What I want to do now is build a typology of learner differences. And I'm going to illustrate the way in which that typology kicks in as relevant in the case of literacy learning. So in this schema that I'm going to run through now we have three sort of macro categories of learner differences. Material differences, differences that we call corporeal differences, bodily differences, and symbolic differences, which are about human meanings, culture, language, all that kind of stuff. So, let's take material differences first. And within that macro category, I've got three subcategories I want to speak to. The first one is social class, and class is simply about access to economic resources. Whether you're rich, whether you're poor, whether you're a boss, whether you're a worker, there's a whole par, whether you're a professional person, whether you're a blue collar worker, whether you're unemployed. So in the societies that we live there are deep, deep fissures of inequality which can be described around this category of class. Now, how does class relate to education? Well, I'll tell you some of the ways in which it is. Researchers have shown that by the time kids come to school the kids in families which are more affluent where the parents are professionals, where the parents have higher education, where they understand the logic of schooling, where there's a lot of talk. The kids have been exposed just to many, many, many more words. And in that vernacular existence, there have been books around the house. The parents have valued books. They've read books to their kids, perhaps. Maybe they've got a iPad, and the kids have read the books to themselves if we update it to contemporary times. And the difference between those and poor households where there aren't many books, where the parents don't come from these professional backgrounds, just the exposure to the number of words in oral discourse and the range of words in oral discourse. The exposure to the culture of print and the object of print means that kids come to school incredibly unequal, and that that pattern of results often follows its way through beyond that point. So one of the key issues is, is there a way that school can make up for those gaps? What can school do? What is the responsibility of school, on the one hand? On the other hand, what are the possibilities, what can be done? What kinds of programs can be set in place where those children kind of catch up? So there's a very famous English educational sociologist who's name is Basil Bernstein. What he did is he did a detailed analysis of the kinds of the home language with which working class kids or poorer kids are immersed in, compared to the kinds of language that professional people speak and the language world that they live in, that domestic world. And he drew a distinction between what he called restricted codes and elaborated codes. In fact, that's a bit judgmental. I mean, in a way, they're sort of just different. But the restricted code is more a set of vernaculars. It doesn't talk very abstractly, whereas the kind of language that we have in these elaborated codes is actually closer to the language of academic schooling. So in other words the gap between the kind of language experience kids have had in the poorer working class environment and the school environment is huge. And it just takes more to catch up. To quote another linguist now, William Labov, working in the American context. William Labov documented a dialect of American English that he called black English vernacular, right, so in other words, African-American English. And again, it has distinctive grammatical forms. It's a totally regular system. It does things which in written powerful academic English you don't do, like you don't use the word ain't in a scientific article or a newspaper article. It's one of the distinctive words perhaps like in English vernacular, but it's actually classified in formal traditional grammar as part of a grammatical mistake. I say, I ain't got no whatever, double negative, can't do double negatives. So the kids come to school, and their language is inappropriate, it's wrong. But there's just a gap. That's the way in which the school operates. They operate as if this is a deficiency. Now, Labov didn't mean to say that or think that or imply that because he was saying, this is a complete dialect, a complete linguistic system, a very powerful, distinctive one. So, without being judgmental, we can simply say there's a huge gap between that vernacular and the conventional discourse of schooling. And for some kids, white kids from professional families and more affluent families, the gap is smaller because their parents are closer to being in this regularized discourse. So then what do we do? How do we handle this? Two other aspects I want to mention briefly of these material differences, one is about locale. You're in a poor neighborhood. In the United States, being in a poor neighborhood means there's fewer taxes coming in, and therefore, the school gets less funding. So therefore, the resourcing of the school is poor. There mightn't be a theater down the road. The library mightn't be very good. So locale, just simply geographical location, which of course overlays with material differences as well, that affects opportunities and affects community resources and educational outcomes. And finally in this material universe, I want to mention family because it's often stuff that's constructed into domestic relationships. So firstly, is the domestic relationship stable, unstable? Of course, there are all types of families, which some of which work perfectly well no matter what type it is, single parent families, extended families, it goes on. So it isn't necessarily that which is the factor, but it's often family circumstances which influence emotional well being and the kind of language resources that you're exposed to and whatever. So those are all classified in this schema as dimensions which affect material difference. I'm going to go on now and mention this second category of differences which we call corporeal, which are bodily related differences. Okay, so the first one is about age, about stages of child development. So, a learner who's 5 and a learner who's 9 and a learner who's 20 and a learner who's 50, there are different dynamics going on around life stages. But particularly with children there are possibilities to learn which are of a different order at different ages. So we have to just recognize there's something about human bodies and their growth which aligns with certain capacities to learn and certain forms of learning. I'm going to go on in a moment and be very specific about that in the cases of stages of literacy development. But I'm just going to make the general point for the moment. A second corporeal difference is a very, very slippery, difficult concept in a lot of ways, which is race. Race seems an easy concept. It stares you in the face, it's called skin