LEARNING FROM DALE

Tannis Nishibata

It's an act-res Saturday. Fellow learners and I are just beginning to settle into workshop time. This time is invaluable to me… Time to ponder my own writing, have conversations with others about shared readings and do some of my own question posing about the content and structure of my own writing. Today, I've signed up for a writing conference with either Judith or Wayne, our professors, and am anticipating some quality time to read over the feedback I've received from the past week. It has been the constructive, direct feedback that has really helped me to improve my own writing, clarify my thinking and speculate upon what is worth doing as I pursue my action research in the upcoming week at school.

Wayne pulls up a chair, with my piece of writing in his hands. I can tell that he has something urgent to say, for it is written all over his face.

"It's the word DECODE -- the ‘decoding process' as you so put it in your writing. This expression doesn't fit with what I know about reading. It jars me. Don't children use all of the cueing systems when they read -- not just the print? I think I know what you are trying to say, but tell me, what do we know that tells us what literacy all about?" Wayne asks.

What's interesting to me is that I've only used the word once and I kind of knew that when I was writing it, I was taking a risk, but it truly was a question that I had. I was wondering if it would be challenged and of course, with no surprise, Wayne picked up on it.

"OK. But I already know that I encourage meaning making and children bringing their experiences to the text. I know that the children leaving my classroom love books. I know that the illustrations are a part of the pragmatic/semantic cueing systems, I know that their own writing allows them to connect to the reading process. I just want to know about what everyone else is doing. I hear the word DECODE all of the time, in circles of educators. Is there something about these Storybox books that help children to identify words? Is there something more that I ought to be doing with the graphophonic stuff that I am not currently doing? How come some teachers teach reading as a product and are successful? Are they successful?" My thoughts are just rolling out. I know that the societal pressures and the unique pressures of grade 1 are being expressed right now. I just want to be able to do the most I can to facilitate this process and do what is best for kids to help them to become life-long readers. Wayne quickly jumps in and poses a new question.

"Then why would you settle for a narrower definition you knew was not true? Oh, I know about the pressure. We do need to resist, though. The evidence you are gathering makes that resistance justifiable" (TN Oct, 1996).

Patty Lather (1986) reminds me that we are always looking to learn from and with others, both colleagues and children. For me, as a teacher, it is the conversations that we have that are the elixir for further thought. Yet, we are always acutely aware of the political and social realm that surrounds us outside the walls of our classrooms.

At the core of the transformation is "a reciprocal relationship which every teacher is always a student and every pupil a teacher." Thus, critical inquiry is a fundamentally dialogic and mutually educative enterprise. The present is cast against a historical backdrop while at the same time the "naturalness" of social arrangements is challenged so that social actors can see both the constraints and the potential for change in their situations (p..268).

And so this was, essentially, the beginning of my inquiry. I was confronted with my own use of written language, particularly the word, ‘decode', used within a piece that I had submitted in class a few weeks ago. This expression (the word itself) presented a problem for me as it didn't really fit with what I knew about reading, yet I only then became aware that this word held lots of power. It was not empowering, but rather disempowering as I began to think about how this basic metaphor reminded me of a transmission model of education and brought forward the whole notion about ‘reading as a product', as being something that could be ‘taught' to children. I realized how the word ‘decode' was an isolated and fragmentary way of thinking about reading and was also largely responsible for the misinterpretation of the process that happens when children learn to read. This was really a staggering realization. I walked out of class that day with a spinning head and an uncomfortable problem to face. It was a problem that began with a sense of discomfort, but became a driving force inside of me, something I needed to understand more about. I was faced with my own history as a reader, my somewhat confusing experience in the 3rd year course that I took in University -- Reading in the Elementary School -- and the lessons that many of the children in my classes had taught me… There were parallels and connections that were beginning to dawn on me but there were also some disturbing contradictions that didn't seem to fit into the larger picture of the literacy ‘puzzle'. I began to reflect, creating potentials for change and I had a passionate ‘need to know' more. I needed to explore this tension and start to confront my own beliefs about language learning.

