that, it provides our species with two unique cognitive abilities. It enables us to:

                        i) create complex knowledge (or “meanings”) using abstract symbol systems.

                        ii) apply this knowledge (or these “meanings”) to the everyday problems of species' survival and communicate and discuss them to others.

Not only are we the only species of living organism on the planet which can construct abstract meaning using a diverse range symbol systems but we can store these meanings in memory, revisit them, manipulate them, extend them, refine them, build on them, and then share and communicate what we've constructed as a consequence of all these processes with other members of the species.

This (biological) way of framing learning was an “aha” moment for me. I realized that psychological discourse I’d habitually used for all of my professional life had subconsciously coerced me to think about “learning and knowledge” as some kind of reified “stuff”. The range of cognate nouns I’d continually used to discuss, communicate, and think about the end product of an act of learning such as “propositional knowledge”, “understanding”, “information”, “know-how”, “expertise”, “comprehension” etc. continually reinforced this underlying conceptual metaphor. These terms represented “stuff-like” concepts. Learners had to “acquire” and “internalize” them. Biological discourse was subtly (but significantly) different. Biology framed learning and knowledge as the “end product of a process of ‘meaning-making using abstract symbol systems”.


While this may seem a trivial exercise in semantics to some, the ramifications (for me) were deep. For example it forced me to make a significant shift in thinking about learning. Rather than subconsciously thinking about learning and knowledge as some kind of “stuff” which exists in the world and which the learner somehow had to “acquire”, I began thinking about learning and knowledge as something which was constructed by a learner using symbols. This in turn triggered a tentative hypothesis that this sort of cognition was so successful in empowering our species, that evolution selected it as form of species-survival behavior.

In my next post , I will address Q3 above, namely "What’s involved in interpreting the human problem of learning to read from a biological rather than a psychological perspective?”

(NOTE: I will list all my references after the final blog in this series

Introduction: Setting The Scene

“We can see, more clearly than ever before, how nature works her miracles. When we stare this deeply into nature’s eyes, it takes our breath away, and in a good way, it bursts our bubble. We realise that all of our inventions have already appeared in nature in a more elegant form and at a lot less cost to the planet”. (Benyus,1997, p6)

This is one of the core messages from a relatively new field of scientific endeavour called “Biomimicry”. (Benyus, 1997.) The etymology of the term “biomimicry” is,  “from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate”. (Biomimicry Institute  2010 (a)). It represents an approach to science which focuses on  “the science and art of emulating Nature's best biological ideas to solve human problems”. (Biomimicry Institute  2010 (b))Two core principles of Biomimicry are firstly that evolution has already solved many of the human problems with which science is currently grappling, and secondly that in order to solve the human problems we identify we must “interpret them from a biological or natural ‘perspective”.

While the concepts and principles associated with this new field have resonated with those who have been trained in disciplines which are derivative of the natural sciences (i.e. the “hard sciences” like physics, biology) , there seems to have been scant interest from  those who  work in  the more socially oriented domains of inquiry which focus on human behaviour in society, such as education, psychology, sociology, anthropology, (i.e. the social sciences).

Until now.

As an educator who has spent the previous forty years trying to develop an educationally relevant, ecologically valid theory of learning to read  (Cambourne  1988. 1995, 2000, 2009), Biomimicry has provided me with new insights to bring to this quest. (Cambourne, 2007)

One is that learning to read is also a ‘human problem’ with which the social sciences (especially psychology, education, and cognate domains) have been ‘grappling’ for about a hundred years. Another is that during this time it’s been interpreted from a psychological rather than a biological perspective.  Yet another is that a hundred years of ‘grappling’ with the problem using a psychological lens had been a failure. At the time of writing, we’re not even close to identifying or agreeing on a definitive theory of learning to read.

Why? This state of affairs prompted me to pose these four (Biomimicry-related) questions :

In the next Blog post I will address the following questions

1.     Is it possible to apply the basic principle of “emulating Nature's best biological ideas to solve a human problem” to an area of the social sciences, (in this case learning to read)?

2.     What does it mean to adopt an “interpretive perspective” in scientific endeavours?

3.     What’s involved in interpreting the human problem of learning to read from a biological rather than a psychological perspective?

4.     What does a “biological perspective for addressing the problem of learning to read” look like?

The more I read in the field, the more I was convinced it was possible to address each of these questions in ways that would add to our understanding of issues with which Reading Education had been  “grappling” for as long as I can remember.

‘Why Is Reading Education So Pedagogically Confused’?

