Literacy Practices and the Common Core

I am an teacher of English Language Arts (ELA). ELA, according to the Common Core Standards, is the teaching of literature, informational texts, writing, language, listening, and speaking with the expressed purpose of "making sure that all students are college and career ready in literacy no later than the end of high school." The word "literacy" is used 97 times in the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. However, the document does not define literacy rather it uses literacy as an adjective -- literacy skills, literacy components, and literacy development. The word "literacy" is most often used as "literacy in" as in literacy in History or Science.

Assuming that teachers working in any of the forty-five states that have adopted the Common Core Standards will need to "use" the Standards to create curriculum in order to keep their jobs, the questions remain, and are apparently open to interpretation according to the standards, what is literacy and how do we teach it?  While we know that a "particular standard was included...only when the best available evidence indicated that its mastery was essential for college and career readiness in a twenty-first century, globally competitive society," we do not know from what particular theoretical framework the authors were working. First, I will say that I agree that it seems appropriate for us to want students to be able to participate in a global society.  And, I can get behind the idea that we want students graduating from high school ready for a career and.or college. Nevertheless, the literacy practices we teach and test have implications for the sort of thinking and acting our students will do in this globally competitive society. What will we read and how will we read it with this in mind?

We are at a historical juncture with the new standards to confront the failure of previous reform measures that sought to quantify learning and achieved, essentially, an accumulation of skills and knowledge without the sorts of  understanding or thinking that students need to participate in a global society.

The National Endowment for the Art's 2004 publication makes a causal link between literary reading and not only the health of individuals ("focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible," p. vii) but the well being of the nation ("as more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent-minded. These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose" p. vii).    The Standards seem aligned to this. Part of being career and college ready for a global society means students " actively seek the wide, deep, and thoughtful engagement with high-quality literary and informational texts that builds knowledge, enlarges experiences, and broadens worldviews" (3).I will argue for a literary education for these reasons. Literature when read with certain literacy practices does enlarge experience and broaden worldviews,  but I will also argue that was is missing here is the word "understanding," for what is knowledge without understanding and how can one act intelligently without understanding?

One way ELA has been conceived is through the framework of  cultural heritage, which sees the English curriculum as bringing students to an appreciation of the finest works of literature. According to Misson and Morgan, this "model encourages readers to yield to all that valued texts offer...readers who give themselves attentively, submissively, to such aesthetically charged works ...become discriminating, subtle readers..." (4). The problem is that this can be seen as conservative and failing to engage with the political agenda of texts and "the ways in which readers are positioned to accede to the ideologies they offer" (4). Another framework is cultural analysis which seeks a critical understanding of the culture within which texts are produced, which encourages readers to "resist the seductions of texts that offer various kinds of gratification, including aesthetic,"' and these readers become discriminating as well but in a different way because the literacy practice of cultural analysis fails to "satisfactorily deal with the aesthetic dimension of texts" or the affect a literary experience brings. Both of these frameworks have implications for the selection of texts for curriculum,  the readers' literacy practice, and, therefore, the sort of experiences students have in school. To read one way or another limits the experience and world views that literature offers. In other words, reading habits shape understanding and thinking. Misson and Morgan, suggest a different sort of literacy practice; they see that the "aesthetic and the socially critical are not opposed to one another but, rather, are necessary, complementary components of a rich literacy practice, one that can lay claim legitimately to benefiting both individual readers and writers and the society to which they graduate from English classrooms" (4).

Critical pedagogy is a strand of cultural studies that sees the classroom as a site for not only literacy skills but also political awareness and countering hegemony. Misson and Morgon write that "students are taught how to critique the very bases of knowledge offered to them in the 'commonsense' texts of their culture and schools. And that the 'voices' of marginalised minorities are to be heeded and validated" (13). Regarding cultural heritage, critical pedagogues see traditional literature as serving to create a bourgeois body/subject and is skeptical of interpreting a text. Giroux writes, "How we read or define a canonical work may not be as important as challenging the overall function and social uses the notion of the canon has served" (1992 96).

I think a case can be made that the sort of literacy practice the Common Core is going for is "close reading" or "New Critical reading" or "practical criticism" (Books, 1949; Ransom, 1941; Richards, 1929). In the introduction, we can find this: "Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature" and "read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text." The techniques for close reading inevitably produce certain kinds of reading and value certain kinds of meaning and thus certain kinds of readers and thinkers. Misson and Morgan suggest, by citing Terry Eagleton, that such reading practices are a "recipe for political inertia" (Literary Theory Eagleton 1983)  because " they encouraged the illusion that all a reader needed to do was focus on the words on the page rather than on the contexts that produced and surrounded them.