Six year old Dale and I are sitting together at Choice Time. Normally, he's choosing a building activity, usually working with Lego, building blocks or Imaginit. Today he is passionate about trying something different. He enlists my help. Dale wants to write a poem about dinosaurs. This catches me off guard, but I willingly follow his lead.

Dale reminds me of yesterday, when he brought his favorite stuffed toy, ‘T-Rex' to the class to share.

"I just want you to watch me for a little while," he proclaims.

Pictures first -- obviously that communicates meaning for Dale, I think, and as he begins his writing, I see that he understands that the words placehold his thought.

"I'm done now and I'm ready to share," he tells me.

Dale reads all of his writing fluently, without hesitation, though his writing was all random letters. It was incredibly rich in description and while he was reading the second time, I unconsciously wrote in pencil just slightly on top of his print, so that I could remember it. I don't usually do this. Afterwards, in reflection, I asked myself why I decided to write on Dale's paper. I knew why I did it. He had written a significant piece of poetry that I didn't want to forget. It was something that I felt would highlight Dale as a poet and perhaps demonstrate an example for the other children to ‘eagerly' follow. We quickly took it through a shortened form of an authoring cycle and Dale continually read his work together with me over and over again. He wanted to make a poster of it and did a final reading for the class. Dale loves to be read to, yet isn't taking the initiative to read/memorize books for an audience. This final reading was spectacular because he showed confidence as a creative poet and as a reader of poetry.

This poem vividly brings back the celebration of Dale's beginning journey as a writer and reader. Dale became empowered and ‘in charge' of the print that was on his page -- it meant something. Dale has always been a lover of poetry and song and I began recognizing the ‘other' forms of reading that we used regularly in our daily lives. As a class we spent lots of time marveling at his rich use of language, gushing about how his words, "I've got sharp blazing teeth in my big huge mouth", painted a picture in our minds and made us feel sort of frightened. Dale now become available as a mentor for other children. This was a personal inquiry for Dale to pursue because he ‘needed to know' how to read and write purposefully -- that is, to communicate his ideas within a social context that was relevant to him at that time and place. Reading was a lot different when he cared.

I think about Dale when he first began to write. Though he was a confident learner, full of ideas to write about, he would often be bogged down with the physical effort of transcribing all of his thoughts on paper. He might turn red, cry and become so frustrated with himself, convincing himself that he ‘couldn't do it'. I often asked myself, "How do I empower this child to empower himself so that he can have faith in his writing abilities and be able to take risks?" There wasn't an easy answer. As his teacher, it was often difficult to find where the fine line existed between encouraging and supporting him. It also took careful listening to know when to withdraw and allow him to be independent.

Dale sits in his chair, pencil poised in his hand, ready to write a letter to me during Reading/Writing choice time. He is chattering away to himself, murmuring under his breath, "I think I know where to find Ms. Nishibata. Don't tell me, Shelby! It's right up there, next to your picture Ms. Nishibata, on that pink piece of paper. Yes, I do know how to write that very long word. Whenever you need something, you know, like a word, to look for, you can ask a friend, listen to the sounds or find it in a nook or cranny of the classroom. " He carries on, holding the Stellaluna doll tight in his arms. He stops and watches Michael read "Is your Mama a Llama?" This holds his interest for a while and he is a willing listener, then he carries on. "You…. are…. r r r r r r … where is a r? I don't know what an r looks like." One of the children points it out to him. "Oh, bother!" (He forms the letter backwards.) I look up from my reading conference and begin to laugh. "Dale, who says, oh bother?" "Winnie the Pooh, of course" he exclaims, laughing at himself and the expression that he makes. I can't stop giggling. "I guess I am Winnie the Pooh, the writer," he says, then motions to Arthur to stop his reading. "Did you know that Winnie the Pooh says ‘Oh bother', whenever he is kind of discouraged about something? Yep, then he just carries on, like nothing happened, just like me, carrying on with my writing." We all go back to what we were engaged in, before Dale's funny statement. The next time I look up, I hear Dale saying, "G-G-G-G-G…. you know, like good… A, B, C, D, E, F, G… H, I, J, K…. I don't know what a ‘g' (makes the sound) looks like…"