At first glance it seems that the answer can be attributed to a simple accident of history.  For a complex mix of reasons, in the late nineteenth century education aligned itself with the then-emerging science of psychology. At the time both psychology and education were emerging as serious domains of research and theory building, so it seemed a natural ‘fit’. After all, psychology was (and still is) broadly defined as  “the science of mental behaviour” and as education and learning to read were (and still are) perceived by most to be something that involved “mental behaviour of animate beings”, this sense of  fit has been continually reinforced. This meant that educators tended to use the discourse of psychology when they communicated and/or discussed their theoretical issues and concerns.
First glances however can be deceiving. Some eminent theorists in the field hint that the pedagogical confusion which characterizes Reading Education goes deeper that mere historical accident. In 1983 Frank Smith upset the experimental psychology and educational psychology establishments by claiming that "education backed the wrong horse when it backed psychology", arguing that "psychology has never been comfortable with learning" . Smith’s assertions are strongly supported by some indirect but very compelling evidence, namely, the sheer abundance of extant (often conflicting) learning theories which have continually emerged from experimental psychology before and since Smith wrote his essay. (See Figure 1).

  FIGURE1 LIST OF EXTANT LEARNING THEORIES CURRENTLY VIABLE IN PSYCHOLOGY URL <http://home.sprynet.com/~gkearsley/tip/theories.html>

 Such an abundance of extant competing learning theories provides a mute but powerful testament that something is seriously wrong with the way psychology (and therefore education) has conceptualised and researched learning over the last one hundred and twenty years. 


Support for the existence of some kind of inherent conceptual malaise within the discipline has recently emerged from within the domain of psychology itself.   In 2001 the author of the recently published “Ecological Psychology in Context” Harry Heft wrote this  in his preface. "Has there been a moment since its formal founding in the late 19th century when experimental psychology was not in a state theoretical conflict? Select any historical point during its first 120 years and you will find psychologists embroiled in some theoretical squabble".


A closer look at the history of psychology shows that the majority of these theoretical squabbles are either directly or indirectly related to the umbrella concept of “learning”. Why? Why after more than a hundred years of research and theory building is there still such an abundance of competing (and sometimes conflicting) theories of learning?   If the basic umbrella concept of learning is so conflicted within education’s chosen foundation discipline is it any wonder that derived theories of learning such as learning to read might also be in conflict?

 In more established theoretical domains such as physics. biology , astronomy, etc., after more than century of research and theory building , broad “umbrella” theories which lack either internal and/or external validity are usually eliminated from further consideration. New theories evolve and converge toward a single set of derivative, explanatory principles. Why hasn't this happened with respect learning theory within psychology?  Why after more than a century of experimental research and theory building can the field still list such a confusing array of theories of learning? Shouldn't there have been a convergence toward a more universal, narrower range of complementary learning theories?

 Something seems to have hampered psychology's evolution as a domain in which to locate learning theory. Those who did the research which produced the theories shown in the figure above are not scientifically incompetent or illiterate. There's something beyond professional expertise and scientific "know-how" intervening here.  What could it be?

The so-called “Reading Wars” have a long history within Reading Education. They began as a series of competing "Method A versus Method B" arguments which were hotly defended and/or attacked by advocates and adversaries within the professional bodies representing reading education.

 

In the fifties (when I began teaching) these debates involved a choice between two pedagogies, one based on a "look-and-say" (or "whole word") visual- recognition-of-word-shapes principle , the other based on a transform-the-visual-signs-to-speech- sounds principle (“phonics"). After the publication of Jeanne Chall's classic volume, "Learning To Read: The Great Debate" in 1967 , the debate’s focus shifted a little to “code-based” versus “meaning-based”, again with conflicting pedagogies based on an either/or choice between two theoretical options.  One option was based on transforming the visual display to sounds and blending these sounds together to make words (i.e. breaking the alphabetic code). The other was based on accessing meaning directly from the visual display without first accessing sound (i.e. meaning-based).

 By the seventies and eighties this code-based vs meaning based debate had morphed into “whole language versus direct instruction”, which in turn generated a series of variant strains of the same dichotomy. For example in the seventies and eighties “literature-based versus skills-based” emerged, accompanied by others such as “implicit versus explicit teaching” ,  “holistic versus fragmented teaching”, and “objectivist versus constructivist pedagogy”. As a consequence today's teachers are heirs to a long tradition of (often acrimonious) debate about pedagogical methods which are presented either as bi-polar opposites, or positions along a bi-polar continuum of some kind. It's as if the field of reading has, for a long time, suffered from something analogous to serious bi-polar disorder.

 From the late nineties to the present time these dichotomies seem to have coalesced into something more complex. They are no longer perceived as “debates”. Rather they seem to have assumed the stature of “wars”. Thus we now have the so-called “Reading (or Literacy) Wars”. Instead of debating the pros and cons of a simple bi-polar dichotomy, the profession seems to be engaged in an all-out “take-no-prisoners” war. One consequence of these “Reading Wars”  is the demand that only pedagogies which are “evidence-based” or “scientifically derived” should be applied in the nation’s literacy classrooms.

 However, invoking  ‘science’ and ‘evidence-based research’ as a way to reduce the theoretical confusion surrounding literacy education doesn't seem to have helped much. There are quite distinct views of  ‘good science’ and ‘good evidence’ held within the education research community, and all that seems to have happened is that new round of argument and debate about ‘whose science" and ‘whose evidence should be considered, has begun..  Such a state of affairs begs the following question:

‘Why is reading education so pedagogically confused’?