Strategies to support balanced literacy approaches in pre- and inservice teacher education: two teachers at different stages of their careers are helped to implement balanced literacy in their classrooms.

Publication: Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy

Publication Date: 01-DEC-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 International Reading Association Inc.

The purpose of this article is to describe the ways in which we, as pre- and in service teacher educators, have come to conceptualize balanced literacy within an educational climate that values quick fixes, standardized curricula, and high-stakes testing. We hope to proffer an alternative version of the work of teachers in the classroom: a version that values, fosters, and supports teacher knowledge, discernment, and reflection throughout all stages of their careers. This is an approach to teacher education that asks



how to make teachers aware of their practical knowledge--the conceptions, beliefs and personal theories embedded in their everyday teaching--and how to develop in teachers both a feeling of responsibility for the goals and effects of their teaching and the skills required to work towards those goals. (Korthagen & Russell, 1995, p. 188)

This conception of teacher education perpetuates an appreciation for the involved decision making, reflection, and action of individual teachers within their own contexts, a view that challenges singular, generalizable notions of the best theory and practice. As such, there is a formal acknowledgment of making conscious and active what Dewey (1933) spoke of decades ago, that pedagogy involves not only the action--the teaching--but also the thinking about teaching, which is itself learning.

Perspectives and theoretical framework

Forms of language and literacy teacher education are contingent upon definitions of literacy. Prescriptive forms are premised upon narrow understandings of literacy that view it as synonymous with reading, that is, a psychological process associated with encoding and decoding (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003). Our notion of literacy is plural; it expands from the psychological to include the sociocultural and finds that what constitutes being literate depends upon the demands of time and locale.

It is important to remember that, as our world changes at an unprecedented pace, literacy, demands are never static or absolute. Also, how teachers pedagogically address those demands is not immediately apparent or easily agreed upon. A variety, of language and literacy studies, for example, lend conflicting "proof" that one response to language and literacy queries is better than another. As such, to discern the appropriate path for their students, teachers must be knowledgeable about language and literacy issues, be adept at seeking and critically evaluating information, and be able to relate these understandings to their daily working knowledge of their students. Consequently, to address the complexity of literacy, teacher education has perhaps never needed to be more dynamic and sophisticated. This emphasis on the professional decision maker is in accordance with a larger concept of balanced literacy.

There is currently an impetus to abandon the term balanced literacy, as it has taken on polemic definitions (International Reading Association, 2000; Reutzel & Cooter, 2003). Yet, we believe that our energy as language and literacy educators should be directed toward clarifying our ideologies, not arguing semantics. The version of balanced literacy that we espouse

* is fostered through reflective consideration, understanding, and use of whole-to-part, part-to-whole instruction;

* is a commitment to ensuring that all aspects of reading, writing, listening, speaking, viewing, and representing receive context-appropriate emphasis within a language and literacy program;

* is about knowing and beginning with individual students and understanding that to do this well requires ongoing professional development informed by a range of current literacy research;

* is about teachers discriminating among a variety of resources within the situation at hand, rather than relying on programs and products to manage literacy;

* expands perspectives of language and literacy education from an emphasis on method to include the range of sociocultural and political factors that affect teachers' classroom actions and student achievement (e.g., global market trends, continental research trends, provincial curricula, district policies, school improvement plans, and the like); and

* cautions educators about the slipperiness of subjectivities, power relations, and the inability of an abstract theory or practice to adequately control, predict, or define the needs of a classroom of students and as such insists that all...

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