I took it upon myself to listen in to this somewhat significant conversation that Dale was having with himself as well as the many social interactions he was having with the community of readers and writers within proximal distance at our table. I'm realizing the limitations within the environment that I sometimes create, which separates reading and writing as two separate endeavors. It has always been something that had not philosophically made sense. Maintaining a work time where students engage in their own choice of reading and writing experiences, pursuing their personal inquiries made much more sense. It has always been a time and accountability tension -- wondering how I could confer with the readers and writers within the environment and keep abreast and supportive of all of the learners. Dale was teaching me how he interacted as a reader, a writer and as an inquirer collectively. He was having the ‘interwoven conversations' where readers and writers voices are constantly intermingling and overlapping with each other. He is a problem poser as well as a problem solver. I was taken aback at the richness embedded within one small conversation. He brought to his dialogue many of his own experiences as a reader and it was evident that he knew quite a lot about language, but didn't particularly know how to unlock the ‘code' or even pinpoint what the ‘code' looked like. Yet he was determined to communicate his meaning through written language -- Dale had a need to correspond! He enlists the help of others, can hear the sound-symbol relationship and has a bigger picture of the letter writing genre so that the context he is situated within informs the written experience for him. He attaches his own meaning to the words, uttered by Winnie the Pooh, legitimizing his expression by using it within a socially meaningful context. He uses reading to inform his writing and teaches me about the functional context that he needs to work within as a reader and a writer. How does he know how to do all of this?

I would suspect that Dale orchestrates some of this unconsciously. However, he calls to mind significant places in his literary experiences and interweaves this into his present conversations about reading and writing. Margaret Meek (1988) talks about this environment and reiterates that

experts often fail to remind themselves that reading doesn't happen in a vacuum. The social conditions and surroundings are important too. For so long we have been inclined to think of reading as a silent solitary activity that we have neglected those things that are part of our reading together. People singing hymns in church are usually reading the words. Their social reading is different from that of the unemployed scanning notices in an employment centre. The reading process has always to be described in terms of texts and contexts as well as in terms of what we think readers actually do (pg. 6).

So I wonder why I see children sitting alone in resource rooms, memorizing words and responding to flashcards. I wonder why a parent and colleague asks to have a reader come home every evening, so that she can ‘practice' the book and take the words out of context to see if her son can REALLY read it. This sounds like the out of context ‘testing' situations that our present government is proposing. Yet, what Meek helps me to think about is the absolute significance of what makes reading enjoyable. Being with others. I recall many young pre-school children that I have worked and played with, remembering the joy they had in listening and dramatizing a story. What happens when those children enter school? Do we nurture this love for books or do we discount everything that young child has learned to enjoy and appreciate up until now? Do we invite them or paralyze them? Meek talks about how children enter the intertext of literature, oral and written, very early and that they are able to recognize what has been in their memories for some time. She explains that

Those who know how to recognize bits and pieces of other texts in what they read find it is like the discovery of old friends in new places. They feel they are sharing a secret with the writer (that conspiratorial feeling again). They become ‘insiders' in the network (p..22).

I would venture to say that Dale is having conversations WITH the characters, the environment and because they are so significant, they are having profound implications on the language that he is using. All voices become interwoven into his own voice. Dale is helping me to understand the world from his point of view.

Dale was no different from me as a learner. I also thought about the interconnectedness of my own reading, writing, teaching and personal life. The personal and professional spheres of my life jumped out at me and I couldn't separate them -- here is what I wrote.

