Challenging the Science of Reading Master Narrative: What History Teaches Us about Curricular Panaceas

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 2:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: The Making of Minds: Pedagogies, Literacy, and Progressions in a Changing Curriculum

Abstract

This paper analyzes the current Science of Reading movement (SOR) and challenges the standard narrative that SOR advocates have advanced in recent years about fundamental flaws of American reading curricula and instruction. I use an historical investigative approach to assess the narratives of crisis and decline that SOR reformers forward about reading curricula, in particular, and about educational research broadly conceived. I argue the SOR advocates have developed a distorted view of educational scholarship, buying into traditional anti-intellectual perceptions of the field of education. Such misinterpretations of education scholarship not only undermine current SOR efforts to mandate widespread literacy initiatives but are also likely to inflict harm on American teachers and schoolchildren.

Author

• David A. Gamson, Pennsylvania State University