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4.3 The Organization of the Didactic Literacy Curriculum

Course video 16 of 26

This module begins with an overview of the range of activity types that might be found in literacies pedagogy. These are illustrated with some examples of literacies learning modules. It goes on to examine two major models of literacy pedagogy: didactic and authentic.

This course opens with an exploration of the social context and aims of literacy teaching and learning. It goes on to describe a range of historical and contemporary approaches to literacy pedagogy, including didactic, authentic, functional, and critical approaches. The course takes has a 'Multiliteracies' perspective, which aims to expand the definition of literacy to encompass today's multimodal communications, and the diversity of literacies across different social and culltural contexts. A Multiliteracies approach also suggests a broad range of activity types—experiential, conceptual, analytical and critical. -------------------------------- Recommended Background -------------------------------- This course is designed for people interested in literacy teaching and learning, including people who may wish to join education as a profession, practicing teachers interested in exploring future directions for a vocation that is currently undergoing transformation, and community and workplace leaders who regard their mission to be in part "educative." -------------------------------- Take this Course for Credit at the University of Illinois. -------------------------------- This course has the same content and anticipates the same level of contribution by students in the 'New Media and Literacies' course offered to graduate certificate, masters and doctoral level students in the College of Education at the University of Illinois. Of course, in the nature of MOOCs many people will just want to view the videos and casually join some of the discussions. Some people say that these limited kinds of participation offer evidence that MOOCs suffer from low retention rates. Far from it - we say that any level of engagement is good engagement. On the other hand, if you would like to take this course for credit at the University of Illinois, apply here: http://education.illinois.edu/online-offcampus/programs-degrees/ldl-online If you have already taken this course in Coursera, you can prepare a portfolio of work created there and request that this work is taken into account for your University of Illinois course.

Taught By

Dr William Cope
Professor
Dr Mary Kalantzis
Professor

Transcript

How is the literacy curriculum organized in this regime of didactic pedagogy?

Well, it's pretty straightforward in a series of ways.

One is we have this thing called the syllabus.

So, the syllabus is often dictated by the government, the national government or

the state.

And what it says, it says look, in grade eight or in year eight,

you've got to start doing your first Shakespeare.

That you should have learned certain spelling and

grammar rules by a certain point in elementary school or primary school.

That as an early learner, you should have got through phonics and

learned this stuff.

And what it often does, the traditional syllabus of the pedagogy,

it lays out the content of literacy pedagogy, which have to be learned

year by year, term by term, semester by semester, whatever it is.

Then what happens is we have people who write textbooks,

sometimes they're academic, sometimes they're teaches who write textbooks and

they try to do everything the syllabus expects.

So, they transmit knowledge in the textbook about grammatical rules,

about the literary canon,

about literary devices, about all of those contents of literacy pedagogy.

Then we have the teacher who's gone to university and knows all this stuff, and

who can stand at the front of the room and

tell the students the same kinds of things that are in the textbook.

So we have this kind of alignment if you like between the syllabus,

which is this systems defined set of expectations,

the textbook which follows the syllabus and the teacher that follows both.

So the teacher actually ends up being in a reasonably

passive relationship to the whole process.

In some ways not a very creative relationship.

They come in and enact what's in the syllabus and

they enact what's in the textbook.

So next, what then is the experience of doing literacy for the learners?

What are the things that in this kind of didactic literacy pedagogy

they have to do to do literacy?

Well firstly, what they've gotta do is they have to if you like,

memorize and copy and repeat things that are being taught to them.

Phonics, spelling,

grammar, rules, memorization of things.

You come and do a test, and then you demonstrate what you managed to remember.

So these are the key things you're doing.

You're going through a process which Aristotle in fact calls mimesis.

The technical word is mimesis, a process of copying.

So what you do is you take the style of good writing, and you copy that style.

You learn the rules and you apply the rules of spelling and

grammar and the like.

So it's very much a kind of a rule bound model of literacy where memorization,

repetition, copying, are crucial parts of the pedagogical process.

>> What does this pedagogical choice dedactive pedagogy mean for literacy?

We've already discussed that literacy means being able to read and

write and of course, it generally is related to also speaking and

listening or some form of meaning making.

Typically, deductive pedagogy involves the following kinds of components,

grammar and typically that involves labels for

the way in which the order and the type of words are selected make meaning.

Vocabulary, the number of words that any person has for

expressing and making meaning, this is a very important area.

And there's a lot of data and research at the moment that suggest

that different peoples from different background have smaller or

larger vocabulary attached to the way of making meaning.