After jotting some ideas down, I realized that I needed to have a conversation with Joanne Hindley, author of In the Company of Children, and ran to my bedroom, grabbed the book, madly flipping to Part Two: The Reading Workshop. She was someone to ‘think with' at the moment. I then had to re-listen to the tape that Claire had recorded of our class two weeks ago. I needed to find the place where Wayne spoke about the different pieces he had chosen to share from his reading class and the significance of those pieces for him. I searched to find the comment he made about ‘patterns', for it was powerful for me and I was starting to create my own pattern within the context of literacy. After finding it and taking notes, I had the urge to do a freewrite reflecting on myself as a reader and of Ron as a reader. Two very different kinds of readers, yet we are both readers. We just conduct ourselves and read in different ways for different purposes. Both of us get a great deal of enjoyment in reading and when we enter into each other's reading worlds, I do think we expand our horizons. Our differences reflect elements of choice and experience. How were we different from kids? Weren't all of the voices interwoven into my own voice when I was writing (TN Oct, 1996)?

I clearly realized that I couldn't separate one from the other as I was working, as a teacher, to "theorize about practice, and to think systematically and critically about what [I] was doing. Central to this activity is the systematic reflection on one's classroom experience, to understand it and to create meaning out of that understanding." (A Final Word) I was trying to create a possible potentials within our own literacy environment, based on what I had observed as being genuine interests, on what I had seen as being enjoyable genres to play with and based on the strategies and skills that I had discovered through individual conferences that would be particularly helpful to specific readers and writers within the community. Dale seemed to benefit from this kind of environment which invited him to be an active participant in learning through language, about language and naming the processes that he was going through as he went along. He knew what it meant to be a writer and a reader, didn't he?

Ken Goodman, author of On Reading, asks me, as a reader, to take a moment to examine what it is that I do when I read. Good question. I had to think about that and realized that it wasn't simple. I didn't know exactly what I did when I read. The fact that I couldn't articulate what I did when I read, other than ‘make meaning', left me a bit perplexed. Obviously I make meaning and bring meaning to a text -- that is why I am a passionate reader myself. I wondered about my structures, my own ‘decoding' and ‘strategic' knowing and how that came about. Wayne, a supportive colleague, comments alongside of my writing, "Are they separate? We use all that we know about language and life to read, don't we?"

I anxiously await those moments when I can support children who are explicitly drawing upon the cue systems available in written language to make sense of what they are reading. I'm constantly listening and watching for the ways that children process the text, considering how they are learning how to read. I've seen Dale use semantic cues to bring his knowledge and experience of stories to written texts so that he can make meaning and so that, most importantly, the text makes good sense. I wonder when the ‘teachable' moment might come where we experience an ‘aha' as we read books or write together and recognize that as we do this, we can use our knowledge and experience to find relationships between sounds and symbols to read particular words. On one particular day, we celebrate when this happens. Dale begins to pick up on the graphophonemic cues within a piece of writing we are working on together.

We were doing a shared writing experience, writing a letter to the naturalist that took us for a walk down Nimowin Trail at Birds Hill Park. The children were dictating the letter to me and we had just finished. It was quite a long letter. Kids were going back to bits and pieces of the letter that they had contributed to and reading it to a classmate next to them. They had so much to say. Morgan raised his hand.

"Yes, Morgan?"
"I notice an -ing here and an -ing here."
"Good for you. You've noticed the endings of watching and walking."
I'm thinking to myself, "What a perfect opportunity to talk about the language within a significant piece of writing as a class."
The kids want to read through the whole letter again and talk about what they are seeing.
Dale raises his hand. This is a rare occasion.
"I see W-E we in two places." He walks up and points to two different places.
"One has an upper case W, one has a lower case w. " Dale is very proud of himself. We talk about why one has upper case and one has lower case. Most kids don't know and so we talk about periods and ends of sentences for a while. I read the passage from beginning to end without any periods and show the kids what it would sound like without STOP signs. Then I read it again, with the periods. They smile, noticing the difference.
It was unlike Dale to notice the bits of language within a piece of writing. I was surprised at his interest. Yet, he had many of his ideas invested in this letter. I'm going to try pushing this new discovery within his own pieces of writing and reading experiences. Perhaps this was Dale's signal that he was ready to begin taking a look at language.

