Generic practice.

Reid, Jo-Anne

In this article Jo-Anne Reid postulates the benefits of postmodern thinking in language and literacy education. She encourages literacy educators to think about what we are doing, each and every time, without relying on what we might accept (without thinking) as rules for the genre of teaching. Rather, she says, we should be engaging ourselves thoughtfully in the `generic practice' of teaching.

Postulation

All we have got are sign systems; we have no immediate access to a reality apart from a sign system. So what licenses any one of them? A given sign system (language, way of seeing the world, form of art, social theory, and so forth) can claim universality or authenticity or naturalness, but this is always a claim made from within the system itself. Outside the system, we are in another sign system that may well have different canons of universality or authenticity. Where do we stand to claim `authority' for ourselves and our sign systems? I The postmodern answer is `nowhere.'

(Gee, 1993: p. 281)

Pre-position

Christie's definition of genre as `purposeful, staged, cultural activity in which human beings engage' (1984: p. 20) was as generative for many teachers committed to `whole language' teaching and learning as it was anathema to others. Much discussion and debate have followed. There have been books and papers written, positions held, insults honed and careers made over this time. And although it may not be politic to encourage such irreverence, the `process-genre' industry developed in Australia during the 1980s, and exported during the 1990s, has, in my opinion, been a Jolly Good Thing for the teaching profession. It has caused us all to have a Jolly Good Think about what it is we do as teachers to encourage the development and expansion of language and literacy, and why we do it, thereby examining the ground on which we stand to claim authority for our own particular (sign) systems for literacy education.

We've all had to take up a position--and The Jolly Postmodern has brought into our professional mailboxes many rewritings about literacy learning we have taken for granted as `true' for too long. In being forced to begin shoring up the sign system of whole language against a competing position, many in the 'whole language camp' have been forced to re-examine certainties suddenly challenged as inadequate, and uncertain, after all. The claims of feminist and critical theorists (Gilbert, 1990; Luke, 1992), that whole language has not addressed dearly enough the hard questions of social justice and equity in education, could not be ignored--and as Christie (1990), Luke (1992), Green and Morgan (1992), Gee (1993), and Kamler and Comber (1996) have argued, the need for a pedagogy for 'critical literacy' in our primary schools is greatly overdue.

This is not simply a result of continued calls for social justice. Rather it is an accident of history, as the world turns, inexorably, along the conveyor belt of Fordist Modernism, whirling us all, unready, into the chaos of Postmodern Fast Capitalism. Our uncertainty has come about because the world has changed! Things are different. We can't push the reverse button. The postmodern condition is now programming itself and we have to learn to deal with this.

Position

In postmodernism, 'after', and 'on the basis of' modernist understandings of teaching literacy, where 'the system' dictates the rules of successful social textual behaviour, any certainties about what is right and proper to teach can no longer hold. Post Modernism though, this is not a bad thing--it is only different. And we should not feel afraid or reluctant to act. Even if we can claim no authority for our sign systems and beliefs, we can examine them in relation to an ethical imperative to ensure that our actions bring no harm to others (Gee, 1993). If we continue to do this, then we will be doing something both worthwhile and beneficial to literacy and education.

I want to argue then that an emphasis on language in literacy education is no longer sufficient, and that an emphasis on the idea of social generic practice may prove to be more useful to learners of literacy in the postmodern era. I draw on the work of Gee (1990, 1991, 1993) and that of Green (1995, 1996) whose notions of literacy go beyond the modernist process/genre binary. For Green (1996), a holistic view of literacy requires the acknowledgment of three related dimensions of literacy central to effective social practice--the operational, the cultural and the critical.

From a position strongly grounded in an historical understanding of educational practice, Green claims that an effective literacy curriculum for schools must seriously account for the critical dimensions of literacy learning. Drawing from both sides of the process/genre debate to explain the interconnection between the three dimensions of literacy, he acknowledges the 'first-order relationship' that exists between the operational and cultural dimensions, in accordance with Halliday's view that learning language is learning culture, and vice-versa. The critical dimension of literacy learning is different, however, in that it is 'a second-order phenomenon'; contextualising the manner in which learning how to operate in the culture involves such things as 'how to best deploy its "technologies", and being socialised into it, becoming part of it, an "insider" (Green, 1996). He compares this with what has become a key referent for the whole language movement: the conditions for literacy learning Cambourne (1989: p. 20) describes as 'a model of acquisition learning'.

These principles or conditions are derived from observations of 'naturalistic language learning'...They can be seen as bringing together four kinds of reaming: enactive learning, iconic reaming, verbal learning, and environmental learning--put simply, learning by doing, learning by watching, learning by using verbal language (speaking, listening, writing, reading), and learning by being immersed in a certain environment over an extended period of time. The best learning situation is one which combines all of these.

(Green, 1996: p. 6)

This view of critical literacy is very close to what I am calling, here, generic practice: the engaged production of social texts for real purposes. It is not just the provision of 'good educational programmes for the teaching and learning of literacy', which Christie (1990: p.3), says 'will teach explicitly the ways in which language operates'. It goes beyond the need to teach about literacy to encourage learning through holistic social practice.