Phonics is another component to dedactive pedagogy, it

stresses the link between sound and speech and how words are formed from letters.

The literary canon, is another component,

it's about what matters, what kind of things are considered best writing.

And of course, this decision is a cultural decision.

But in every society, some texts come to the top because

those who make decisions or are associated with judging writing,

decide that some kind of writing is better than other writing.

For example, the novel Moby Dick,

is better than a newspaper writing or

other kinds of expressions in some other form.

Reading is another component of dedactive pedagogy and

this is much involved with fluency and the flow of

words being sounded out and sentences being articulated.

And finally comprehension, the degree to which a reader or

a listener comprehends any particular kind of text and the way it makes meaning.

>> Finally, what are the social relationships of literacy learning?

Well, you saw the classroom that we started with in the previous video,

the classic didactic classroom, that what happens at the end of the week,

when you have a spelling test or the semester, when you have your

literacy test or the end of a section of schooling, when you do a high-stakes test.

You demonstrate what you've learned.

But you've all been, you as in all the students in the classroom,

have all been in this, in a way very individualistic kind of space,

where you're reading the book,

showing that you as an individual can comprehend it, writing pieces of text.

There's not much lecture or discussion between students and

very, very little collaborative work.

And we saw in the classroom that the classroom just was not designed for

that in a lot of ways.

It was also a classroom which valued conformity.

Learn the standard form of the language, learn how to apply the rules of language.

The assumption was that every student would learn that

in much the same kind of way.

So if you like, there are kind of a set of values written into that classroom.

And in fact, if you actually go right to the purpose and

the function of schooling in the era of that dedactive pedagogy, it was taking

all these kids from the world who might have spoken different dialects, being

members of different ethnic groups, come from different backgrounds and the like.

And making them more or less the same so they conform to

the protocols and the standards of the standard forms of the national language.

It was also very much part of a nationalist agenda where if you come to

appreciate the literary canon, you become part of a common culture

which is shared where we're all more or less the same.

There the underlying value sits and

ideals that underpin didactic pedagogy.

>> Together again of the focus on these elements in literacy,

didactic pedagogy form an ecology,

the living-learning nexus that this approach produces.

And typically, the kind of effect

that it has is that it requires experts and apprentices.

That is, those who know are in control and

those who don't know have to learn from the experts.

It involves authority and followers, so questions of validity and

value are not terribly relevant in didactic pedagogy.

It's those who have authority who determine what is good for the learner.

And finally, of course, this produces a singular frame of meaning that is

determined by those who know more or who know better.

It's rare in didactic pedagogy

that the learner might decide what they need for themselves.

Or have the power or

the capacity to determine the cultural values around any particular kind of text.

So the ecology that this produces is one of uniformity,

one of acquiescence, one of doing as you're told,

and one that evolves you to learn in a common way with the others around you.

I started off talking about the nuances of the word didactic

in the first videos in this section.

And in English it has a bit of a negative connotation which is someone's telling you

things and you're passively listening and you're doing as you're told.

It's got a bit of a negative connotation.

But what I want to say is that it actually isn't all totally bad,

that as we come through the different models of pedagogy, I want to say that

didactic pedagogy does have some insights in it which are kind of worthwhile.

And it's not to be dismissed entirely.

And in fact if you go back to section three in this series of videos,

that within the multiliteracies pedagogy, the learning by design pedagogy,

we have this idea of a knowledge process of conceptualizing.

So when you use a word like noun or

verb to describe something happening in a sentence, or

when you use a words like hyperlink or menu to describe to architecture of.

Educators have come into situations where students are seriously impoverished,

very, very disadvantaged and they've come in with didactic pedagogues like,

for example, direct instruction.

Which was invented here at the University of Illinois some decades ago.

And they've been reasonably effective in teaching

students in these highly impoverished, disadvantaged contexts.

Now, the pedagogy might make you feel awkward and

it might be problematic in a whole lot of respects, but we can't deny the fact

that sometimes in some circumstances, in some respects, it's effective.

So what we want to do with this notion of didactic pedagogy is describe it

as a historic reality which has been, actually, the main experience

of modern schooling since modern schooling was invented in the 19th century.

It's mostly what happened, and

it hasn't been entirely unsuccessful a lot of the time.

So, even though we might want to be partly critical of it and say look, it's perhaps

time to move on in some respects, some aspects of it we may also want to retain.

And of course recognize that it has performed a historic role

in modern societies.

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