Later in the day, we have an interaction that I hope will further extend what he is beginning to discover about language.

Since Dale began ‘looking at' language and paying attention to what he saw in familiar text, I thought I would have him choose a favorite poem to share with me one day during reading time. He chose Hug O'War and read it with lots of expression. I asked him a carefully phrased and what I thought was an open ended question. We had talked about the poem a lot, acted it out, put it to music, so I asked him, "What do you notice in this poem?" Dale pointed out two I's. He then looked at the last line of the poem by Shel Silverstein where he says, "And everyone WINS!"
Dale pointed to WINS and says, "I notice that WINS is spelled in big letters."
"Why do you think it is spelled in big letters?" I ask.
"Because when everyone wins, they shout Hurrah!"

HURRAH for Dale! I think back to this day, just a week ago and smile. As a reader and writer, Dale is very contextualized, making meaning in dynamic ways. He is beginning to figure out some grammatical structures and the putting together of letters to make words, within contexts that he is familiar with and are meaningful to him. In discussion with Claire, a colleague also interested in the role of young children's literacy, she comments with further response to this story.

"He is taking the type face (large print) and is interpreting it as sound. Big type = loud sound. Since the word is ‘win', the sound is a cheer. Shows he knows quite a lot about written language conventions, don't you think?"

This is the first notable time that Dale orchestrates all of the cueing systems together within a piece of writing that is not his own.

What Dale is doing here and is involved in is far more complex than meets the eye. He is applying a combination of strategies in order to read and the process is one which involves him within the text. Frank Smith (1985) proposes that

The teacher's task was to make reading easier. He further proposed that learning to read was not made easy by breaking down the process into a series of component parts nor by presenting children with contrived or over-simplified texts. To develop increasing control over any new learning process the learner had to take on the whole activity and make sense of it (p..24).

I thought about the Storybox and Sunshine books that lined one small corner book rack in the room. In the teacher's study group that I regularly get together with, we talk about the value of these contrived and over-simplified texts. How these texts leave little to talk about, make sense of, bring our experiences to… Frank Smith reminded me that we can lower the bar as low as we want and call it reading. Dale rarely touches these Storybox books, not even for a confidence builder. However, when the bar is much higher, as in Dale's case, I can see his active involvement in both the text and the pictures, observe how he can quote the lines of a character and bring a lively voice to the text . Most importantly, he makes sense of it. Which brings me back to re-visit the word ‘decode' and how, no matter how many times this expression goes through my mind, it just doesn't make sense to see this ‘little' bit of literacy (grapho-phonic cue system) stand on its own, without the others. Goodman (1988) confirms that

Reading must be set within the context of language and learning so that it was no longer envisaged as an isolated skill (p..24).

To be seen as an isolated skill would de-contextualize the process and, after having seen the transactional nature of the text and what it means to Dale, I would attest that the opposite of this must be a transmission model of reading. Wersch (1991) talks about the transmission model as involving

the translation (or ‘encoding') of an idea into a signal by a sender, the transmission of this signal to a receiver, and the ‘decoding' of the signal into a message by the receiver (p.71).

Furthermore, he cites theorist Michael Reddy (1979) who reviews a wide range of metaphors concerned with communication and outlines the "conduit metaphor" that shapes a great deal of our understandings about human communication.

The basic outlines of the conduit metaphor, at least in its "major framework" version, consist of the following points:

•  language functions like a conduit, transferring thoughts bodily from one person to another;
•  in writing and speaking, people insert their thoughts or feelings into the words;
•  words accomplish the transfer by containing the thoughts or feelings and conveying them to others; and
•  in listening or reading, people extract the thoughts and feelings once again from the words (p.290).

In Reddy's view, however, thinking about communication that avoids the conduit metaphor tends to ‘remain brief, isolated, and fragmentary in the face of an entrenched system of opposing attitudes and assumptions" (p. 297-298).

