Narratives of Deficit: All Roads Lead to Synthetic Phonics

• In Event: Literacy, Scholarly Responsibility, and Problematics: An International Analysis of Inequitable Systems in the 21st Century

Abstract

Objectives of the Paper
This paper questions a diverse range of narratives that have been offered as evidence of a literacy problem and have supported ensuing attacks on balanced understandings of literacy within the Australian educational context. The drive to seek the holy grail of ‘best practice’ in literacy teaching has ignored the local in our understandings of what quality, equitable literacy instruction should be and ignored well-established principles established over decades of reading and literacy research. Specifically, ‘truth claims’ (Luke & Woods, 2009) work to produce narratives that ignore established scholarly evidence. Claims investigated include that: there is one best method for teaching all children in all contexts how to read; learning phonics must precede learning how to read and write texts; learning to decode print should precede learning to comprehend texts of other modes; and learning to decode is the same as learning to read.
Methods/Techniques or Modes of Inquiry
We present a narrative analysis (Bold, 2012; Reissman, 2008) of policies that advocate for more attention to phonics in university teacher education programs. These policy initiatives have followed two years of attacks in traditional and social media related to the teaching of reading (Baroutsis & Woods, 2020) and the conflation of the teaching of reading with the teaching of phonics or code breaking. Our narrative analysis first unpacks the structure of these policy initiatives, and then shifts to analyse elements of temporality, sociality and place (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006) across established narratives.
Data Sources
We analyze policy initiatives following an announcement made by the Australian Federal Minister of Education October, 2019. Relevant publicly available texts including media releases, news reports, and new policy produced form the corpus for this analysis.
Findings
Significant findings include, that regardless of the narrative put forward across these policy discourses, supporters of synthetic phonics instruction always land on the same solution – teach more phonics and teach less reading, writing, speaking, listening, and designing to young children. This demonstrates that once phonics is identified as the solution to perceived problems, the full scope of children’s literacy practices, purposes and culturally-informed experiences are ignored. While simplistic propositions related to phonics instruction may bring a causal logic, they have negligible impact on children and their literacy learning. Ignoring the complexity of reading as described in paper #1, the implications of simplistic instructional practices are discussed demonstrating the problematic convergence of simplistic understandings of teaching reading and literacy that fail to recognise the complexity of being/becoming literate in 21st century contexts.
Scientific or Scholarly Significance
This paper demonstrates how discourses of deficit and standardization work across international contexts to the same ends. Understanding the international circulation of deficit discourses is vital if shifts are to be made towards more open, evidenced-based approaches to teaching reading and literacy (Authors, 2020). Like the author of paper #1, the author of paper #2 maintains that learning to read is a dimension of both social justice and of scientific rigor.

Author

• Annette Woods, Queensland University of Technology