Following Gee (1990, 1991), learning literacy involves much more than just language, and the sort of 'environmental' learning referred to above must address more than the operation of language alone. Language is always social, and used in symbolic, textual and embodied practice. In this way, the idea of generic practice links closely with Gee's explanation that any sign system in society can be understood as a 'discourse', defined as:

...a socially accepted association among ways of using language, of thinking, and...of acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or 'social network'.

(Gee, 1991: p. 1)

Learning to read and write successfully in school thus involves much more than language. It involves learning how to hold a book; how to sit in a certain place on the mat, with your body in a certain position; bringing the right sort of lunch; getting the teacher's attention; getting to know which bits of the teacher's talk you need to listen to, and which bits are meant for someone else; staying awake; and the right sorts of colours to use for colouring with your crayons (Kamler et al., 1995). Learning a discourse can be thought as acquiring 'an "identity kit" which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act and talk so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize' (Gee, 1991 p. 1).

Proposition

Learning to write and speak about things that matter, in recognisable ways that will get you read and heard in social life, requires the textual crafting of your meaning to become transparent, invisible. The meaning is the message. As you read this article, it has been my intention so far to slightly jar and fracture the lines and planes of the textual form so as to make the nature of the text itself, my alliterations and allusions, the object of your attention from time to time--not 'as well as my meaning', for this is, of course, my meaning.

Like any genre, the journal article can be thought of as a 'purposeful, staged, cultural activity'. The conventions can be (and are) explicitly taught to academic writers around the nation. Yet knowing the rules of the journal article genre will not necessarily get me published. What matters, more than knowing and being able to utilise the conventional way to say what I have to say, is knowing how to fashion it in a way that will be read as 'meaningful' by a range of different readers. This is not a new argument, of course, but it is one that is not clearly enough heard by teachers--especially when the outcomes statements to which we are oriented describe our teaching/learning goals in very conventional frameworks. We can help our students learn 'operational and cultural literacies' through attention to the processes and genres of textual production in classrooms, but we often fall short of providing them with access to critical literacies, which are most meaningfully produced in and through fully realised, social, textual practice. The appearance of rule-governance is always after the fact, but strategic tactical decisions need to be made as part of larger generic practices specific to particular situations of practice. In postmodern terms, I don't need to know or understand information to use it (Green, 1995). The question is: How does textual practice parallel this generic practice? And taking us Back to Basics, here is the allied question of what happens when you are not well practiced at all; when you are 'just practicing'--learning what it means to engage in the generic practice of producing a journal article or even recounting what you did at the Royal Show last week.

Re-position

To answer this, let us reflect for a moment on the learning of a quite specific cultural activity in which some people engage--the buying of meat. For some, this was extremely easy. We learnt 'for free', as Gee (1991) says, at our mother's knee, as we were first carried, then pushed in our strollers, and then finally obliged to follow her in preschool shoes through the rounds of the shopping, looking up quietly, waiting, but knowing not to ask, for the hoped-for piece of polony or frankfurt. We learnt the smell and the sawdust. We know about butchers' paper, the wooden chopping block, and the clink of the butcher's knives as he (always, it was he) drew them from his belt to sharpen against the steel hanging from a hook on the wall.

Since then, we haven't consciously noted the changes to the generic practice of meat buying. But when the smells changed, when the sawdust disappeared and the plastic fern appeared in the window, our practice also changed. We accepted the convenience of the supermarket meat-counter. We can tell a good cut of meat, and we know the difference between a good sausage and a poor one. And further, we also know (Heath, 1983; Cambourne, 1988; Gee, 1991, 1993; Luke, 1992) that some children in our schools learn to read and write in exactly the same way as they learn to buy meat. Easily, `naturally', almost without thinking.

But this is not the way all people get meat, or all people become literate. Some people's fathers meet at the co-op once a week and take their share from the communal purchase. Other people buy meat fresh every day. These might, or might not, be among those who choose meat from plastic-covered packets displayed on supermarket shelves. The variety of generic practices is large, though it is not infinite. Nor is it infinitely varied. If you have never had the opportunity to watch someone else select a veal rump before the butcher slices it, you may not have the power/knowledge to ask him to cut it, just so. Instead you pick up a package of schnitzel pre-cut, from the display cabinet. The point is, there is not just one way to achieve your ends. If you want meat, you will strategically adapt and accommodate your actions to the generic practice of getting it--in practice, as you go. And to do this, you will draw on the range of practices available to you to achieve this end, even if they are not exactly 'kosher'. To learn to buy meat involves much more than just the purposeful stages of selecting-asking-paying. It may also involve talking to strangers, deferring to powerful men, writing lists, reading magazines, cookbooks and novels, watching television, going to restaurants, imagining tastes, estimating weights, and the multiplication, addition and subtraction of numbers.

It is the same with writing. There is always more involved in the production of a text than can be ordered or governed. We learn generic literacies in practice. We will only learn to write good letters by wanting/needing to write them: but learning to write letters may also involve telling anecdotes, talking on the telephone, reading books, watching television and movies, copying accurately, and reading letters ourselves. We learn to make arguments by wanting things, feeling unfairly treated, observing the way others convince us, move or influence us (or fail to do these).