I first met Matthew in August, 1994 when he and his family came to school to meet ‘the new teacher' -- that was me -- before school had started. He would be in a grade 1 -- 2 classroom, with the suggestion from his teacher the year before that he stay back in grade 1. From the stories I had heard, compassionately told from his parents perspective, school had failed Matthew, or in the school's eyes, Matthew had failed school, completing only 30% of the curriculum that year, as explicitly stated by his teacher on his final report card in June. It was evident that he couldn't live up the ‘typical' classroom expectations that were apparently expected of him:

speak when spoken to, work alone, become socially apathetic, learn passively and nonexperientially, recall information, follow instructions, compartmentalize knowledge, and so on (Sirotnik, 1988).

Thank goodness. This little boy, with bright red hair, lots of freckles and a dynamic smile that would warm anyone's heart was, on the surface, seemingly undisturbed by a rather frightening experience that I would call schooling. There were many days that I was disgusted and discouraged with the people that were my so called colleagues within the teaching profession, as they made it clear to Matthew that "he couldn't read and most certainly he couldn't look at the pictures to read because it was cheating." But I was also on a mission, a very determined mission. To dispel the beliefs within Matthew, his parents and the community within Josh's past school that reading wasn't just ‘de-coding words' and to nurture the stories that Matthew was bringing from his rich experiences to the literary invitations within our learning environment. It was going to be an overwhelming task. At the time, I couldn't live with the thought that my teaching might fail Matthew. It was too heartbreaking. It was then that I think I first really realized that I needed to enlist Matthew as my teacher.

I'm tiptoeing around the word ‘de-code' because it seemingly is part of the language I've been used to all of my teaching life, especially in reading conversations. That word is being used all over the place, a common place word that I've not really thought about literally. I mean, doesn't ‘de-code' mean to unscramble? Matthew knew how to take, rather, break apart sounds and mutilate them, but what he had been asked to do was separate this process from his experience, the context and ‘read' from an unengaging text. I ask myself, "Is reading something we do to unscramble letters?"

I wake up one morning to hear, on CJOB, an advertisement for the Phonics Game that guarantees your child reading in 18 hours after playing the game. I grimace. Is this nuts? Can it be? What kind of garbage is surrounding parents and minimalizing the complexity of the work that we are trying to achieve with children? How do we respond to those parents who are believers or who want a cure -- a quick fix and who become ‘sucked in' by this gimmick? I'm wanting to actually order one of these games to actually see it. Reading -- a product that we achieve through an game played for 18 hours (TN Nov, 1996)?

It hardly felt appropriate to envision reading in this way and yet my experience in ‘learning to teach reading' from third year makes me think of Ekwell Reading Inventories and basic sight word lists. In contrast, in fact, a lovely contrast, Dale was showing me how important his cueing systems were and these were everything that Matthew was discouraged to do.

Matthew and I sit together at lunch, perusing the choice of books that sit in front of us. All 3 are authentic texts and Matthew wants to hear a synopsis of all three, before deciding which one he wants to read. He pauses and points to Fire! by Gail Gibbons.

"I could read this one, but… I just look at the pictures to help me read and I'm not really reading." He kind of pushes the book aside with a grimace on his face.

"Why do you think you're not really reading?" I wonder.

"Well… I just know it by heart because it IS one of my favorite books. Last year, I brought it to school and… well… I said I could read it…. but then my teacher put her hand over the pictures. I couldn't read it. I remember that."

My heart is breaking. The baggage that this little boy is bringing with him. I'm not quite sure what to say.

"I think you need the pictures to help you to read. They're one of the first things I look at when I'm choosing a book for kids… Would you like to give it a go? I won't cover the pictures -- promise…" I stumble.

"Okay. Fire… by Gail Gibbons." Matthew reads on, looking at the pictures, telling the story. All of a sudden, he stops. It is like his memory fails him, right in the middle of the book. His eyes glaze over, his hands shake and he is looking at me. I say, "Keep going, Matthew… You're doing just fine. Would you like to read together?" He refuses my help. He just keeps struggling. He is making no sense. Everything becomes ‘coded' in a strange language. He breaks apart words by their sounds. Fire fighter becomes fish fig… He says all of the ‘f' words he knows. I'm struggling just as much as he is. He all of a sudden becomes helpless. What do I do to help this little boy? I gently close the book, give him a hug and I eagerly go and get a book that I can read to him.