color. But in fact, and well, the whole business of skin color, some theorists for a long time, including as recently as people like Murray and Herrnstein not many years ago, to be quite frank, thought that differences of intelligence were also related to differences of race. That was an old idea, but it's an old idea which has persisted. And in fact what we find in reality is, how can you actually separate out material conditions in which some races are unequal or some people, by virtue of what's visible on their skin color are unequal in relation to others? I think this idea of race in relation to intelligence now has been pretty thoroughly discredited. I think it might be in the back of people's minds in a certain kind of racist subculture. But the other thing about race is it's a kind of a difficult concept, because on a lot of other variables, human beings are incredibly different. So when you actually classify human beings by various other biological characteristics like blood types and whatever, race doesn't align. It's a set of funny, very, very superficial things in a lot of ways. Not superficial in terms of the history of race and the practices of racism, but superficial in terms of these physical manifestations, this corporeal manifestations in the terms of physical differences and visible differences. Now, what is a real problem, an ongoing running sore in many countries is racism, which is attitudes which are negative and structural racism, whereby whole groups end up being marginalized. And so it might not just be attitudinal racism, which is people saying bad things to each other or thinking bad things about each other, as defined by skin color. But also it is the whole business of whole groups by virtue of their history, their positioning in society, African Americans come out of a history of slavery in the United States. They are still structurally caught up in cycles of poverty, and that therefore racism is not only attitudinal, it's also structural. And you go to a school which is predominantly black, it's not as well resourced, you don't do very well. And that ends up being structural racism where the system does you a bad deal by virtue of these historical accidents of skin color and historical experience. Now the next category I want to talk about is sex and sexuality. How does this relate to literacy? Well, funny thing is girls do better than boys in literacy. And it's to do with the culture of being a boy or a girl. So now, to what extent is that linked back to the corporeal reality, the bodily reality of sex? Well, probably not, actually. And I'm going to get on in the next section to talk about the cultural aspects of that, or the symbolic aspects of these differences in male and females. But also, there's the whole question of sexuality, which bodily reality is related masculinity, femininity, and a whole pile of other variations of sexuality around the LGBTQ universe. So in other words, what we have is we do have those as bodily realities, which become things which need to be dealt with in schools. And then the final area of corporeal differences are physical and mental abilities, spectrums of bodily and cognitive capacity. So the bodily capacity bit is if I am blind, it means the business of learning literacy is different. If I am deaf, the business of learning literacy is different. If I'm blind, I might learn Braille. If I'm deaf, I might learn sign language. And so in other words these physical differences make a difference. But also there's a whole spectrum of cognitive issues which range from issues of autism, and it goes on and on and on. So there's a whole panoply of these physical and mental abilities which are bodily things which need to be dealt with in literacy. And the dynamics of learning literacy are different depending on this whole range of physical and mental abilities. Now, I'm going to move now onto the third major area which is symbolic differences, which is of course language. What's my first language? What's my second language? Is the language at the school the same language that I speak at home? There are differences around, for me there are all sorts of different logistics of teaching me language if I'm a first language speaker of the language of school or a second language speaker of the language of school. My level in that language, in both languages is pretty important. There are a whole pile of complicated dynamics. And also there are differences in dialect and social language, of which black English vernacular is a good example, or working class English, which Bernstein called restricted code. They're both examples of language issues which come up which need to be dealt with in the classroom. The next area that if symbolic differences we call ethnos, which is nationality, ethnicity. If you're indigenous, diasporic identities, I'm part of a world where my identity is spread all over the world because I'm a Korean-American, or an Irish-Australian, or whatever it is. The next area around symbolic difference is identities that are built around communities of commitment. So that might involve religious identities and religious commitments, which by the way often involve learning arcane religious texts. Most religious texts that people use these days are pretty arcane. They take a fair bit of learning. It might involve political discourses. So the discourses of the left and the discourses of the right are pretty different, and they form your identity in all sorts of ways. Or it just might be worldviews, things that I'm interested in, things that I belong to, which are things which shape the way I speak, the way I read, what I read, what I write, what I think. And the very last category here is we've sort of coined this word ourselves, the word gendre. It's a mixture of gender and genre. It's actually an old English word that we've sort of tried to revive. Because what we have with gender and sexuality, when it comes to identity, we have a whole panoply of identities which are not simply about sexuality, and not simply about gender, but all those things together. So for people across various gay communities, there are lots and lots of shades of identity. There might be in the gay male community people who have some characteristically female mannerisms, others that are macho bodybuilders. So the gender and identity and sexuality stuff all gets mixed up within the heterosexual community. There might be metrosexuals who look like they're gay. And there might be other people who are very butch in the way they operate, and so on. So, what we have here is a whole pile of symbolic things based on gender. But it's not just male, female, and it's not just gay, straight. These dichotomies really don't work, and these things layer on top of each other as a pile of identities. So the reason why we created this word to capture all those things is we want to capture the symbolic meanings that are ascribed to sex and sexuality. And we want to call those things gendre.
