Teaching the Young to Read: The Canon

In the intellectual climate in which I matured, an unspoken assumption was that a well-educated person had read authors on,  and considered both sides of,  any given position (assuming that there were only two). 

I bring this up relative to the discussion of texts for teaching teachers of reading.

Let me give you an example.  My early adulthood was spent among the Austrian School of Economics.  All the thinkers around me had read and mastered Mises and Hayek, ( giving only two  examples of Austrian School thinkers)--but they had also read and mastered Marx and  Keynes and Veblen  and Gramsci (to give a smattering of other sides).

In another view, there is the notion of a canon -- a set of works that an educated person ought to be at least familiar with.  The Wikipeida article on the Western canon.

Relative to the teaching of teachers of reading--there seems to be two points of view. To escape the tired old kneejerk reactions,  let us name them "reading is a natural act best inspired by good children's literature" and "reading is a cultural construct, needing discrete skills mastery first and continuously".  Oh my.  We need shorthand here.  I reject "whole language" and "phonics" because those terms short-circuit thinking. How about for now, the "natural school" and the "learned mastery school"?

What works would you nominate for the natural school?  Certainly some works by Ken Goodman -- but which ones?  Who else would you nominate?

What works would you nominate for the learned-mastery school?  Certainly some works by Jeanne Chall--but which ones? Who else would you nominate?

The rules here are to nominate works that a prospective k-5 teacher should have read and understood, in order to form his or her point of view.

Then there is a third and fourth category, which moves from the theoretical to the practical.  Those would be the most valuable reference works for classroom teachers, from the natural school and the learned-mastery school.

What do you think?

Comments

[John Lloyd]

I'm soooo tempted to drop an entire reading list on this, but I'll resist...just stick to the ABCs:

Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

Blachman, B. (Ed.). (1997). Foundations of reading acquisition and dyslexia. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Carnine, D., Silbert, J., Kame'enui, E. J., & Tarver, S. (2004). Direct Instruction reading (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

[Jeff]

Diane McGuinness has some fascinating stuff on the history of written language and the titanic accomplishment that is alphabetic writing:

McGuinness, D. (1997). Why Our Children Can't Read And What We Can Do About It (A Scientific Revolution in Reading). New York, NY: Touchstone.