This episode, which occurred about 2 years ago continues to haunt me. I can still remember Matthew becoming paralyzed and the look on his face. It was at this moment that I realized how every choice we make, every word we utter, every experience we give, as teachers -- good or bad -- can influence children to either pull away or feel encouraged. I think about how he was encouraged to mutilate the language and was allowed to struggle, until, he lost all meaning and his eyes glazed over. I wanted, at those moments to get inside of his head and see the book through his eyes. I wanted to save him. I always wondered how Matthew continued to have the positive attitude that he did and work so hard to become the kind of reader he desperately wanted to be. At the end of two years together, we (Matthew, his parents and I) met his goal -- at least for the time being. He kept on setting higher and higher goals for himself. To this day, he thinks that I helped him to read, but really, I think he got his dignity back and had the courage to keep on going.

Dale delights in sharing books and lives for those moments he can share a story that ‘he can read'. Matthew felt self-conscious and was always hesitant to ‘read' a story to an audience. A telling story?

Matthew and Dale are brothers. Neither of the two children have ever been capable of being "boxed and arrowed" in a linear flowchart (Sirotnik, 1988). Perhaps that was part of their charm and intrigue to me -- a mystery to figure out. They were never easily ‘figured out' and typified for me, Judith's favorite saying, "You're always right and you're always wrong." They have always given me reason to look deeper into my practice and have made it clear that life didn't have black and white answers. There were many grey areas. Both boys have always invited me in to further understand them and have challenged me to re-think my own beliefs, values and philosophy about children. I am humbled by their ability to teach me so much about children and literacy… Dale still continues to do so.

Dale and I are settling down to read a brand new book called Tickling Tigers. After reading it once, we're engaged in a conversation. I'm asking Dale to teach me about what it is like for him as a reader. I tell him that I am interested in how he looks at books and about how he reads the books and ask him what he is interested in. I tell him that I want him to be my teacher.

D: I'm interested in the pictures and pictures can bring you to a faraway land. You can imagine that you're just in that world. Artists are very good drawers and they stay in the lines very good.

T: It's very neat to see the pictures, isn't it? If you were a teacher, what kind of books would you read to kids?

D: (pauses) Hmmm… I would read, How Much I Love You -- it has so many details and it has good pictures and I like the story.

T: Any others?

D: I would choose this book, Tickling Tigers. It is very neat and some of the pictures flip to this side and flip to that side (referring to the page in the middle of the book that extends out). I would read Alphabet City because it is very neat and the pictures have letters every time you turn the page. And A looks like the sign on the road that says Danger.

I think again about how Dale really does have a ‘relationship' with books and how he intimately interacts with the voices of characters, notices the details that the artist creates in his/her illustrations and builds relationships with those books worth building relationships with. Like any friendship, he is particular about which books he chooses to be faithful to and practices them over and over again. Some are what people would call ‘too old/advanced' for his age, yet are engaging and absolutely capture Dale in worlds he'd never be able to enter if he had to choose something that he could read from back to front -- a word for word product.

Though I have read Ken Goodman's work before, On Reading is beginning to bring me to deeper understandings about the whole transactional nature of reading.

I've grown to see how vibrant and dynamic the written text is for Dale. He jumps into the page, particularly when the illustrations catch his eye and help to assist in the language of telling the story. He is constantly bringing it alive with his voice and has more than an incredible memory. In fact, I have a hard time believing that his re-telling is entirely from memory. There are some difficult, but rich and descriptive words that he remembers merely after one reading. Margaret Meek says that "There are many more obvious things which successful readers learn without ever being taught. So obvious are they, we seem to have missed them out of our accounts of reading and reading instruction… If we look at these a little more closely, they may turn out to be less ordinary than we first believed."