We get better at doing these things by practicing them, until we too can make an argument, write a narrative or construct a dialogue, without thinking about it unless something unexpected occurs. We learn to tell stories by stretching our imagination, rearranging ideas from our lives, our reading and viewing of television and movies, from the Internet and computer games. In this way, the literacies we value in schools can be understood as generic. They are, in practice, 'general, not specific or special' (Australian Oxford Dictionary). And yet mostly in schools we value and reward only a narrow range of conventionally powerful strategies for achieving a particular outcome. Other ways are seen as wrong, inadequate or unconventional. When this happens, Gee (1993: p. 291) argues:

Schools can only expect opposition from those children and their families whom they either exclude or seek to apprentice to practices that are 'owned' and 'operated' by groups who otherwise oppose and oppress them in the wider society outside the school.

Critical literacy practice in schools, then, must be generic practice, where children can tactically select from all the practical strategies from the cultures available to them, rather than being taught one, conventionally 'most strategic' operation. Through generic practice, learners experience which of their generic tactics 'pay off, and which don't, for particular purposes, or on particular audiences. They observe the practical effects of their literacy on others. And they won't just have one set of 'powerful' rules to draw from.

We can no longer rely on modernist logics to guide us through the teaching of literacy, now that we realise that the learning of literacy does not work like that. In postmodern literacy education, we learn (and teach) powerful literacies through powerful literacy practices, not just through the operational and cultural dimensions of literacy learning. Children learning to write must be encouraged to write in ways which reward their attempts to sample, copy, borrow, quote and utilise everything within all available sign systems, to get the job done (Green, 1995). There is not just one right way. Not any longer. Operational and cultural literacies are 'strategies' while critical literacy is derived from tactical attempts to use literacy to get things done. Literacy learners need to experience and reflect on the effects of their practices on other people. They need to talk about the effects of other people's practice on themselves. Without this they cannot learn to question the undoubtable 'truth' of their reading, nor to doubt the unquestionable logic of any one best way.

Post-position

As Gee (1993: p. 291 [my emphasis]) writes: 'Education is always and everywhere the initiation of students as apprentices into various historically situated social practices so that they become "insiders". Or it is the exclusion of children from these apprenticeships.' Simple reminders like this dearly underline the benefits of postmodern thinking. It is a Jolly Good Thing to have doubt. Doubt encourages us to have a Jolly Good Think about what we are doing, each and every time, without relying on what we might accept (without thinking) as rules for the genre of teaching, rather than engaging ourselves thoughtfully in the generic practice of teaching.

REFERENCES

Cambourne, B. (1988). The Whole Story. Auckland: Ashton Scholastic.

Cambourne, B. (1989). Look what they've done to my song, ma: A reply to Luke, Baty and Stehbens, English in Australia, 90. pp. 13-22.

Christie, F. (1984). Varieties of written discourse. In F. Christie and course team, Children Writing: Study guide. Geelong: Deakin University Press. pp. 11-52.

Christie, F. (1990). The changing face of literacy. In F. Christie (ed.), Literacy for a Changing World. Hawthorn, Victoria: ACER. pp. 1-25.

Gee, J. (1990). Social Linguistics and Literacies. Ideology in Discourses. Basingstoke, UK: The Falmer Press.

Gee, J. (1991). What is literacy? In C. Mitchell and K. Weiler (eds), Rewriting Literacy. New York: Bergin & Garvey. pp. 1-11.

Gee, J. (1993). Postmodernism and literacies. In C. Lankshear and P. McLaren (eds), Critical Literacy: Politics, praxis, and the postmodern. New York: State University of New York Press. pp. 271-95.

Gilbert, P. (1990). Authorizing disadvantage: Authorship and creativity in the language classroom. In F. Christie (ed.), Literacy For a Changing World. Hawthorn, Melbourne: ACER. pp. 54-78.

Green, B. (1995). On Compos(IT)ing: Writing differently in the post-age. Paper presented at the Australian Association for the Teaching of English National Conference, Sydney.

Green, B. (1996). Literacy/technology/learning: Notes and issues. Discussion Paper DEET project: The role and status of technology in language and literacy learning. Geelong, Victoria: Deakin Centre for Education and Change.

Green, B. & Morgan, W. (1992). After the tempest? Literacy education and the brave new world. Opening keynote address to the Whole Language Umbrella Conference, Niagara, USA.

Heath, S. (1983). Ways with Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kamler, B. & Comber, B. (1996). Critical literacy: Not generic--not developmental--not another orthodoxy. Changing Education, 3, 1. pp. 1-6.

Kamler, B., Maclean, R., Reid, J. & Simpson, A. (1995). Shaping Up Nicely: The formation of schoolgirls and schoolboys in the first month of school. Canberra: Department of Employment, Education and Training.

Luke, A. (1992). The social construction of literacy in the primary school. In L. Unsworth, (ed.), Literacy Learning and Teaching: Language as social practice in the primary school. Melbourne: Macmillan Education. pp. 1-53.