Meek utters words that resonate for me. What is more obvious than the dissonant chord that the word DECODE strikes for me? Decoding, as a way of thinking about reading is virtually impossible. For Matthew, decoding didn't work. It stopped him in his tracks. He froze when he had to ‘decode'. He was paralyzed. For Dale, reading is an integrative experience. He can't separate all of the strategies that he is using ‘to read' because they are so interwoven within the way that he experiences the text. Graphophonemic cues ARE important for Dale, within the predictable material and texts that he knows well and has experience with, so that it holds meaning. However the word decode, standing on its own, violates everything that I know about reading. I jettison it.

Mrs. Webster and I are talking about her child's progress this year. Mrs. Webster is a grade 2 teacher in another school division and though I suspect that her classroom is activity-based, I also suspect that there are things that we believe that are quite different. She is a supportive parent and is very positive about what she sees in the classroom. Her son is a reluctant reader and I believe, carries tremendous pressure with him to read. He is hesitant to take risks. When talking about reading, Mrs. Webster talks about all of the thousands of books (real literature) that they read at home and how Nolan has been read to since before he was one. She then continues to say, "I love the Storybox books. Could you send one home with Nolan every night, so that we can practice them? That would give me the opportunity to make flashcards because phonetics is pretty important and doesn't allow Nolan to only rely on memory." Interesting. I wasn't going to let this be a battle and something I was going to make an issue of. I hesitated talking about all of the books I could lend them that had predictable patterns and I didn't know her well enough as a professional to feel safe embarking upon this conversation. I didn't want this to be a tension and on-going struggle, especially for Nolan but I was interested in observing as time went on. We negotiated and said that Nolan could bring home two books, one of his choice and a Storybox book. She seemed happy. I was disappointed in her conversation, yet knew that she was using her best professional judgment to try and help Nolan at home. I wondered if it would really help Nolan… I tried to understand my own struggle with holding back. I know why I did. On the one hand, I feel uncomfortable with conflict, however the political tension and ‘who knows best?' feeling wasn't worth tackling in a 15 minute interview and there was a part of me that didn't want Nolan to take the brunt of a conversation that may be misleading, for lack of understanding. Why are colleagues so difficult to begin this conversation with? The vulnerability, the unsafe feeling, the always polar opposite kind of philosophies that I wonder are well thought through?

Like any inquiry, I end with a dilemma. Very rarely, if ever, do I come to a place where I think I've figured out all of the answers. Halliday (1975) puts it nicely.

Such work forces us to reconsider the established positions which so often provide the staple content of syllabuses. It encourages us to learn to live dangerously, open to what will alter, perhaps radically alter, what we have previously held to be the case. It reminds us that the questions raised by our study of how human beings use language to live and to learn, and how they learn the language they need, do not fit neatly into our existing gridiron of academic subjects, are not susceptible of tide answers, and necessarily push us out toward areas where, as yet, our only true knowledge is the extend of our ignorance.

Though Dale and Matthew help me to better understand the complexity of the reading process, I am very aware of the climate and the political context within which I work. I am still within it. I am uncomfortable with the ‘positions' out there about learning to read and the ways reading is measured. My challenge therefore lies in supporting and better understanding those children who do not learn to read in neat little boxes.

Centre for Language in Primary Education 1988 The Primary Language Record Handbook for Teachers. Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational Books Inc.

Goodman, Ken 1996 On Reading. Richmond Hill: Scholastic Canada Ltd.

Halliday, M.A.K. 1975 Learning How To Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language. London: Edward Arnold.

Lather, Patty 1986 Research as Praxis. Harvard Educational Review: Vol. 56 No.3

Meek, Margaret 1988 How Texts Teach What Readers Learn. Great Britain: The Thimble Press.

Sirotnik, Kenneth 1988 What Goes On in Classrooms? Is This the Way We Want It? In: Landon E. Beyer & Michael W. Apple (Eds.) The Curriculum: Problems, Politics, and Possibilities. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Wertsch, James V. 1991 Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action.